I prepare and coordinate statutory plant health risk analyses at the Julius Kühn Institute for National and International Plant Health. An important topic of my research is the assessment of the risk of introduction and spread, the pest potential and the impact of plant pests including invasive alien species on plant health and biodiversity. The planned activities in Use Case 3 to improve research data management on pests and yields are also highly relevant to our work. Better accessibility and usability of relevant data can help us to better assess the risks of plant pests, including economic and ecological damage, and the effects on ecosystem services. Our good networking at international level within the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC), the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (EPPO) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) help to link FAIRagro's activities internationally.
As the coordinating institution of the Leibniz Innovation Farm for Sustainable Bioeconomy which is being implemented as an interdisciplinary research infrastructure on a practical agricultural farm, we at ATB are really looking forward to applying the solutions which will be set forth by the FAIRagro consortium: FAIRagro is addressing challenges that all research institutions in agriculture face at the moment such as the existing momentum of digitisation processes and accompanied increase in data availability but missing data standards and reachability. Hence, we see that all this gathered information can – at the time being – not be put to full use in the wide interdisciplinary scientific community. We are looking forward to getting a chance of implementing the Innovation Farm as a bridge use case at later stages of FAIRagro when basic proofs of concept such as data standards and workflows have been provided. Integrating the forthcoming Innovation Farm’s research data on livestock and feed production as well as on residue management into and making them available via the FAIRagro Portal using the above mentioned standards will surely bring us all a step forward to the goal of a more circular agriculture. As an interdisciplinary initiative, we would like to highlight the training and dissemination activities among the many important tasks that FAIRagro is planning. These will surely help to overcome barriers by raising awareness of discipline-specific data handling habits and by aligning them.