From 4 to 7 November, EU-FarmBook Ambassador Eduard Mauri presented the online platform EU-FarmBook for forestry and agriculture in Europe during the Mediterranean Forest Week in Barcelona, Spain. Mauri and his colleague Mercedes Caron, from the European Forest Institute (EFI), informed visitors about the many benefits of sharing and contributing practical project outcomes to EU-FarmBook.
The Mediterranean Forest Week is a biennial event that serves as a platform for cooperation among researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders, fostering dialogue on the challenges faced by Mediterranean forests. This year’s edition attracted around 200 attendees, who participated in plenary sessions, side events, and a poster exhibition. The European Forest Institute team, led by Mercedes Caron and Eduard Mauri, tended a poster and promotional materials on EU-FarmBook for three days. They introduced the platform to several stakeholders in the Mediterranean forestry sector, encouraging contributors to share their practical project outcomes.
Researchers particularly appreciated the fact that EU-FarmBook treats practical knowledge with similar standards as scientific articles: metadata to index content and high-quality data curation. The free long-term storage is also seen as useful for the preservation of content.
“Practitioners have high expectations for the future automatic translation of knowledge objects and peer-to-peer interactions that will be soon available on the platform”, says EU-FarmBook Ambassador Eduard Mauri. The visitors also expressed that they very much appreciate that EU-FarmBook has the potential to prevent the proliferation of multiple repositories for practical knowledge in agriculture and forestry.
This benefit became more evident when they learnt that thanks to the EU-FarmBook API, project websites can search, filter, and display content stored on the platform, as the ResAlliance project also exhibiting a poster at the event is currently doing. While currently EU-FarmBook is collecting and gathering practice-orientated solutions from EU-funded Research and Innovation projects, Mauri and Caron informed about the second launch planned for 2025. They are looking forward to then presenting EU-FarmBook with all new improved features and multiple languages.
The Mediterranean Forest Week is always an opportunity to take the pulse of the main challenges and trends in Mediterranean forests and an excellent occasion for networking. A project as cross-cutting as EU-FarmBook could not miss it.
