The Miguel Hernández University gave a presentation entitled:

"VSA: Visual soil assessment, an easy tool for agricultural soil quality evaluation".

 This masterclass was well attended with over 30 PhD students and degree students from Agronomic engineering and Environmental sciences at the Miguel Hernandez University. At this Spanish conference the central focus was on the iSQAPER project. Water bottles were offered to all participitants as a present. See pictures below and take the opportunity to download the presentation (Spanish). The masterclass was organized on March 16th, 2017.

 

UMH speech160317web ISQAPER bottles web  UMHwebpres

The first scientific board meeting was held in Madrid from 7-9 February 2017. In the afternoon of February 7th a meeting was held between WP-leaders and the coordination team. On February 8th the project team met representatives from the European Union and ongoing project results and goals were presented and discussed. The morning of February 9th was used for an evaluation between coordination team and WP-leaders.

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WebinarLand Degradation Neutrality: conceptualization and governance
12th of December, 9.30 – 11.30 (CET)

 

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The iSQAPER study sites have been recording agricultural management practices with farmers and conducted visual soil quality assessments in test plots. This work was done in the framework of Workpackages 5 (Multi-stakeholder case study inventories of soil quality and selection of innovative practices) and 6 (Testing, evaluating and demonstrating measures to improve soil quality and crop production and yield stability). The photos below give some field impressions from the Costera study site in Spain.

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Chinese partners of the iSQAPER project met each other in Chengdu, China, to discuss the progress of their joint project . The 2 day mini-meeting of iSQAPER project, from 24 to 25 October, 2016, was held by one of Chinese partners, Soil and Fertilizer Research Institute, Sichuan Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The project coordinator Coen Ritsema, Violette Geissen and Xiaomei Yang participated this meeting. All Chinese case study leaders and some related researchers joined this meeting. Registered users can download the presentations here. More information about this meeting  can be seen at local Chinese news sites with these links: http://www.chinawestagr.com/homepage/showcontent.asp?id=26251
http://www.chinawestagr.com/tfs/showcontent.asp?id=26251

Photo website


landmarkiSQAPER partners collaborate and dialogue with members of other European soil related projects.  As reported before, there is a main interest in project results between the iSQAPER consortium and the SoilCare network. Another interesting European H2020 project is the LANDMARK initiative and there is a main interest in each other's project goals and results. According the LANDMARK website this project is aiming at: “How to make the most of our land? How can we ensure that our soils deliver on the many expectations we have of our land?”. The themes they are focussing at are amongst others:

  1. Primary productivity (agriculture and forestry)
  2. Water purification and regulation
  3. Carbon sequestration, cycling and regulation
  4. Provision of functional and intrinsic biodiversity
  5. Provision and cycling of nutrients.

More info can be found here


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