Research

The present project Use.AT aims to systematically harvest learnings from the use (and not-use) of climate scenarios and climate information (=climate services) available for Austria and analyse its role in decision making processes. It assesses how graphs, style and language of climate services and products can be improved in terms of being more useful, usable and used. Overall, usable climate services are a reliable basis for decision-making towards a resilient future.

In practice, rainfall-runoff modeling has proven to be a good tool for the development of flood characteristics. An important input parameter for this modeling is the temporal distribution of heavy precipitation. There are no large-scale evaluations of this in Lower Austria yet, so that so far one had to stick to literature recommendations of a general kind (e.g. DVWK rules). Within the calculation of standardized temporal precipitation distributions for different duration stages, temporal distributions deviating from the standard recommendations could be found in some catchments. Representative precipitation stations are selected for the climatic regions of Lower Austria, where sufficiently long temporal high-resolution precipitation records are available. The aim of this project is a regionally differentiated derivation of standardized intensity curves of heavy rainfall for Lower Austria.

IntercropValueES aims to exploit benefits of intercropping to design and manage productive, diversified, resilient, profitable, environmentally friendly cropping systems acceptable to farmers and actors in the agri-food chain. It will develop both a scientific research action for better understanding and modelling intimate intercrop functioning and a detailed analysis of lock-ins and levers at the value chain level to identify credible solutions that can be adopted by farmers and value chain actors. As a multi-disciplinary and multi-actor project, it brings together scientists and local actors representing food value chain. It includes 27 participants from 15 countries (3 continents) from a wide diversity of organizations and stakeholders. IntercropValuES organizes its activities in 6 objectives, to: 1) support the design of locally relevant, legitimate and innovative agri-food chains, through 13 Co-Innovation Case Studies; 2) understand the functioning and G*G*E*M interactions allowing the selection of compatible ideotypes and the optimization of machinery and management strategies for maximizing the productivity and delivery of ecosystem services with better soil health and mitigation of GHG (meta experiment 15 sites); 3) produce novel information, improved methods and tools for intercrop management and the assessment of their performance and profitability; 4) unravel intercropping performance by modelling; 5) analyze grain and sanitary quality of cereal-legume intercrops, functional qualities for food processing and new products, 6) uncover key barriers and levers at the value chain level to boost development, and identify new market avenues and solutions to increase economic added-value of intercrops. The Comms and Dissemination Plan is designed to diffuse outcomes widely by adapted channels to different end-users, such as farmers, advisors, food processing companies and machinery industries, retailers and citizens, academia, policymakers and influence bodies.