Theme 6: Monitoring agri-food and forestry systems 

The lack of integrated, user-friendly digital monitoring systems poses a challenge to advancing sustainable agriculture and forestry across BIOEAST countries. This results in suboptimal soil management due to limited real-time analysis, fragmented access to reliable economic and environmental data, and inconsistent monitoring of agricultural and forestry systems across the BIOEAST macro-region.

• Improve integrated soil monitoring and analysis.
• Improve accessibility to consistent economic and environmental data for policymakers and researchers to support the agri-food and forestry sector.
• Harmonise cross-country data for monitoring sustainable farming practices and food system transitions.
• Improve monitoring of the impact of wild animals on forest regeneration.

We are looking for ideas, concepts or prototypes at different stages of development, close-to-market or market-ready solutions, to address –but not limited to– the following areas:

• User-friendly decision support systems for soil monitoring and assessment. Some desirable characteristics are:
  • a geor eferenced database on soil data (soil parameters, images, site descriptors), fed by users, and that ensures data protection
  • capacity to assess soil condition and to generate basic recommendations for improving soil health
  • provides links to additional knowledge sources and expert support.
• Policy support tools for the agri-food and forestry sectors, based on open economic and environmental data, spatial and time-series visualization tools, and predictive modelling.
• User-friendly benchmarking and progress reporting for sustainable food systems in transition, including through indicators aligned with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and EU Green Deal.
• Cost-effective and efficient solutions to monitor and assess forest regeneration under pressure of different levels of wild animal densities.