PRESTIGIOUS INTERNATIONAL AWARD FOR THE “GROW OBSERVATORY” PROJECT

The European Landowners’ Organization granted its international Land and Soil Management Award to the GROW Observatory project, a Horizon 2020 project involving the Faculty of Earth Science at the University of Miskolc. The awards dinner was held in the Cercle Gaulois club in Brussels on 9 April, with Daniel Calleja Crespo (EU Director-General for Environment) in attendance, among others.

The award-winning project is a soil-moisture monitoring network that is community based and uses voluntary data collection to gather soil and land data for use by EU agencies, growers and climate scientists. Its work consists of many segment: designing and implementing a scientific monitoring system, geoinformatics, mapping and data analysis, and social science aspects such as social innovation. The project deals with conscious soil management, soil protection and improvement, techniques and technologies for environmentally conscious land and soil use, and several means of social involvement and outreach in this unique project. The Institute of Geography and Geoinformatics was in charge of tasks related to soil mechanics and geoinformatics and also was successful in involving Hungary as a sampling area. The project is a consortium made up of 18 partners from 10 nations.

The project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 690199.

Photos from the awards dinner: