From 29 to 31 October the SOGRAPE VINHOS winery in Villa Nova de Gaia (Portugal) hosted the first General Assembly of the MED-GOLD project, which took stock of the information compiled during this project’s first year of activities, conferences and workshops.

The aim of the Horizon-2020-funded MED-GOLD project is to translate state-of-the-art climate data and climate predictions -at the seasonal timescale and beyond- into easily accessible, valuable information for a wide range of end-users in the agriculture sector. For this purpose tools were jointly designed and developed to suit the project’s needs and serve as support to decision-making on the basis of climate data and likely future scenarios.

Three staples of the Mediterranean food system are being brought under the spotlight: grape, olive and durum wheat. This assembly put forward the conclusions reached in each pilot service in relation to climate information and data; these conclusions will then help end users to manage their productive systems more efficiently and sustainably.

This first stage has also characterized, analyzed and selected the historical climate-observation information sources, in-situ and by satellite, to serve as the basis for applying and assessing different climate-modelling techniques. These will then in turn underpin the final tools that will help end users to forecast yields, prevent pest damage, select varieties and plan farming work, among others.

The assembly, coordinated by the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA), was attended by all project partners: Sogrape Vinhos (Portugal), Dcoop (Spain), Barilla (Italy), GMV (Spain), ec2ce (Spain), the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission, the UK’s Met Office, Beetobit (Italy), the National Observatory of Athens (Greece), the National research Council (Italy), Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spain), the farming-innovation company Horta (Italy) plus three academic institutions, University of Leeds (United Kingdom), the University of Thessaly (Greece) and the Nueva Granada Military University (Colombia).

GMV is responsible for the work package dealing with the communication, exploitation and dissemination of MED-GOLD’s value chain; as such it is leading the project’s climate-service marketing and communication activities to ensure coherence in the European and international market and also replicability to other farming sectors of interest. During this first year GMV has also played a big part in the definition of user needs for the project’s climate services and in the contextualization and characterization of the sectors under study.

The Assembly ushers in a new stage for the climate-service prototypes after taking stock of the activities and results of the various pilot schemes and the corresponding analysis of the advances achieved in each one. This has then served as the basis for agreeing on and defining a common future development strategy within the project’s technology platform. This also represents a great boost to all activities focusing on the MED-GOLD community’s groups of interest (farming professionals, sector companies, institutions, service providers, data providers, public at large, etc.).

To find out more: https://www.med-gold.eu