The Horizon 2020 CAPSELLA project: Collective Awareness PlatformS for Environmentally-sound Land management based on data technoLogies and Agrobiodiversity

 Only agricultural and food systems with reduced use of external inputs can meet the challenges of sustainability. Agrobiodiversity is key to this, being the basis for improving agricultural production through smart utilization of the functionalities that agroecosystems offer. Improving food systems where consumers play an active role in driving produce demand and offer is also crucial. Alternative, agrobiodiversity based agricultural models are more likely to be supported by open, horizontal and dynamic Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems in which research, education, extension, support systems and farmers, citizens and consumers, are gathered in networks. Just like the tiny yet sturdy little plant it takes the name from, the Horizon 2020 CAPSELLA project (www.capsella.eu) will deepen the roots of sustainability in agri-food systems by harnessing scientific and local knowledge, people’s energy, motivation and innovation skills around the theme of agrobiodiversity by making use of novel, improved and demand-driven ICT solutions. CAPSELLA will focus on two complementary domains (agrobiodiversity and the food supply chain) through participatory bottom up data collection and top down data integration to develop solutions. The project will build from scratch open data repositories concerning regional agrobiodiversity, and build upon and enhance existing data sets on the agrobiodiversity and food domains. Based on these, the project will develop a number of community-driven data powered ICT solutions, which will be tested by the communities engaged in the project and will result in a number of pilots running around three multidisciplinary, community-driven use cases: the field, seeds, and food scenarios.