Instead of having a physical meeting in Vilnius the three-day NIVA project meeting was done online from the 1st till the 3rd of December 2021. The theme of the project meeting was “Deploying NIVA for farmers and PAs”. Due to the two pre-project meetings on the 23rd and 29th of November 2021 the participants were able to look forward on the next steps in the final year of the project.
The first day was all about providing the context of the work. DG AGRI shared the latest insights on the Common Agricultural Policy (CA), Area Monitoring System (AMS) and Check by Monitoring (CBM). This gave some new food for thought for the participants. The same applied for the Use Cases that shared their plans for 2022 and their way to deployment.
The second day the focus was on extending the NIVA reach. WP5 shared the ideas for the upcoming years regarding webinars, stakeholder meetings and communication. There was also attention paid to the reduction of administrative burden for the famers by showcasing how this is done in UC5B. In a workshop the preliminary results of the FMIS working group were shared and discussed. The main question was how to involve more farmers and farmers organisations. In a parallel session a group of more technical NIVA members had a hands-on training session on the common component “Open EO API” that was developed by WP4. The nine Use Case further elaborated on the deployment. And the second day was concluded with a glance at the use of IACS data in new applications and how to stimulate the uptake of the recommendations of WP3 on the use of data.
The third and last day of the project meeting started with an interactive session in which the participants were challenged to reflect on the use of IACS data and WP3 recommendations. The final steps towards implementation of the Use Cases were shared. The final working session was about life after NIVA, where the participants were asked to reflect on what they believe as the NIVA assets and their willingness to continue after NIVA.
The three day meeting was too short. The main cause was that there is so much to share within NIVA and the discussions were quite vivid. There was a lot of energy in the project meeting. Now the challenge lies ahead to use this energy for the final year of NIVA!