Assoc. Prof. Mustafa Erdem Kabadayı from the Department of History was honored with the Proof of Concept grant given by the European Research Council (ERC) to researchers who were previously worthy of the Starting Grant.

Prof. Kabadayı achieved this important success with his project, which aims to analyze radical land use and land cover segmentation from the 1940s to the present in the area including the cities of Istanbul, Edirne, and Plovdiv by associating them with population dynamics, and predict possible agricultural population loss, agricultural land abandonment and deforestation in the 2040s.

Since 2016, M. Erdem Kabadayı has been carrying out the UrbanOccupationsOETR project, which is the first in Turkey in the field of History and still the only one in the field of Economic History of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire across the European Research Council.