Let’s read the mid-term report of challenge #6 Atlas of Best Practices – Polirural cases. 

Mentors

• Petr Horak is mostly responsible for technical development and coordination within the challenge
• Pavel Kogut is in charge of stakeholder engagement and day-to-day communication with participant

Registrations

Since 3 Sember 2020 when the challenge was first announced by Plan4All, a total of 20 participants signed up to it. Many of those who registered are partners of the PoliRural project. However, a few people are completely external, and some come from outside the EU e.g. Ethiopia, Rwanda. 

Process

Groups

To better manage participants and improve the overall coordination of the challenge, mentors decided to divide people into three groups: 

• Atlas Consultants: The purpose of this group is to advise the PoliRural tech team on how best to incorporate frontend and backend changes requested by Collectors and Testers to improve the current version of the Atlas. No programming input is expected from Consultants, however it will help if people joining this group have some UX and web development experience.
• Case Study Collectors: This group will be primarily responsible for gathering case studies (a template will be provided later) that will eventually appear on the Atlas. Additionally, Collectors will need to provide feedback to Developers on how they would like the case studies to be displayed (frontend) and what admin features they would like to use when accessing the Atlas (backend). Collectors are not required to possess any technical skills. What is important is the ability to collect information using desk research and other techniques, as well as to have some basic writing skills (to present the case studies in English) and of course an overarching interest in rural affairs.
• Prototype Testers: The role of Testers is to assess Atlas improvements implemented within the scope of the Challenge. A special questionnaire will be created to gather structured feedback from Testers several times during the process. People that collect case studies can also volunteer to test the prototype solutions, so it’s possible to be a member of both groups at the same time. No special knowledge or skills are needed to perform testing activities. What’s needed is an impartial assessment of the tool from a layman’s point of view.Welcome email

Webinar

A joint webinar involving the mentors of Challenge 2, 6 and 12 was held on 20 October 2020 at 09:00 CET. Petr Horak presented the overall Atlas architecture and its background (Enabling project), while Pavel Kogut introduced Challenge 6 to the attendees. In his presentation, Pavel first set the context for the challenge by describing some of the problems that rural areas are facing e.g. poverty and social exclusion, lack of public services, negative population dynamics. This part was followed by a quick overview of pressures caused by the pandemic (e.g. demand shocks, falling tourism, logistics bottlenecks) and their impact on rural livelihoods. Next, several good practices for dealing with Covid-induced rural challenges were presented, drawing on the examples from Europe and the US. The presentation ended with the description of Challenge 6, its objectives, groups, and expectations (next steps). The entire slide deck can be found here.

Alpha version 

At the webinar, participants were offered a sneak preview of the Covid Atlas. Currently, it contains two made-up cases that are used only for illustration purposes. In the future, as Collectors supply their case studies to the mentors, the Atlas will be populated with actual stories from across the globe. Eventually, the goal is to integrate the Atlas into the PoliRural Innovation Hub. 

Case study collection

Shortly after the webinar, Pavel Kogut reached out to interested Collectors and asked them to look for interesting case studies. A template was provided to ensure consistency in data collection, as well as to make further integration with the Atlas easier. First input is expected by early November 2020.

Next steps

Mentors will work on the following in the coming weeks

• Collating, synthesising and integrating information from Collectors
• Initiating a series of training sessions with Testers
• Engaging Consultants with a view to improving the Atlas
• Capturing feedback for integration in the final report
• Preparing for the final event

The main goal of the challenge is to calculate agro-climatic factors of a selected area of interest. The second task for this challenge is to analyse inner uncertainty of climatic data provided by the Copernicus ERA5 Land dataset and compare this dataset to the dataset produced by in-situ sensors in pilot localities. 

During the first period of the Challenge No.13 discussion about agro-climatic factors and their selection for forecasting regional food supplies was done. The selected agro-climatic factors are following:

• frost-free periods, growing degree units, heat stress units, number of (optimal) growing degree days from temperature.
• nitrogen application window from soil temperature.
• accumulated solar radiation from incident sunlight.
• water balance from precipitation, evapotranspiration, and runoff data.

Pilot area of interest was selected and datasets from Copernicus ERA5-Land database was downloaded. The pilot area of interest will be Pilsen region, Czech Republic. For evaluation and comparison of global data versus local in-situ sensors, two small localities were selected. Previous sensor campaigns were organized in these 2 pilot localities. First locality is in southern part of Czech-Moravian Highlands – Kojcice. Second one is in Northern Moravia – Trisce.

We have collected sensor data from locality Kojcice between spring 2016 – winter 2018 from soil sensors and meteostation. We have data from locality Trsice between spring 2015 – autumn 2018 from meteostation. Corresponding phenomena will be collected form the ERA5-Land dataset for both localities. 

First period was mainly oriented on selection of phenomena and factors, selecting area of interest and data collection from global and local perspective.

The team for the Challenge No. 13 consists from 15 members, where mainly EU states are presented, partly Africa and one member from the US. 

Covid19 pandemic and mainly subsequent restrictions was and still is a test for the food supply chain in order to provide enough food to the market to the end customers. Especially in crises a good decision can be made only with enough information.The yield potential is highly prone to the seasonal effects such as drought, floods, optimal amount of rainfall, duration of insolation, temperature and others which can make the predictions highly different from the reality. The goal of challenges is to design methods of monitoring yield and climatic conditions during the season, which can influence negatively or positively yield in the season. 

As the reference layers we use the yield production zones calculated from 2013 – 2019 with the trends during the season of 2018. Temporal trends or events will be analysed on the basis of comparison of yield trends with Sentinel 2 EVI (Enhanced Vegetation Index) Index which is very close to NDVI index. The reason why we have decided to choose EVI index instead of NDVI is that EVI index does not suffer from saturation effect.

Figure 1: Map of yield potential delineated from multi-temporal Landsat imagery

Our aim is to monitor phyto phenology of wheat in Rostenice farm, where we have available data of yield potential, field boundaries geometry and inter alia, the information on the type of crop grown in the field.

Metrics

EVI will be calculated for every image where it is not too cloudy. The difference Δ between EVI values in two consecutive images will be calculated using following formula:

Figure 2: Formula to calculate normalized difference between two EVI layers

where v1 and v2 are EVI values of the same pixel and t1 and t2 stands for time in days.We know from previous experience that the difference cannot be negative. The size of the difference value shows how much had the crop (wheat) changed in reality. This information is very useful for measuring the effect of any issue or condition during the season. Thanks to this difference information we will understand better the individual phases in crop growth.

Another way to compare the EVI values is to calculate integral for the whole season. Mathematical formula to calculate integral (SUM) is depicted below:

Figure 3: Formula to calculate integral for the whole season

where again v1 and v2 are EVI values of the same pixel and t1 and t2 stands for time in days. Thanks to integral value we can see where EVI was mostly above the average and which places were under the average most of the season compared to other places in the image.

Last way to compare EVI values will be by simple statistics within chosen fields. When comparing the mean value of some fields, we will learn which field has higher yield potential. We will also compare deviation in order to validate our metrics.

The figure 1 outlines the challenge #8 concept and selected two pathways. The concept encompasses 4 phases; what indigenous knowledge to collect, how to collect, how to evaluate the quality of the knowledge,  and finally how to record and share the indigenous knowledge.  So far we have decided to put effort on two pathways but we are still looking for additional ideas for pathways. Pathway 1 is addressed on grain storage systems in Africa. Pathway 2 is about mapping out soil microbes coverage, quality and quantity in African continent.

Figure 1: The concept of challenge #8

The team of challenge 8 consists of 31members from 17 countries.  Most of the team members are from Africa continent.  The team uses emails, WhatsApp and Skype for communication. WhatsApp is the most active channel having 13 team members. Skype group has also gathered 13 members.  

By 19.10.2020, there have been 3 team meetings: 1 pcs for general, 1 pcs for pathway 1 and 1 pcs for pathway 2.  The discussion, ideation, knowledge transfer could have been more active and vivid, but we are still in a ramp-up phase of the project.  The first results to come will hopefully and activate participants into dialogue.  

The kick-off webinar was planned to be on week 40, but it was necessary to postpone to 23.10.2020 (week 43) due to one presenter’s personal reason. 

Pathway 1 needs support from the challenge 6 expert Peter Horak,  and Pathway 2 from the challenge 3 expert Pavel Hajek. The co-operation between challenges enriches and enables more ambitious deliverables and increases all participants’ know-how and skills. 

At the moment there are no particular risks ahead.  The next tasks are to ideate additional pathways, pilot the 4-step concept and constantly assess the progress. To enhance team dialogue is one of the core tasks.