Project description
Data processing for sustainable beekeeping
Data processing is a valuable ally for Europe’s beekeeping industry, supporting the development of sustainable apiculture. It helps to further our understanding of sustainable beekeeping socio-economics, as well as its impact on the human ecosystem. The EU-funded B-GOOD project aims to create a health status index (HSI) that will be linked to apiarists, and will collect and process data from a wide range of sources. In cooperation with EU Bee Partnership, an EU-wide bee health and management data platform and affiliated project website, the project will estimate capacity and propose new feasible business practices for sustainable and resilient beekeeping.
Objective
A key to healthy beekeeping is the Health Status Index (HIS) inspired by EFSA’s Healthy-B toolbox which we will make fully operational, with the active collaboration of beekeepers, by facilitating the coordinated and harmonised flow of data from various sources and by testing and validating each component thoroughly. We envisage a step-by-step expansion of participating apiaries, and will eventually cover all EU biogeographic regions. The key to a sustainable beekeeping is a better understanding of its socio-economics, particularly within local value chains, its relationship with bee health and the human-ecosystem equilibrium of the beekeeping sector and to implement these insights into the data processing and decision making. We will fully integrate socio-economic analyses, identify viable business models tailored to different contexts for European beekeeping and determine the carrying capacity of the landscape. In close cooperation with the EU Bee Partnership, an EU-wide bee health and management data platform and affiliated project website will be created to enable sharing of knowledge and learning between scientists and stakeholders within and outside the consortium. We will utilise and further expand the classification of the open source IT-application for digital beekeeping, BEEP, to streamline the flow of data related to beekeeping management, the beehive and its environment (landscape, agricultural practices, weather and climate) from various sources. The dynamic bee health and management data platform will allow us to identify correlative relationships among factors impacting the HSI, assess the risk of emerging pests and predators, and enable beekeepers to develop adaptive management strategies that account for local and EU-wide issues. Reinforcing and establishing, where necessary, new multi-actor networks of collaboration will engender a lasting learning and innovation system to ensure social-ecological resilient and sustainable beekeeping.
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
9000 Gent
Belgium