International conference for discovering links between the bioeconomy development and climate change mitigation

Dear colleagues and friends, we are happy to invite you to the 2^nd International Scientific Conference “Sustainable Bioeconomy Development 2021: Adaptation to Climate Change”, which will be held online on 20-21 May 2021. The conference is dedicated to discussion of the relevant topics of sustainable bioeconomy in the context of climate change. The conference will have the plenary session, panel discussion, parallel sessions, and workshop.

Implementation of the European Green Deal strategy in the EU and Lithuania is highly important, in particular, in terms of reduction of the effects of climate change. The development of the bioeconomy is expected to contribute significantly to combating climate change, and we invite international experts and scientists to share their experience during the plenary session, which will be held on the 20^th of May during the morning session. It will gather the researchers, policy-makers and entrepreneurs to discuss the key issues of bioeconomy. You will have the opportunity to hear the keynote speakers from Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Dr. Lucia Rocchi, an Italian scientist conducting research in the fields of economics, sustainability, biodiversity, ecosystem, and circular economy, will introduce the participants to the circular economy and SDGs, their connections for a more sustainable development model. Dr. Martin C. Th. Scholten, an advisor for science diplomacy to future food and nature policies from the Netherlands, will focus on climate-resilient food production in a sustainable bioeconomy and adaptive agricultural practices based on circular resource management. Dr. Gerald Schwarz, who has 15-year background in agri-environmental and rural policy analysis, will introduce the participants to the governance and sustainability implications of agroecological transitions. The presentations will be complemented with valuable discussion on sustainable bioeconomy development.

On the 21^st of May, the conference will begin with the panel discussion, which focuses on the potential scenarios of the development and market uptake of biofuels, biofertilizers, and bioplastics. Environmental, technological and economic factors will be discussed with the leading researchers and bio-based industry representatives from Lithuania, Estonia, Norway, and Sweden.

Perspectives of biofuels will be explored with Dr. Vincent Eijsink, Professor of the Faculty of Chemistry, Biotechnology and Food Science at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and Ahto Oja, Member of the Board of “Balti Biometaan” that was founded with the aim to develop the production of biomethane as a motor fuel in Estonia and the Baltics. Adoption of innovative and sustainable bio-based solutions in agriculture will be discussed with Dr. Audrius Gegeckas, Head of R&D Department at Lithuanian company “Bioenergy LT” that provides innovative and sustainable high-biotech solutions improving crop productivity and maintaining soil biological activity, and Dr. Gustaf Forsberg, Senior Specialist of Swedish company “ThermoSeed Global” that offers innovative, highly efficient and environmentally friendly seed treatment technology. Meanwhile, Dr. Inga Matijošytė, Senior Researcher and Head of Applied Biocatalysis Sector at the Institute of Biotechnology of Vilnius University Life Sciences Centre, and Dr. Irena Vitkauskienė, Business Development Consultant at Lithuanian company “Plastiksė” that manufactures plastic packaging products for beverage, food, cosmetic, chemical and medical industries, will share their insights about the future of plastics.

As the transition towards more circular economy requires not only new technologies, processes, but also new business models that change the way the enterprises conduct their business, the second part of the panel discussion will be dedicated to the discussion on good practice business models for sustainable bioeconomy development. Dr. Ants-Hannes Viira, Senior Researcher and Director of the Institute of Economics and Social Sciences at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, will present results of the recent study on such business models conducted by the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme’s project “Unlocking the Potential of Bio-based Value Chains in the Baltic Sea Region” (BalticBiomass4Value).

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VDŪ ŽŪA starts the cooperation with Tashkent State Agrarian University

On March 17th 2021 took place an online meeting between the representatives from VMU Agriculture Academy (VDU ŽŪA) and Tashkent State Agrarian University. VMŪ ŽŪA was represented by the Chancellor prof. dr. Astrida Miceikienė, Vice-Chancellor prof. dr. Aušra Blinstrubienė, international coordinator lect. dr. Ekaterina Makrickienė and deans of faculties: doc. dr. Bernardas Vaznonis, prof. dr. Edmundas Bartkevičius, doc. dr. Algis Kvaraciejus and doc. dr. Roandas Domeika. Tashkent State Agrarian University was represented by Vice-Rectors dr. Abduaziz Abduvasikov, dr. Sohib Islamov, dr. Komolitdin Sultonov and deans of faculties. During the meeting, it was decided to develop cooperation in the preparation of double diploma programs, organization of internships for students and lecturers, student exchanges, organization of joint seminars, scientific conferences and projects. It was decided in the nearest future the sides will sign the Memorandum of Understanding, and begin the cooperation in the development of double diploma programs with the faculties of Bioeconomy Development, Forest Sciences and Ecology and Agronomy.

A list of science events taking part in 2021 at VDU AGRICULTURAL ACADEMY: from international conferences to creative workshops

The list of scientific events to be held at the VMU Agriculture Academy in 2021: international conferences, creative workshops, and many more

The VMU Agriculture Academy has published the list of scientific events planned for this year. The topics of seven important international scientific conferences listed reflect the most sensitive recent issues, such as adaptation to climate change, sustainable bioeconomy development, human and nature safety, the Green Deal guidelines, etc.

The list also includes two scientific events for the university and high school students, in particular, students’ scientific conference “The Young Scientist” and national conference for high school students dedicated to the environmental issues.

Two traditional exhibitions are coming back to the VMU Agriculture Academy this year: international agricultural exhibition “Ką pasėsi…2021”, and fibre cannabis business exhibition and pre-deal fair CANNABIS HUB.LT 2021.

The researchers at the VMU Agriculture Academy are planning to hold twenty practical seminars and creative workshops on a wide range of topics intended for the country’s farmers and public sector representatives engaged in rural development.

VDU ŽŪA konferencijos, renginiai 2021 EN (1)

VMU Is Among the 350 Best in Agriculture in the World University Rankings by Subject

For the first time, Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) was included in QS World University Rankings by Subject, where the world’s best universities are evaluated according to individual subject areas. VMU’s results in the field of Agriculture and Forestry were ranked the best; namely, in this subject category, the University was awarded a high 301–350 position among the world’s universities.

According to Prof. Dr. Astrida Miceikienė, Chancellor of Agriculture Academy at Vytautas Magnus University, such a high ranking confirms that the Academy researchers’ scientific competencies are at the international level. Their research significantly contributes to scientific progress, agricultural and forestry business development both in Lithuania and globally.

“Assuredly, scientists in the fields of agriculture and forestry are leaders in Lithuania and equal partners in the international research area. The science-based knowledge and skills imparted to the students by this Academy’s researchers demonstrate the modernity, quality, and viability of the ongoing studies in Agronomy, Forestry, Ecology, Engineering, and other studies important for Agriculture and Forestry. A high ranking in the field of Agriculture and Forestry is a reasonable basis for presenting these study programs to Lithuanian and foreign schoolchildren and students seeking to become the creators of the future agricultural and forestry business,” said the Chancellor of VMU Agriculture Academy.

In total, the QS rating evaluated as many as 23 subject areas in which VMU conducts scientific and study activities. The vast majority of the assessed areas offered by the University received a rating of more than 40 points. In addition to the mentioned Agriculture and Forestry (53.5 points), the VMU activities in Performing Arts (60.8 points), Environmental Science (57.2 points), Social Sciences and Management (55.3 points), and Educology (52.6 points), and Arts and Humanities (52.1 points) were evaluated exceptionally well.

In the QS ranking by subject, universities were rated in 51 individual subject areas this year. Each area’s ranking is based on the following four criteria: academic reputation, employer reputation, citation, and h-index.

Academic reputation was estimated based on a survey in which 100,000 academics from all over the world expressed their opinion about universities’ performance in a particular field. Estimation of employer reputation also relied on the survey of more than 500,000 employers from various sectors. The citation criterion was applied to determine the average number of times the University publications were cited. The last criterion, the h-index, assessed the institution’s scientific level according to the citation of the most frequently cited research papers in other publications.

In total, 1.4 thousand institutions worldwide were evaluated in the ranking by subject this year. The highest-ranked institutions – as many as 508 – are in the United States, 200 in China, 197 in France, 177 in India, and 172 in the United Kingdom.

Vytautas Magnus University consistently receives a high score in international rankings, especially in the areas of internationality and entrepreneurship. In the World’s Universities with Real Impact (WURI) ranking of innovative universities, published at the end of last year, VMU was awarded a high 41^st place in the category of entrepreneurship.

Greetings to VMU Graduates

Due to the global situation of COVID-19, the annual VMU diploma award ceremony has been moved to June 2021 hoping that the new graduates will be able to share the joy of this special occasion lively with all participants of the celebration and warmly say goodbye to their Alma Mater.

VMU Rector Prof. Juozas Augutis congratulates and sends sincere wishes to all graduates who have completed a very important and significant stage of their lives in such a difficult and unusual time for all of us.

Greetings to the graduates from Prof. Astrida Miceikienė, the Chancellor of VMU Agriculture Academy

2nd International Scientific Conference “Sustainable Bioeconomy Development 2021: Adaptation to Climate Change”

We are pleased to invite you to the International Scientific Conference “Sustainable Bioeconomy Development 2021: Adaptation to Climate Change”, which will be held online on 20-21 May 2021.

The conference is organised by the Faculty of Bioeconomy Development of Vytautas Magnus University Agriculture Academy and the Faculty of Economics and Social Development of Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies.

The conference is dedicated to representatives of social sciences, who are invited to make presentation under following topics:

Policy and Public Investments in Bioeconomy Research
Consumer and Producer Behaviour in the Context of Climate Change
Business and Place Models for a Circular Bioeconomy
Accelerating Bioeconomy Through Investment and Financing Decisions

The conference will bring together the European and national experts as well as policy makers, researches and stakeholders to discuss about opportunities related to sustainable bioeconomy development.

Online registration for presentations is open until 19 April 2021.

More information

10th International Scientific Conference “RURAL DEVELOPMENT 2021: Challenges for Sustainable Bioeconomy and Climate Change”

We kindly invite You to the 10^th International Scientific Conference “RURAL DEVELOPMENT 2021: Challenges for Sustainable Bioeconomy and Climate Change”, which will take place in Vytautas Magnus University Agriculture Academy (Lithuania), 21-23 September, 2021.

This conference is aimed at providing interdisciplinary scientific discussion, presenting new ideas for rural development processes in the context of Bioeconomy, Climate Change, Innovations and Social Progress.

The main topics of parallel sessions:

Agro-innovations and Food Technologies;
Biosystems Engineering and Environmental Integrity (Dedicated to the 75th Anniversary of Engineering Sciences in University);
Multifunctional Approach for Sustainable Use of Bio-Resources;
Social Research for Sustainable Bioeconomy and Climate Change.

Business and Science Forum “Green deal: the way improving the well-being of people and business” will be held during the Conference.

Keywords: Innovations, Integrity, Bio-resources, Well-being.

Online Registration on the conference website.

Information for authors.

More information about conference is in attached Announcement, also at: https://www.ruraldevelopment.lt/

Happy Holidays

Our Dearest,

On the eve of the great holidays of the year, we all remember what the most important happened. The greatest miracles are in our hearts, heads, and hands.

In the New Year I wish You to find hope, believe in Your abilities, achieve Your goals and keep interested!

Astrida Miceikienė
Chancellor of Academy of Agriculture Vytautas Magnus University

Analysis and experimentation of ecosystems newsletter, December 2020

Foreword by Michel Boër, AnaEE DG

Dear readers,
2020, the year of the coronavirus outbreak and the global sanitary crisis, is coming to its end and should be considered as a wake-up call. As pointed in the last IPBES report, prevention is better than cure; critical knowledge gaps have to be closed, such as “the understanding of the relationship between ecosystem degradation and restoration, and the risk of emergence of pandemics”, or “the impact of climate change and related extreme weather events”. Thanks to its experimental approach, AnaEE can be a major contributor to this research.

On a more positive note, 2020 has been also a critical year for our implementation activities: we have answered to the ESFRI questionnaire to become a landmark on the European Research Infrastructure 2021 roadmap, and finalized our application for the ERIC, with the approval of the statutes and of the last version of the Scientific and Technical Document. Recently, we organized the first AnaEE webinar, part of the AgroEco2020 conference (see report below). The difficulties experienced this year did not prevent us to prepare our infrastructure towards operationality.

2021 will be a year rich in events, with the last steps for the landmark label and for the ERIC, and, moreover, the first call for proposals to use our European infrastructure. AnaEE, with its service centres, will also organize training activities and workshops. In 2021, the first calls for the new Horizon Europe program will be released, and we should prepare outstanding applications that, first, will enable the research community around AnaEE to perform cutting edge research, and, second, will bring sustainability and visibility to our infrastructure.

I wish you all a merry Christmas and a great end of year vacation, while keeping safe from the Covid.

AnaEE on the path to become an ERIC and a European
Landmark

On October 29th, the interim Assembly of Members (AoM) of AnaEE met in videoconferencing. Several important decisions were taken, as the approval of the 2021-2022 work program and of the overall Scientific and Technical Document to be sent to the European Commission as part of the ERIC Step 2 package. The STD is an important strategic document that describes the infrastructure and its business model, and presents its scientific priorities.

In this document, AnaEE has identified key scientific priorities that actively support the European Green Deal strategy:

Plant health and ecosystem functioning
Greenhouse gas emissions in ecosystems, especially in agriculture
Ecosystem carbon storage

The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation of the host country (France) prepares now the formal application for the ERIC status to be sent shortly to the European Commission. A period of 6 months is expected to complete the procedure.

AnaEE in the ENVRI community and ENVRI-FAIR

AnaEE is one of the RI contributing to the ESFRI Cluster of Environmental Research Infrastructures (ENVRI) which aims at identifying common issues and at developing integrated and shared solutions in environmental research.

The ongoing ENVRI-FAIR project (2019 -2022) is the connection of ENVRI to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The solutions prototyped in the previous ENVRI-plus project (2015 -2019) are deployed for, data/metadata and services interoperability and for the feeding of the EOSC portal.

The participating RIs cover the different domains of the Earth system: Atmosphere, Marine, Solid Earth and Biodiversity / Ecosystems.

The ENVRI-FAIR organisation consists in cross-cutting WorkPackages (WPs) about project management, communication, policy, training, common requirements, implementation technical solutions and 4 domain specific WPs. AnaEE, which is represented by the CREA (Italy), CNRS and INRAE (France), is part of the “Biodiversity and Ecosystem domain” (Figure 1) together with eLTER, LifeWatch and ICOS.

AnaEE mainly contributes to the development of technical and semantic interoperability and is involved in interoperability use-cases such as “the description of sites for experimentation or observation” and “the soil water content”.

The ongoing implementation of the AnaEE RI benefits from this participation in ENVRI-FAIR, particularly for the establishment of the Data and Modeling Centre and the services it will host. Engineers in charge of the identification and integration of provenance metadata elements in the characterization of AnaEE resources (data and services), as well as the implementation of semantic modeling and deployment pipelines for standardized data sets and metadata records, have been hired, thanks to the support provided by the EC through ENVRI-FAIR.

A look back at the AgroECO conference and AnaEE day

The Vytautas Magnus University, Agriculture Academy, Lithuania, and the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, organized the 2^nd and 3^rd December the AgroEco2020 conference featuring the 1st AnaEE webinar. The event gathered about 200 participants from several countries in the world, and it was a great success.

Aušra Blinstrubienė, Vytautas Magnus University Agriculture Academy, Lithuania and Zenonas Dabkevičius, Lithuanian Academy of Sciences opened the event by recalling that international cooperation is key to strengthen knowledge and research. The first day a plenary session was followed by three parallel thematic sessions.

Cees Veerman, Chairperson of the board of the Mission for Soil Health and Food of Horizon Europe, and former Minister for Agriculture of the Netherland, opened the plenary session. He highlighted the critical EU objective of 75% of healthy soils by 2030, and the need for the collaboration between academia and the society to reach this objective. He emphasized the role of living labs as a tool to gather both researchers and farmers, in a co-creation approach. Michel Boër, DG of AnaEE, presented an overall review of AnaEE, its objectives, its strategy, and the specificity of the approach to forecast the future of ecosystems, and the impact of the infrastructure on agriculture, industry, and the society at large, notably within an evidence-based policy approach.

During the plenary, participants discussed about agroecology, the BIOEAST initiative, precision agriculture, environmental management, the influence of organic production on bioactive substances in food product, circular bioeconomy. The three parallels sessions tackled soil health and C sequestration for sustainability, food quality and safety, soil and crop management towards a chemical pesticide-free agriculture, the role of circular bioeconomy in climate change mitigation, biodiversity, crop and production diversification, precision farming and digital technologies.

The second day of the conference was dedicated to AnaEE. It was the occasion to share an overview of the services currently under development. Web services such as the AnaEE website, the proposal portal and SEISM application were presented as well as funding opportunities. The representatives of Services Centres gave out presentations about the missions and stages of development of the Data and Modelling Centre, the Technological Centre and the Interface and Synthesis Centre. It was also the opportunity to show the role of AnaEE in ENVRI-Fair; as an example, AnaEE Denmark presented its method for the FAIRification of data acquired at Danish platforms. These presentations were followed by a focus on the unique features of Ecotrons in AnaEE, and of the FATI-Platform in Belgium. Finally, the collaborative approach in Finland was presented, with a national infrastructure that manages together the three local nodes of AnaEE, ICOS and eLTER.

Our Lithuanian partners presented their rich landscape of facilities, with presentations of the various types of platforms they propose: analytical, enclosed, forestry, aquacosm, agro-ecosystem, plant phenotyping.

AnaEE warmly thanks the Lithuanian organizers for holding this conference, and thanks all participants to this very successful event. We look forward seeing you all to the next events organized by AnaEE.

AnaEE day presentations are available here.

The result of the virtual hackaton HACK AgriFood’20 – prototypes of a local food supply chain created

4th year students of Administration of Rural Development Study Program at Faculty of Bioeconomic Development of VMU Agriculture Academy Alex Yirenkyi Akuffo, Mulolo Ngasa Gracia Donido, Johnson Segun John, Ndukwu Ifeanyi Harrison, Ohaegbu Paul Nnamdi together with Prof. Dr. V. Atkočiūnienė enjoy the results of 6 weeks of work at the international online hackathon HACK AgriFood’20.

The team solved the issue of how to promote and support the demand for local products through environmentally friendly short food supply chains, bringing producers and consumers closer to each other. The developed solution is a prototype of a short local food supply chain. HackAgriFood 2020 was participated with the developed prototype.

The solution is based on the short local food supply chain designed to bring local food producers and consumers closer to each other through communication links and convenient forms of cooperation. Demand for fresh, seasonal, locally grown and produced food has been increasing recently and will increase in the future. Local food producers lack innovative distribution channels; the issue of reaching the end consumer, mostly living in the city, remains unsolved. Therefore innovatively organized short local food supply chains effectively create new market opportunities for producers and locally grown products of higher biological value are received by consumers.