We were looking forward to this – and today we are very pleased to be able to announce the new use cases of our consortium on the way to a FAIR data future in agricultural research. We would like to thank you for the exciting submissions and the great interest in working together.
A total of 12 use case applications were submitted:
● 3 applications for larger projects with a duration of 2 years.
● 9 applications for smaller pilots with a duration of up to 12 months.
The application deadline was July 5, 2024. The review panel, consisting of the members of the FAIRagro Steering Committee (SC), had the task of evaluating the submitted applications according to predefined evaluation criteria. At this point, special thanks go to the members of the Community Advisory Board (CAB), who actively supported the selection process from the perspective of our community with their international expertise. The expert opinions were then summarized and the final decision was made by the Steering Committee on 4 September.
The showcase “Next-Generation Environmental and extended Tools for Extreme Events & Plant Resilience Assessment” was selected as a two-year use case project. The project was developed by the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the German Weather Service (DWD), TU Dresden and the German Climate Computing Center as additional associated partners. It was submitted as part of the NFDI4Earth consortium and is already receiving special attention in various consortia of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI).
In line with the interdisciplinary consolidation of the NFDI consortia, this is the first example of cross-domain data provision for specific modeling applications.
We have also included five use case pilots on various topics with a duration of up to 12 months from the following institutions in the funding:
● Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops (IGZ) with a UC on the topic of “Systematic Approaches for Efficient Data Synchronization in Horticultural Sciences”
● Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HUB) with a UC on the topic “Linking Agrosystem Data with Socio-economic Information”
● University of Rostock (Uni Rostock) with a UC on the topic “Diving into arable weed data to link biodiversity and farming”
ZB MED – Information Center for Life Sciences UC on the topic “Increasing FAIRness of FAIRagro data through AI supported metadata enrichment”
● Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) with a UC on the topic “BrAPI Integration on PSI Hardware”
With this, we will not only add new use cases, but also new participants to the FAIRagro consortium, and we are particularly looking forward to enriching our six flagship use cases with six additional use cases from our community. Together, we aim to make significant progress in the development of data infrastructures and services that meet the needs of the FAIRagro community. The selected use cases will make a valuable contribution to this.
The new use cases will start between fall 2024 and spring 2025 and will have the opportunity to present themselves during the upcoming FAIRagro Plenary in Berlin in November.
We look forward to a productive collaboration!
Are you interested in actively participating in FAIRagro as part of a project or as an institution, or in submitting a use case? Then please contact us at any time! We expect to publish the next call for use cases at the beginning of next year.