Behavioural, Ecological and Socio-economic
Tools for Modelling Agricultural Policy

With the holiday season approaching and the Christmas mood slowly taking over, BESTMAP wants to take a moment to wish you all pleasant holidays and a prosperous New Year 2022!

Between 2 and 4 November 2021, BESTMAP held its second annual General Assembly (GA) meeting in a virtual environment. Led by the Project Coordinator Guy Ziv and Project Manager Jodi Gunning of University of Leeds, UK, the event was attended by representatives from all of the BESTMAP-partnering organisations.  Divided in three days, the agenda of the GA meeting followed through the BESTMAP story so far, discussions and setting the plan for the end game of the project. Each...

Between 22 and 26 November 2021, BESTMAP will be attending the 2021 EU Conference on modeling for policy support. The European Commission’s Competence Centre on Modelling (CC-MOD) has organised this conference which aims to bring together researchers and policy makers from European and international institutions, Member States, universities, research institutes and consultancies to identify common challenges and solutions when using models to support policy making across all policy...

BESTMAP will be attending the Early Career Biogeographers Conference between 22 and 24 October 2021. The event has been originally planned to be held in Amsterdam, the same as previous years, but due to COVID-19 restrictions, this year it will be fully online. The conference will be participated by a great number of international scientists, amongst whom will be BESTMAP’s member Miss Stephanie Roilo from the Technical University Dresden and Prof. Anna Cord, co-coordinator of ...

On the 14th and 15th of October, BESTMAP is going to attend at the second edition of the Farm to Fork Conference, where European stakeholders, interested in helping to shape the EU’s path towards sustainable food systems, will gather to discuss the progress made on the initiatives foreseen in the Farm to Fork Strategy, support the EU efforts to achieve a global transition to sustainable food systems and put emphasis on transition enablers. This year the conference will be held...

On 20-22 September 2021, BESTMAP will participate at the Landscape 2021 Conference – Diversity for Sustainable and Resilient Agriculture.  Landscape 2021 will bring together scientists from across disciplines with key actors to explore whether and how diversity and diversification can contribute to a more sustainable and resilient agriculture. Promising approaches reduce trade-offs between high productivity and use of external resources, the provisioning of ecosystem...

In pursuit of the goal to establish ecological and socio-economic tools for modelling agricultural policy, which will enhance the sustainability of agricultural landscapes, while ensuring farmers’ livelihoods, BESTMAP wants to share key achievements with policy and decision makers. To achieve this, the project created a summary leaflet, presenting the twelve Brussels-based interviews with representatives of agricultural producers, inputs industry, environmental NGOs and expert...

The AGRIMODELS Cluster, formed by the Horizon 2020 projects BESTMAP, AGRICORE and MIND STEP is going to participate at the sixteenth congress of the European Association of Agricultural Economics (EAAE), which will take place on 20 – 23 July 2021 in an entirely virtual environment.  The cluster is going to take part in the congress with an individual session on the use of individual decision-making models to support policies. Each of the three projects is going to...

The first BESTMAP-supported research paper is now available in the People and Nature journal. The study investigates the possible ways of making socio-environmental modelling more prominent to support policy and management and has been conducted with the involvement of the BESTMAP experts Meike Will (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany) and Brigit Muller (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany)....

A press release titled "Farm to fork strategy: Public hearing on improving the EU’s food system" became recently available on the European Parliament’s website. The publication informs about the discussion between experts and Members of European Parliament from the Agriculture and Environment committees. During the meeting, the main topic of discussion between the present parties were the possible ways through which the EU food system may become more sustainable, resilient and...

BESTMAP is delighted to share that the project’s coordinator, Prof Guy Ziv, has been invited by the United Kingdom’s government to serve as a member of the Environmental Land Management Modelling Expert Panel (MEP).  The Environmental Land Management programme is the cornerstone of the UK’s new agricultural policy. Founded on the principle of public money for public goods, it aims to achieve the goals of the 25 Year Environment Plan and commitment to net zero...

BESTMAP wishes you a very healthy and prosperous new year! The emergence of Covid-19 resulted in a great deal of challenges and limitations. Regardless, the BESTMAP team maintained united in our common goal to establish ecological and socio-economic tools for modelling agricultural policy, which will enhance the sustainability of agricultural landscapes, while ensuring farmers’ livelihoods. We have gathered our most impactful achievements during 2020 in a short video. 

BESTMAP is wishing you all a delightful Christmas holidays and a happy, and bright New Year!

BESTMAP aims to establish ecological and socio-economic tools for modelling agricultural policy, which will enhance the sustainability of agricultural landscapes, while ensuring farmers’ livelihoods. Along the way of fulfilling BESTMAP’s goal, the project members have created a collection of deliverables, which holds an overview of the projects’ activities and achievements.* While BESTMAP is actively working towards significant outcomes, the deliverables delineate the path...

A press release on the AGRIMODELS Cluster is now available in the online science news portal EurekAlert! and the European Commission’s news and events service CORDIS Wire. The announcement informs about the collaboration between the three EU research projects - AGRICORE, BESTMAP and MIND STEP in their common goal to design modelling capabilities in the agricultural sector, while at the same time contributing to the creation of a new agenda of the agricultural policies within the...

BESTMAP held its annual meeting from 21 to 23 September 2020, where all partners gathered to discuss the project’s achievements in the past year, along with the vision for upcoming tasks. Each of the project teams’ representatives introduced their accomplishments and further agenda. After thorough deliberation, the meeting resulted in brainstorming for future updates within the different branches of the consortium. There are yet a number of time-sensitive tasks that await to...

 A recent publication in the Agricultural Sciences journal reviews the different methods through which soil erosion can be estimated. The article states that the process of soil erosion is greatly affecting the soil fertility and causes its loss, and land degradation throughout a great number of lands worldwide. There are various methods for detecting the occurrence of soil erosion and the factors which have caused it. However, due to the complexity of the issue, the estimation of...

The concept, aims and expected outcomes of the BESTMAP project were presented during the poster section of the GEO BON Open Science Conference & All Hands Meeting 2020 held online from 7 to 9 July 2020. GEO BON is a global biodiversity observation network that contributes to effective management policies for the worldwide biodiversity and ecosystem services. The main objective of the organisation is to improve the acquisition, coordination and delivery of biodiversity observations...

On 14 and 15 July 2020 BESTMAP held a workshop entitled "Improving the environmental and social capacity of EC impact assessment tools" in an entirely online environment. The event was divided in plenary sessions with three thematic breakout discussion groups, where the attendees were mainly from the European Commission's Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development (DG AGRI) and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). Additionally, the workshop has been...

Do you want to be part of a project aiming to improve the sustainability of the European agriculture? BESTMAP is looking for an enthusiastic Post-Doctoral researcher with a background in computer simulation, agent-based modelling, farmer behavioural modelling or microsimulation to join the BESTMAP team in the University of Leeds and contribute to the development of individual-farm agent-based modelling on farmer decision making, in dealing with challenges in land-use intensification,...