Unveiling Recodo, an online platform to promote biodiversity-sensitive farming through collaboration

Transitioning towards agricultural practices that protect biodiversity needs spaces where farmers can dialogue, support each other and share useful science-based knowledge. With this transformative spirit, the European project FRAMEwork launches Recodo, a multilingual digital space addressed to anyone involved in monitoring, maintaining, or restoring agricultural ecosystems. Recodo offers open access to a wide range of materials from scientific books, publications and best practice guides, to events, software, and databases. But not only does Recodo provide resources; it also showcases and promotes the Farmer Cluster model that the FRAMEwork project has already implemented in 10 European countries. This model proposes that farmers take the lead in protecting and enhancing farmland biodiversity by collaborating to identify common challenges and solve them with the support of science, local actors, and guidance of a facilitator. 

Among other actions, these clusters promote a biodiversity monitoring program on farms, integrating expert knowledge with Citizen Science campaigns. In this regard, CREAF researchers Joan Masó and Berta Giralt from the Grumets Research group have set up  the Data Hub, a catalogue that comprehensively collects geospatial and biodiversity data from different clusters and makes them accessible to all stakeholders.

It has been proven that when biodiversity enhancement techniques are applied to one piece of farmland, the benefits naturally extend to neighbouring areas. As a result, a biodiversity-rich agricultural ecosystem will benefit from having large, well-connected habitats. These were the key elements that led to the creation of the Farmer Cluster concept in 2015 in the UK. The idea is to avoid isolation by stablishing agricultural communities that support and motivate each other to improve the ecological health of their fields. 

The FRAMEwork project, has set up an Advanced Farmer Cluster network that already includes 11 pilot cases across Europe from Spain to Estonia. In Spain, the trials are being carried out on olive farms in Aguilar de la Frontera, Córdoba. ‘Each of these clusters has a facilitator responsible for coordinating group activities and seeking for relationships with local actors interested in promoting this change,’ says Giralt. The facilitator could be a scientist or even one of the farmers. ‘Each cluster has its own idiosyncrasies, meaning that the internal organisation of the cluster varies according to the cultural and socio-economic aspects of each country and region,’ clarifies Giralt.

The “advanced” part of this network comes from the fact that it expands the original cluster concept by launching in each case a specific long-term biodiversity monitoring program. To do so, they rely on experts who analyse indicators such as pollinators, birds, or plant species diversity, as well as on other kind of observers, namely, citizens. In this case, IIASA and Nordeco project partners oversee the creation of Citizen Science projects through iNaturalist, as well as promote events such as bioblitzes to collect data. 

The Recodo Data Hub is where biodiversity data collected from each cluster is stored, maintained, and made publicly available. This is done following the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability), whether the data comes from experts or has been collected through Citizen Science. In the context of Europe’s open science landscape, this information is highly valuable to the European and international scientific and agricultural community.

They also use licences and access tokens to ensure that sensitive, private or proprietary data can be shared in a secure and controlled manner. ‘Without this cataloguing and data curation, all of this information would probably not be so easily accessible, and its impact would be diminished’, according to Masó.