Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DIGITAF (DIGItal Tools to help AgroForestry meet climate, biodiversity and farming sustainability goals: linking field and cloud)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-07-01 do 2023-12-31
Although AF is recognised as one of the most effective climate change mitigation measures, few Member States had successfully supported it in their recent funding programmes. Farmers’ concerns include the technical feasibility of AF, difficulty to predict the impact of their choices made and lack of recognition of AF benefits.
The wider agricultural sector is rapidly being digitised. It creates new opportunities for farmers and advisers to leverage this technology to improve their financial and ecological performances, and many European farmers are already using DSS to support them in their daily work at the field and management level. However, the development of such tools for AF is still in its infancy. DigitAF partners believe that by combining simulation models and data, it is possible to create digital tools supporting decision-makers to better understand the complex functioning of AFS, take into account local specificities and make better decisions. DigitAF set up the necessary standards, IT architecture and code sharing opportunities so that tools will overcome these problems. Tools adapted/developed during the project will serve as demonstration vectors for engagement towards the FAIR principles to boost their usage and applicability between peers and downstream marketable applied tools. The project’s objectives are to develop, improve, and test digital tools to:
-Support policymakers and administrations at regional, national and European scales in devising and implementing efficient agroforestry and carbon farming related policies, and monitor their impact on biodiversity, climate change mitigation and agricultural sustainability
-Support practitioners of agroforestry to optimise the design and management of agroforestry systems to increase the technical feasibility, productivity, economic performance and sustainability
-Allow actors in agroforestry value chains to verify and market agroforestry benefits, including enhanced biodiversity, carbon sequestration, soil health, and support consumers seeking good value and environmentally beneficial products
The wider agricultural sector is rapidly being digitised. It creates new opportunities for farmers and advisers to leverage this technology to improve their financial and ecological performances, and many European farmers are already using DSS to support them in their daily work at the field and management level. However, the development of such tools for AF is still in its infancy. DigitAF partners believe that by combining simulation models and data, it is possible to create digital tools supporting decision-makers to better understand the complex functioning of AFS, take into account local specificities and make better decisions. DigitAF set up the necessary standards, IT architecture and code sharing opportunities so that tools will overcome these problems. Tools adapted/developed during the project will serve as demonstration vectors for engagement towards the FAIR principles to boost their usage and applicability between peers and downstream marketable applied tools. The project’s objectives are to develop, improve, and test digital tools to:
-Support policymakers and administrations at regional, national and European scales in devising and implementing efficient agroforestry and carbon farming related policies, and monitor their impact on biodiversity, climate change mitigation and agricultural sustainability
-Support practitioners of agroforestry to optimise the design and management of agroforestry systems to increase the technical feasibility, productivity, economic performance and sustainability
-Allow actors in agroforestry value chains to verify and market agroforestry benefits, including enhanced biodiversity, carbon sequestration, soil health, and support consumers seeking good value and environmentally beneficial products
During the first 18 months of the project, we have established Living Labs in six countries, gathering more than 100 persons. Within these LL, we have conducted a survey to inventory the needs and expectations of stakeholders, we have also mapped the agroforestry value chains at each Living Lab and evaluated the costs and benefits of the baseline and have started to evaluate the benefits and costs of selected agroforestry interventions. We synthesized agroforestry-relevant policies both in terms of past expenditures and of strategic plans, not only in the Living Lab countries but also across Europe to allow cross-country comparisons and suggest improvements. In parallel, we have inventoried existing models and tools, and we are building an online catalogue based on this inventory. We analysed the strengths and weaknesses of existing models of agroforestry systems and defined concrete criteria applicable to code, models and tools to assess their FAIRness. We also analysed their inputs and outputs to propose the first version of an Open Platform Architecture. We combined these results with the stakeholder’s needs expressed in the Living Labs to devise a strategy to develop user-friendly, useful and sustainable digital tools for agroforestry system design, tree and crop management but also for evaluating the effect of agroforestry on climate change adaptation, in particular models to predict the impact of droughts, and biodiversity. We have put particular emphasis on tool interoperability to optimise data input and avoid unnecessary redundant data collection. Thus, we have started to analyse the variables, resolution and data formats used in the OpenFarmCarbonCalculator as well as in the Agri-Environmental Indicators collected in member states, to see if synergies could be found to improve the automation of data entry. We have started recoding the OpenFarmCarbonCalculator using modern frameworks to allow interoperability through data exchange and hosted the code on EURAF’s GitHub account, which is one of the elements of the agroforestry community Virtual Space.
During the first period, the results which will have an impact beyond State of the art are:
-AgroforesTreeAdvice is an app, which is still under development, to help tree selection for agroforestry farmers, allowing them to define their site conditions and objectives, compute the adaptation and efficiency scores of each tree species and visualize the results in graph or table form.
-The Open Farm Carbon Tracker is an open-source tool for diagnostics of farm scale greenhouse gas fluxes. The OFCT not only includes a farm level baseline assessment of current operations, but also has a module to model and project effects on emissions of changes in land-use, such as the transition from arable farming to agroforestry. This additional temporal aspect makes it possible to assess expected effect of land-use changes and other initiatives on future GWP of the operation.
-Blockchain technologies for Iberian dehesa products is a blockchain as an immense accounting book, incorporating all the relevant information generated in the value chain in order to collect, process and manage, in a secure, trusty and confidential manner, large amounts of information from all participants in the value chain. Blockchain technology generates trust in the final consumer and develops a differentiation strategy of products.
-Open Platform Architecture is the result of an analysis of 56 agroforestry tools, and identified 7 modules: species selection, system design, performance, GHG, biodiversity, and financial assessments and community tools. Collaboration between tool developers is underway to develop data exchange standards within and between these modules to allow shared APIs, thus ensuring interoperability, efficient development, extensibility, and vendor independence.
-AgroforesTreeAdvice is an app, which is still under development, to help tree selection for agroforestry farmers, allowing them to define their site conditions and objectives, compute the adaptation and efficiency scores of each tree species and visualize the results in graph or table form.
-The Open Farm Carbon Tracker is an open-source tool for diagnostics of farm scale greenhouse gas fluxes. The OFCT not only includes a farm level baseline assessment of current operations, but also has a module to model and project effects on emissions of changes in land-use, such as the transition from arable farming to agroforestry. This additional temporal aspect makes it possible to assess expected effect of land-use changes and other initiatives on future GWP of the operation.
-Blockchain technologies for Iberian dehesa products is a blockchain as an immense accounting book, incorporating all the relevant information generated in the value chain in order to collect, process and manage, in a secure, trusty and confidential manner, large amounts of information from all participants in the value chain. Blockchain technology generates trust in the final consumer and develops a differentiation strategy of products.
-Open Platform Architecture is the result of an analysis of 56 agroforestry tools, and identified 7 modules: species selection, system design, performance, GHG, biodiversity, and financial assessments and community tools. Collaboration between tool developers is underway to develop data exchange standards within and between these modules to allow shared APIs, thus ensuring interoperability, efficient development, extensibility, and vendor independence.