DivGrass

Around one million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of biodiversity loss. Indicators of the extent and structural condition of ecosystems, of the composition of ecological communities, and of species populations overwhelmingly show net declines over recent decades (https://ipbes.net/global-assessment, IPBES, 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services). The same report mentions that Biodiversity provides us with clean air, fresh water, good quality soil and crop pollination. Therefore, this proposal aims to enhance (functional) biodiversity for climate resilience in dairy grasslands. 

This project focuses on dairy farming, a main agricultural sector in terms of biodiversity loss and land use. Whereas many dairy farmers are willing to contribute to biodiversity recovery, they experience barriers in terms of a lack of knowledge about how to integrate biodiversity, cost coverage, adverse incentives from agricultural policies and many other problems. DivGrass will tackle these barriers through: regional knowledge transfer from farmer-to-farmer, through farmer-trainers, capacity building and transnational transfer in the triple helix project network, the establishment of transdisciplinary field labs with test beds for biodiversity, climate adaption and resilient seeds and tests for digital monitoring and technology development, involving regional authorities, competent in facilitating farmer-friendly regional planning, digitally supported grassland monitoring via state-of-the art artificial intelligence (AI), drone data and tailor-made app to enhance farmer decisions, co-produced, scientifically supported national and EU policy recommendations. DivGrass, involves partners from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany Sweden.

Overall Objective: Promoting climate resilience of regions dairy farms by enhancing (functional) biodiversity in grasslands. Current tensions between environmental measures and farm cost coverage are overcome by digitally supported knowledge creation, transnational networks and multi-actor generated policy advice.