Episode 2 - Understanding the Power of IACS Data

00:00:00: Hello and welcome to the second episode of European Land Use Talks, a mini podcast series of the Horizon Europe project, Europe Land.

00:00:07: Here we talk about anything land use and biodiversity related while sharing our project progress.

00:00:13: My name is Megan Carling and I'm the communications manager of the project from the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany.

00:00:27: The main aim is to improve our understanding of the factors behind land use decisions as well as stakeholders' awareness and engagement in climate change and biodiversity challenges across Europe by developing, testing, and implementing integrative tools.

00:00:40: The question is how land use decisions can be oriented towards more sustainable land use practices.

00:00:45: We're working towards various local, national, and European-level policy objectives.

00:00:50: And the project's methodology combines various multidisciplinary approaches from national-level analyses to land use surveys to policy assessments and social network analyses.

00:01:00: Additionally, a telecoupling framework is being developed.

00:01:02: Future land use changes are being modeled, where engaging future stakeholders in interviews and focus groups within a living lab framework.

00:01:09: And all of this work is complemented by eight local case studies acting as demonstrators, as well as a digital toolbox for integrative land use scenario exploration.

00:01:18: Last but not least, the project is also involved in capacity building by offering open access to the project methodology, outcomes and learnings to different stakeholder groups.

00:01:27: This multifaceted methodology allows the project to identify exactly how to steer land use in Europe to more sustainable practices.

00:01:35: We're excited to share with you today one other unique feature of the Europe Land Project, which is our IAX data community of practice.

00:01:42: This is a result of our expert workshop on IAX data back in February, twenty twenty five, and it's a community that will connect researchers, policymakers and practitioners to foster exchange, share insights and collaborate on innovative research related to agricultural land use data.

00:01:57: This year, five of our Europlan researchers from Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development and Transition Economies, or EIMO, here in Germany, and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark published their article, Field and Farm Level Data on Agricultural Land Use for the European Union, in the Open Access Journal Scientific Data.

00:02:15: Here to tell us more about the power of IACS data is first author of this article, and Europlan consortium member, Clemens Yannicka of EIMO.

00:02:24: My name is Clement C. Nicker.

00:02:26: I'm a research associate at Leitmann Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies, short IAMO.

00:02:33: I'm doing my PhD at the YAMO and I'm working on land use and then ownership.

00:02:40: And in the Europlan project, I'm responsible for collecting and harmonizing the IACS data and then afterwards analyzing them.

00:02:54: also in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen and other partners.

00:02:59: Okay, great.

00:03:00: And which work package is that associated with primarily?

00:03:04: This is work package two.

00:03:07: I have to be careful here because in other projects we are different.

00:03:10: So like you said, you're primarily associated with organizing that IACS data.

00:03:16: And many people listening to the podcast may not know what that data is and what it can be used for.

00:03:21: So could you just briefly explain where that data is and its importance and what that is as a concept?

00:03:28: Yeah, of course.

00:03:29: So the integrated administration and control system, the IACS, is the system of the EU that manages and controls agricultural subsidies that are paid out to farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy, the CAP.

00:03:44: So basically, when farmers apply for subsidies, they enter the request into a subsystem of the IACS.

00:03:52: And in the applications, the farmers have to indicate for what they want their subsidies.

00:03:57: and most subsidies are paid out on an area basis.

00:04:01: but there are of course others such as animal-based subsidies or subsidies that are linked to ecological practices and so on.

00:04:10: and let's say a farmer applies for area-based subsidies then he or she has to use an online platform and a digital map to indicate for which fields he or she once the subsidies and they also have to write down what kinds of props or land uses they are cultivating on these fields.

00:04:32: and this is the same if they apply for eco schemes for example.

00:04:35: so they have to indicate which areas they manage and cultivate and what kind of eco schemes they are following on these fields.

00:04:42: so in the end and as a side effect This creates a huge database on agricultural land use that covers a huge portion of the agricultural land in the EU, I think more than ninety, ninety-first percent of the agricultural land.

00:04:57: And as farmers apply for subsidies each year, this database is updated annually.

00:05:04: In the end, we get a very special database as it provides us with detailed information on land use, so on field and parcel level.

00:05:12: that covers a large area, so almost the entire EU, and that comes every year.

00:05:18: And the great thing is that we as researchers, we don't have to collect these data ourselves.

00:05:23: We don't have to be in the field to know what the farmers are doing.

00:05:25: They basically reported themselves.

00:05:28: And of course, there's a certain effort in collecting these data from the different institutions.

00:05:33: But yeah, it's much less effort, of course.

00:05:36: The importance comes from the information.

00:05:39: that are stored in the data.

00:05:40: So they can be used to analyze the effectiveness of policy interventions.

00:05:45: They can be used to study land use and land use changes.

00:05:48: They can be used to train as reference data for machine learning tasks or for prop modeling, for example.

00:05:55: And this variety of tasks shows how important the data are to the science community.

00:06:02: And you said this is just a fast follow-up question.

00:06:05: You said that this data was hosted on a platform that's maintained by the European Union.

00:06:11: No, no, it's not.

00:06:13: The data are collected by each country separately and sometimes even by different subregions such as federal states, Germany.

00:06:22: They have different paying agencies and they get all the data.

00:06:25: And then often the ministries, the agricultural ministries, they have the database at the end.

00:06:32: And sometimes they put it up online on a website.

00:06:36: In many cases, they do not.

00:06:37: So you have to actually request the data from them separately.

00:06:42: There are efforts that collect all the data from the Inspire portal.

00:06:48: There are many links to the data, but this is not complete yet.

00:06:54: It covers only a part.

00:06:56: Thank you.

00:06:57: So kind of like you mentioned, those efforts as data policies are evolving and that data is more available for open use rather than specifically being requested.

00:07:06: How do you think it can best be utilized in future research by researchers across the EU?

00:07:11: Yeah, so with the slow opening of the IX archives across the EU and with the Inspire portal where it's also collected a bit, we can now start to build a longer time series of these land use.

00:07:24: information or eventually data.

00:07:26: And as I already said, this provides us with a lot of options.

00:07:30: what we can do with it.

00:07:32: Just to name a few, with the time series, we can now analyze X posts or afterwards how effective certain cut parameters or ecosystems have been as we know what happened before and as we can see in the data what happened before and what happens afterwards.

00:07:48: We can also link the agricultural practices to biodiversity so you can calculate from the data how diverse landscapes are and then you can analyze the effect on certain animal species for example.

00:08:00: You can also use the data for land use monitoring so people have been using it to analyze what kind of crop rotations farmers are managing or cultivating on the field and how these crop rotations change over time.

00:08:12: This was not possible before because before we mostly got data on from the official statistical websites where they provided aggregated for administrative units such as districts.

00:08:27: So you only knew that there was a certain share of wheat and a certain share of maize, but you didn't know where it was.

00:08:32: Now we have the field information with that.

00:08:34: Did you say in that answer, did you say that the portal that's being developed is called the Inspire portal?

00:08:41: Yeah, the Inspire portal, I'm not the best to explain this.

00:08:44: That's okay.

00:08:45: The Inspire Portal is an effort by the EU where many different datasets are collected and the IAACS data are one part of it.

00:08:54: Gotcha.

00:08:55: Lastly, what do you see as the benefits of a collaborative community like the IAACS Community of Practice, which is a part of the Europe Land project?

00:09:04: For me, this community or the biggest benefit of this community is to get into an exchange with other people that are working with the data.

00:09:12: So first I get a good overview of the topics that people are researching.

00:09:17: I'm not aware of all the topics, of course, and so I get to know them.

00:09:21: Second, I get to know how the people handle this data, the other people handle this data because... This data, they were not designed for scientific purposes.

00:09:30: They were designed to manage the subsidies.

00:09:33: And as I already explained, they are collected from different institutions.

00:09:37: And then each country, they look differently.

00:09:40: So you have to harmonize them and you have to pre-process them.

00:09:42: And this is a lot of work and this can be done differently.

00:09:45: And so I'm glad that I get to know how other people handle these issues.

00:09:50: Then, of course, with the exchange, new ideas come up and then you collaborate on these ideas, which is always nice.

00:09:58: And then last but not least, I get to learn a lot of things because there are so many people in the community that know more than me about the data, for example, from the JSC or other national institutions.

00:10:09: And yeah, without this exchange, I would not learn these things.

00:10:15: And this is, I promise, the actual last question if you're willing to answer it.

00:10:20: I'm just curious based off of kind of you talking about your interest in the field, how you got involved in IACS data land use as your professional kind of specialty.

00:10:31: What led you to that?

00:10:32: What's interesting?

00:10:34: How did you get in a position where you're qualified enough to talk about this really niche topic?

00:10:40: Yeah, so I studied geography.

00:10:42: my bachelor's and my master's, so of course land use is a big topic in geography.

00:10:48: If you look at the current challenges that we are facing, the climate change, biodiversity loss and so on, land use plays a major role here.

00:10:58: For me, this was always interesting.

00:11:00: Then I started to work with remote sensing data, mostly in my studies, which is basically monitoring land use and then cover.

00:11:11: After my studies, I started to work with the JAMO, the research group of Barania and Müller, the land systems group.

00:11:20: And there I got introduced to the IACS data.

00:11:24: We first only got them for one federal state in Germany.

00:11:27: We started to work with them.

00:11:28: And then we actually looked into the crop rotations, which was already very interesting.

00:11:35: And then from there on, We started to collect more and more data and then new collaborations came up and new topics.

00:11:42: And yeah, this is how I ended up here.

00:11:45: Thank you, Clemens, for joining us today and sharing so much insightful information about the future of IAAC's data usage in the EU.

00:11:52: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of European Land Use Talks.

00:11:56: If you liked what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe and join us for future episodes.

00:11:59: In the meantime, please visit our website, europe-land.eu.

00:12:03: to learn more about the work we're doing and stay connected with us by joining our stakeholder pool.

00:12:08: We'll see you next time.