On April 26, the first virtual Virtual FAIRagro Plenary Meeting April 2023 meeting after the project start in March 2023 took place. All co-spokespersons, TA- and Measure Leads, participants and already hired project staff were invited. Approximately 55 people from 23 participating institutions attended the meeting.
At the beginning, Frank Ewert and Xenia Specka reported on important activities before and since the project start, such as participation in conferences and FAIRagro publications. An important reporting moment was the announcement of the results of the two elections held in April: as “spokesperson of the consortium according to the statutes” Frank Ewert was elected (deputy Xenia Specka). This election creates the conditions to establish FAIRagro as a consortium according to the NFDI statutes and thus to represent the interests of the agrosystems community in the consortium assembly of the NFDI.
The second election concerned the four members from the FAIRagro Plenary for the FAIRagro Steering Committee. In addition to the five permanent representatives – the Task Area leaders – four further representatives from the FAIRagro Plenary and deputies were elected for a period of six months:
• for the group of co-applicant institutions: Florian Hoedt (Thünen);
• for the group of participants: James M. Anderson (ATB) and Stephan Lesch (SGN);
• for the group of young scientists: Florian Beyer (JKI).
The second part of the meeting focused on the presentation of the five Task Areas and the collaboration with Use Case 3 (UC 3), “Use case 3: Streamlining pest and disease data to advance integrated pest management“. Til Feike (JKI) introduced the objectives of UC3 and the requirement for research data management. In the Task Areas, Senthold Asseng (TU Munich, TA1), Ulrike Stahl (JKI, TA2), Daniel Martini (KTBL, TA3), Matthias Lange (IPK, TA4) and Xenia Specka (ZALF, TA5) presented and discussed possible responses and activities to the UC challenges. This approach of community-driven problem description and data-driven responses (actions and work steps) from the Task Areas represents the typical and integrated collaboration in our consortium.
Finally, Carsten Hoffmann (ZALF) introduced the upcoming FAIRagro kick-off meeting, which will take place on September 25 in Berlin and is expected to attract about 100 participants.
For more information on the project and the event, please visit our homepage www.fairagro.net, write to fairagro@zalf.de or follow us on Twitter at #FAIRagroPlenary.
