ClimAurea will turn Europe’s complex climate future into clear, field-level guidance that farmers, advisers and regional authorities can act on. As climate zones drift northward and extreme events become more frequent, today’s crop and livestock choices will not match tomorrow’s growing conditions. ClimAurea bridges that gap by translating the latest scientific knowledge on temperature rise, rainfall shifts, drought, heatwaves and flooding into continent-wide maps showing where key crops, grasslands and livestock systems will remain viable or become risky through each decade to 2100. Three “stress-response hubs” then test how compound flooding, prolonged drought and recurring heatwaves affect real farming systems in contrasting European regions. The lessons are generalised so every rural area can see what similar shocks would mean for its own soils and enterprises. To ensure these strategies take root, ClimAurea also evaluates their socio-economic feasibility and policy fit, co-designing options with farmers and advisors so they are practical, affordable and compatible with CAP frameworks. All of this intelligence is channelled into a visual Digital Twin of European agriculture and into ClimAurea Advisor, a multilingual large-language-model assistant. A farmer simply asks, “Will winter wheat still be worth planting on my land in 2040?” or “How can I prepare my farm for a future heatwave?” The LLM queries the Twin, retrieves the scenario, explains the result in plain language and suggests effective adaptation options, from variety shifts to grazing adjustments. Open access to the maps, code and advisory engine ensures that regional administrations, CAP networks and cooperatives can embed ClimAurea insights in their own services. By combining robust science with an intuitive interface, the project empowers Europe’s farmers to anticipate risk, capture opportunities and design practical, climate-ready strategies, field by field, decade by decade.

European agriculture faces severe water scarcity, with more than 60% of EU land affected by drought and irrigation systems consistently underperforming, losing around one-third of applied water. A key challenge is that irrigation scheduling assumes static soil properties, despite strong evidence of seasonal variability. At the same time, soil amendments such as biochar have been shown to systematically influence soil hydraulic behavior, yet their potential remains weakly connected to irrigation optimization. This fellowship proposes a new paradigm of “amendment-informed precision irrigation,” which integrates amendment-induced soil changes with dynamic irrigation scheduling to improve resource use and resilience. I bring over 15 years of expertise in irrigation optimization from water-scarce regions of Iran, where I developed and implemented methods that improved water use efficiency by 25–30% across more than 500 hectares and trained over 350 farmers. This experience provides a unique foundation for transferring proven practices from arid regions into temperate European systems, addressing critical gaps in combining soil amendments with precision irrigation. The research is structured into three stages: (1) controlled-environment studies to characterize amendment impacts, (2) field validation at Harper Adams University’s Future Farm and partner sites, and (3) development of a stakeholder-informed decision framework. Using advanced modellin and analysis, the project will quantify how amendments affect soil parameters and convert this knowledge into texture-specific scheduling rules. Co-designed validation with commercial farms ensures applicability under real-world conditions. Expected outcomes include practical protocols for amendment–irrigation integration, measurable improvements in water productivity, and decision-support tools compatible with existing infrastructure. The project directly advances the objectives of the EU Water Framework Directive, CAP enviro

AGROBOOST is a pilot driven, 5-year multi-disciplinary project that aims to transform the agricultural sector into a more attractive, sustainable and efficient industry by harnessing the power of advanced agro-robotics, augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), automation and digitalisation revealing the societal and economic benefits for all the people working in agriculture, especially women, young professionals and farmers with moving disabilities. Through the development of cutting-edge, ground-breaking solutions, the project will improve the safety and appeal of agricultural work, reduce environmental impacts, enhance productivity and address labour shortages. AGROBOOST will also emphasize on the development of flexible business models, concrete system analysis tools and training curricula to ensure the widespread adoption and the rapid uptake of these technology innovations. Six distinct and diverse pilot validation campaigns will be demonstrated in 6 countries across Europe (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, England, Belgium and Switzerland), covering multiple agricultural practices and sectors including (1) tree pruning and flower thinning, (2) mushroom selective harvesting, (3) automated weeding, (4) strawberries gentle picking, (5) animal husbandry and livestock farm management and (6) crop monitoring in steep slope viticulture. Financial support to third parties for testing and validation of technology offerings as part of the project’s funding and implementation strategy will be awarded through an Open Call, enabling a dynamic response to a changing policy and technology landscape. Through the engagement of a diverse range of stakeholders e.g., farmers (young and women), farm workers, advisors, technology providers and scientists in decision-making processes and the incorporation of social sciences perspectives, AGROBOOST will create a more inclusive and forward-looking agricultural landscape, securing a promising and sustainable future for farming.

MyToolBox mobilises a multi-actor partnership (academia, farmers, technology SMEs, food industry and policy stakeholders) to develop novel interventions aimed at achieving a 20-90% reduction in crop losses due to fungal and mycotoxin contamination. MyToolBox will not only pursue a field-to-fork approach but will also consider safe use options of contaminated batches, such as the efficient production of biofuels. A major component of MyToolBox, which also distinguishes this proposal from previous efforts in the area mycotoxin reduction, is to provide the recommended measures to the end users along the food and feed chain in a web-based Toolbox. Cutting edge research will result in new interventions, which will be integrated together with existing measures in the Toolbox that will guide the end user as to the most effective measure(s) to be taken to reduce crop losses. We will focus on small grain cereals, maize, peanuts and dried figs, applicable to agricultural conditions in EU and China. Crop losses using existing practices will be compared with crop losses after novel pre-harvest interventions including investigation of genetic resistance to fungal infection, cultural control, the use of novel biopesticides (organic-farming compliant), competitive biocontrol treatment and development of forecasting models to predict mycotoxin contamination. Research into post-harvest measures including real-time monitoring during storage, innovative sorting of crops using vision-technology and novel milling technology will enable cereals with higher mycotoxin levels to be processed without breaching regulatory limits in finished products. Research into the effects of baking on mycotoxin levels will provide better understanding of process factors used in mycotoxin risk assessment. Involvement of leading institutions from China are aimed at establishing a sustainable cooperation in mycotoxin research between the EU and China.