On the 13th of March, the AgroTech Hub Cluster, consisting of six leading Horizon Europe projects including LandShift, NOSTRADAMUS, Agrarian, OpenAgri, ENFORCE, as well as EARTHONE, hosted a joint webinar titled ‘From Data to Decisions: Building Europe’s Next-Generation Agri-data Ecosystem’. As the Agricultural sector in Europe is being increasingly transformed by the availability of vast amounts of data from satellites, sensors, models, and digital platforms, ensuring that this translates into maximum impact is crucial. For that reason, the event explored how emerging technologies, data infrastructures, and collaborative research can help transform large volumes of agricultural and environmental data into practical insights for farmers, policymakers, and land managers.
The AgroTech Hub Cluster in a Nutshell
All projects within the cluster contribute to strengthening Europe’s agri-data ecosystem. Their work focuses on improving how agricultural data is collected, shared, and analysed enabling new decision-support tools while supporting policy frameworks that promote sustainable, data-driven land management. Initially, the cluster was created to improve knowledge exchange among research and innovation teams, align efforts and avoid overlap across projects, develop shared activities that raise visibility and encourage collaboration, and support practical pathways for data-driven, nature-based solutions. Webinars like the one on Friday are precisely how the Cluster strives to do so in practice.
Aggregating and Integrating Environmental Data for Decision-Making Support
The webinar opened with a presentation from the NOSTRADAMUS project, which led the organisation of the webinar. NOSTRADAMUS focuses on developing a unified digital platform that integrates diverse agricultural data sources, including Earth Observation data, IoT sensor measurements, market information, and existing agricultural databases. Project representative Ioannis Varvaris, researcher and Deputy Research Coordinator at the ERATOSTHENES Centre of Excellence, highlighted the broader challenges driving the development of such infrastructures. These include supply-chain disruptions, volatile energy and fertiliser markets, and the impacts of geopolitical instability, such as the war in Ukraine on food security. At the same time, he pointed to strong policy momentum in Europe, including initiatives such as the European Green Deal, Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Modernisation, the Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience, and the development of a European agricultural data space. Against this backdrop, NOSTRADAMUS aims to help transform fragmented data sources into practical tools for agricultural decision-making and policy support.
LandShift was represented by Dimitrios Koumoulidis, Assistant Researcher and PhD Candidate at the ERATOSTHENES Centre of Excellence, who gave a brief overview of the project and its objectives, and then delved into what data is collected and how it is aggregated into an applicable formula. LandShift integrates Satellite EO Data, in-situ measurements, existing open-access databases, National and EU institutional Datasets, historical datasets, and crowdsourced observations, and organises them into a structured system that allows them to be analysed together. Based on this data, indicators are developed to measure the impact of land-use decisions across environmental, social, and economic dimensions. Trade-off analytics and scenario pathways, in turn, help decision-making.
Meanwhile, the project EARTHONE also works to support better decision-making through making data more readily available. Borya Arroyo Galenda, Scientific Coordinator of EARTHONE and leader of its agroforestry lab, focused on the projects role in studying greenhouse gas emissions through field sensors, laboratory analysis, and environmental monitoring technologies to generate detailed data on soil, climate, and ecosystem conditions. These datasets are integrated and made openly available through a central platform, supporting researchers, policymakers, and land managers in making more informed decisions about land use and environmental management.
Bringing new Digital Tools to Farmers
Several of the projects presented at the webinar focused on technological approaches that bring data-driven decision-making closer to farmers. Agrarian, represented by Miguel Cachão, an agronomic engineer based at the farmers’ consultancy AVIPE, aims to support real-time farm management by bringing digital intelligence directly to the field. Instead of relying solely on distant cloud systems, Agrarian processes data locally using sensors, drones, and connected devices. This allows farmers to receive fast and reliable insights, even in rural areas with limited internet connectivity.
Similarly, the project OpenAgri too works to bring digital agriculture tools to farmers by making these more accessible. Project Presenter Felipe Arruda Pontes, who is a postdoc researcher at Maastricht University, discussed how through open standards and collaboration with farmers across Europe, the project supports the development and testing of practical open-source digital farming solutions that can work even in regions with limited connectivity, helping farmers adopt data-driven practices more easily.
Including Citizens in Environmental Data Collection
Beyond improving agricultural technologies, some projects in the cluster also address the governance and regulatory aspects of environmental data. Anna Aseeva, Policy and Sustainability Expert at Digital for Planet, presented on how the project ENFORCE explores how digital monitoring tools and citizen science can support environmental compliance and enforcement. By transforming citizen-generated environmental data into reliable evidence, ENFORCE helps bridge the gap between locally collected environmental information and the requirements of regulatory authorities.
Shared ambition and collaboration
Together, the projects presented during the webinar highlight a shared ambition: to ensure that agricultural and environmental data is not only collected but also effectively used to support decision-making. While each project approaches this challenge from a different angle, whether through building data infrastructures, developing digital tools for farmers, improving data accessibility, or strengthening governance frameworks, they collectively contribute to a more unified agri-data ecosystem.
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