NFDI4Biodiversity meets FAIRagro

Cross-NFDI networking in action! At the first FAIRagro Community Summit in Berlin, representatives of NFDI4Biodiversity were able to gain exciting insights and inspiration for future joint projects.

More than 120 interested parties from the NFDI consortium FAIRagro came together at the first FAIRagro Community Summit on June 17-18 at the Leibniz-Gesellschaft in Berlin. People associated with agriculture from the NFDI4Biodiversity network also took part and were impressed by the well-organized event and the valuable insights they were able to gain in the various sessions and in exchange with members of the consortium.

Of particular relevance to us was the presentation of the FAIRagro community services, in which the Data Steward Service Center (DSSC) provided a comprehensive overview of its helpdesk and support services for researchers. Keeping an eye on how other consortia work here is therefore of great interest to NFDI4Biodiversity and other consortia, as there are efforts to link these services across the NFDI – among other things, to be able to offer users better cross-disciplinary advice.

The detailed insights into the six FAIRagro use case projects, in which partner institutions from NFDI4Biodiversity were also involved, also inspired new ideas for possible joint work at the interface of agrosystems research and biodiversity. This includes in particular the cooperation in Use Case 6 (Automated Data Flows for Crop Simulation Models (zenodo.org)), in which our partner institution, the Bavarian State Archives, play a central role in long-term archiving and communication with state authorities, not only for us but also for FAIRagro.

The poster sessions on the topics of middleware, metadata standards, data quality and infrastructure (SciWIn) offered further inspiration and opportunities for exchange, discussion and networking. NFDI4Biodiversity was also represented here: We presented the paper "Advancing FAIR Data Management in Livestock: Towards Standardized Metadata" for the partner institution Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) based in Dummerstorf.

The second day of the summit also offered exciting sessions, for example on the legal situation in agrosystems research and on networking NFDI-wide as well as institute-specific or country-specific helpdesks.

Being a guest at the Community Summit gave us a deeper understanding of the developments in FAIRagro – and once again showed us how important the exchange within the scientific community is. We look forward to integrating the knowledge gained into our own project work and further deepening our collaboration with the FAIRagro community.

You can find a detailed follow-up report on the FAIRagro Community Summit in the consortium's news blog.