ConServeTerra Annual Meeting
After one year of collaboration, a first Annual Meeting with all project partners was scheduled from 2nd to 5th November 2021 in Marrakesh, Morocco. Due to different Covid-restrictions of the respective partner countries, the meeting had to be rescheduled and was held as an online event. The project stakeholders from Morocco, Tunisia, Spain, Turkey and Germany made the best of it anyway and shared ideas to improve the project further: With country and work package specific online discussions, important adaptions in the experimental design for the second growing season were discussed and agreed upon where necessary. Particularly important was the input from our experienced advisory board members, Christian Thierfelder (CIMMYT), Helena Gómez Macpherson (Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, Spain) and Maike Krauss (FiBL Switzerland).
Figure 2. Word cloud showing key innovative aspects of ConServeTerra project after the first growing season, named by the consortium at the online Annual Meeting.
Even though we still have not had the chance to meet everyone in person yet, all project stakeholders agreed that the country-specific measures have to be harmonized further in order for the project to tell a common story about Conservation Agriculture within the Mediterranean. Apart from this it became clear that the project has a huge potential to deliver important insights when it comes to sustainable soil management within different Mediterranean countries. We are looking forward to the next growing season and will keep you updated on our progress!
Figure 1. Screenshot of the participants during the online Annual Meeting.