Changes in rural areas, such as depopulation, land abandonment and the loss of biodiversity, may proceed very slowly yet are often irreversible. Policymakers can steer these developments in order to reduce their negative impacts but this requires knowing whether current policy instruments are effective, who is benefiting from them and in what measure, what driving forces will be most influential and how they will affect people, planet, profits and land-use. To be truly useful, this knowledge must transcend siloed thinking and be the corollary of a joint effort uniting different actors under a common cause. PoliRur will provide this knowledge by combining several key activities needed to design effective place-based, human-centric and forward-looking rural policies. These include actionable research that takes place within an inclusive learning environment where rural populations, researchers and policymakers come together to address common problems; an evaluation exercise that uses text mining to assess the perceived effectiveness of past or planned policy interventions; and a foresight study that tries to glean the development trajectory of agriculture and its allied sectors until 2040 using several scenarios in which the evolution of rural populations occupies a central place. As a result of these activities, PoliRur will leave decision makers at different levels of government better equipped to tackle existing and emerging rural challenges, rural populations more empowered and rural areas more resilient.

SmartAgriHubs is dedicated to accelerate the digital transformation of the European agri-food sector. It will consolidate, activate and extend the current ecosystem by building a network of Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) that will boost the uptake of digital solutions by the farming sector. This will be achieved by integrating technology and business support in a local one-stop-shop approach involving all regions and all relevant players in Europe. The heart of the project is formed by 28 flagship innovation experiments demonstrating digital innovations in agriculture, facilitated by DIHs from 9 Regional Clusters including all European member states. Concurrently, SmartAgriHubs will improve the maturity of innovation services of DIHs so that digital innovations will be replicated across Europe and widely adopted by European farmers. A lean multi-actor approach focusing on user acceptability, stakeholder engagement and sustainable business models will boost technology and market readiness levels and bring user adoption to the next level. This will be enhanced by synergetic effects between SmartAgriHubs and RIS3, since SmartAgriHubs will work in lock step with European regions to maximize the return of European investments, including regional structural funds and private capital. Open Calls with a total budget of ±6 M€ will expand the network and ensure that technological developments and emerging challenges of the agri-food sector are incorporated in the DIH service portfolio. SmartAgriHubs’ inclusive structure and ambitious targets will bring the entire European ecosystem together, connecting the dots to ensure global leadership for Europe in the AgTech market. The consortium, led by Wageningen Research and other partners of previous key projects such as IoF2020, FIWARE, S3P Agri-Food and I4MS, will leverage the existing ecosystem and guarantee a maximum ROI for European taxpayers and a vital agri-food sector producing adequate and safe food for future generations.

COMUNIDAD aims at developing, testing, and implementing a framework that will make use of Copernicus data from agriculture, forestry and rural development in Chile and Colombia. It will develop solutions integrated on the COMUNIDAD platform with different sources of data. The COMUNIDAD Platform will be important base for the use of EGNSS and sharing of expertise with public and private entities from the target countries to introduce EU-space based applications and to use of Copernicus data, to develop jointly algorithms, services and products, which serve local user needs. The interaction with each Pilot Application in Chile and Colombia will feed to long-term policy strategy development, aiming at bringing about the transition into the new paradigm of sustainable agriculture and forestry growth. The combined use of EGNSS and Copernicus to develop innovative downstream applications combining positing navigation and timing with Earth observation services will be an essential part of the COMUNIDAD development through pilot applications in Chile and Colombia with the direct involvement of regional end users, decision makers and support organisations. This approach is not only demonstrating the possibilities of potential transfer of the results and addressing the potential barriers, but as well introducing the added value for developing new markets, information sharing, open access and transparency. The platform is combining existing components and services for new target regions where potential for utilization is expected. The COMUNIDAD will address 4 main Scientific Objectives via 6 WPs. The cooperation of 9 partners is envisaged, from them 5 are from Chile and Colombia and 4 from EU.

SIEUSOIL will design, implement and test a shared China-EU Web Observatory platform that will provide Open Linked Data to monitor status and threats of soil and assist in decision making for sustainable support of agro-ecosystem functions, in view of the projected climate change. The Observatory platform will through customizable modules support the wise management of soil at field level and will provide showcase of good practices on soil management both for EU and China. The final target will be to support sustainable management of soil, increase land productivity sustainably, reduce crop yield variability across time and space, and support the policy formulation process. Innovative practices and tools will be tested in SIEUSOIL and their impact will be assessed for improved soil fertility and land suitability.

To unleash the full potential of IoT, realizing the digital society and flourishing innovations in application domains such as eHealth, smart city, intelligent transport systems, and smart manufacturing, it is critical to facilitate the creation and operation of trustworthy Smart IoT Systems. Since smart IoT systems typically operate in a changing and often unpredictable environment, the ability of these systems to continuously evolve and adapt to their new environment is decisive to ensure and increase their trustworthiness, quality and user experience. The DevOps movement advocates a set of software engineering best practices and tools, to ensure Quality of Service whilst continuously evolving complex systems and foster agility, rapid innovation cycles, and ease of use . Therefore, DevOps has been widely adopted in the software industry . However, there is no complete DevOps support for trustworthy smart IoT systems today. The main technical goal of ENACT is to develop novel IoT platform enablers to: i) Enable DevOps in the realm of trustworthy smart IoT systems, and enrich it with novel concepts for end-to-end security and privacy, resilience and robustness strengthening trustworthiness, taking into account the challenges related to “collaborative” actuation and actuation conflicts. ii) Facilitate the smooth integration of these to leverage DevOps for existing and new IoT platforms and approaches (e.g., FIWARE, SOFIA, and TelluCloud). This will be accomplished by evolving current DevOps methods and techniques to support the agile development and operation of smart IoT systems, and provide a set of novel mechanisms to ensure quality assurance and trustworthiness, such as actuation conflict handling, continuous testing and delivery across IoT, edge and cloud spaces and end to end security and privacy management. Through this ENACT will provide a DevOps framework for smart IoT Systems