Climate Smart Agriculture - Beginners

Part of the

Pathway in Growing smarter for a greener tomorrow: FarmBox’s MOOC on Climate Smart Agriculture


This course will provide key information about what Climate Smart Agriculture is and will present basic understanding of useful practices and techniques that can improve land management in view of biodiversity principles and climate change adaptation needs.

At the end of the course, you will have the possibility to enroll for the Advanced level and test our Online Simulator, a virtual environment where you will have the chance to simulate the benefits on a given area of the implementation of Climate Smart Agriculture measures presented in the MOOC.


Attendance and Credentials

Attendance
FREE!
Attendance Certificate
FREE!

Category

Science

Training hours

8

Level

Beginner

Course Mode

Self Paced

Language

Multilingual

Duration

4 weeks

Type

Online

Course Status

Self Pacement

Enrollments Start

Jun 11, 2023

Course Opens

Jun 26, 2023

Course Closes

Not Set
  • Identify main issues affecting sustainability of agriculture and food security
  • Understand how sensing technologies might support crop monitoring
  • Understand the role and usefulness of traceability in food security
  • Understand the legislative context related with the Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation at international and national level
  • Learn about the different climate change mitigation and adaptation measures developed in the agricultural sector
  • Understand and evaluate the diversity of methodologies and calculators available to calculate the carbon footprint of the agriculture sector
  • Identify the main theme of the diversification of farmers' activities in a complementary production context
  • Identify indicators for different quality parameters (social, environmental, products and services) for agricultural sectors
  • Motivate the learner to use satellite technologies for monitoring crop conditions
  • Motivate the learner to use satellite technologies for monitoring irrigation water use
  • Provide knowledge about the requirements of organic farming rules, technologies used in the organic farming system, organic production farm activities in the conditions of organic farming
  • Understand the principles of integrated pest management and the possibilities and benefits of their application
  • Provide knowledge about the agrochemical properties of soil
  • Apply the latest crop and tillage technologies, apply and implement the latest methods and requirements for agricultural crop rotations, apply the latest recommendations for fertilizers and fertilization
  • Value the increase in biodiversity and ecological connectivity as a support to ameliorate agronomic practices
  • Identify sustainable agricultural practices that improve biodiversity
  • The course will be using a QGIS version of Windows PC. Mac and Linux users will have to adapt the instructions to their operating systems.
  • Basics of crop production.
  • Basics of plant breeding, animal husbandry.

Agrios, G. N. (2010). Introduction to plant pathology. Elsevier Academic Press Publication (In Persian).

Attrey, D. (2017). Food safety policies in agriculture and food security with traceability. Food Safety In The 21St Century, 449-454. doi: 10.1016/b978-0-12-801773-9.00036-4.

Barzman, M., Bàrberi, P., Birch, A. N. E., Boonekamp, P., Dachbrodt-Saaydeh, S., Graf, B., ... & Sattin, M. (2015). Eight principles of integrated pest management. Agronomy for sustainable development, 35(4), 1199-1215.

European Green Deal

European Tourism Legislation

Farm to Fork Strategy

Fujimori, S., Hasegawa, T., Krey, V. et al. A multi-model assessment of food security implications of climate change mitigation. Nat Sustain 2, 386–396 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0286-2

Introduction and terminology GIS: https://spatialanalysisonline.com/HTML/index.html

Kuenzer, C., Dech, S., & Wagner, W. (2015). Remote sensing time series.

Leese, J. (1987). Remote sensing applications in the meteorology and operational hydrology programmes of WMO. Advances In Space Research, 7(3), 49-57. doi: 10.1016/0273-1177(87)90123-2

Principles of Remote Sensing An introductory textbook:  https://webapps.itc.utwente.nl/librarywww/papers_2009/general/principlesremotesensing.pdf

Principles of Geographic Information Systems: https://webapps.itc.utwente.nl/librarywww/papers_2009/general/principlesgis.pdf

Schmidhuber, J., & Tubiello, F. (2007). Global food security under climate change. Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences, 104(50), 19703-19708. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0701976104

Smith, P., Calvin, K., Nkem, J., Campbell, D., Cherubini, F., & Grassi, G. et al. (2019). Which practices co‐deliver food security, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and combat land degradation and desertification?. Global Change Biology, 26(3), 1532-1575. doi: 10.1111/gcb.14878

Toma, I., Redman, M., Czekaj, M., Tyran, E., Grivins, M., & Sumane, S. (2021). Small-scale farming and food security – Policy perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe. Global Food Security, 29, 100504. doi: 10.1016/j.gfs.2021.100504

Waldhoff, G., Lussem, U., & Bareth, G. (2017). Multi-Data Approach for remote sensing-based regional crop rotation mapping: A case study for the Rur catchment, Germany. International Journal Of Applied Earth Observation And Geoinformation, 61, 55-69. doi: 10.1016/j.jag.2017.04.009

Wheeler, T., & von Braun, J. (2013). Climate Change Impacts on Global Food Security. Science, 341(6145), 508-513. doi: 10.1126/science.1239402

The course contents are designed and organized in seven Sections or Modules. These Sections not only can make it easier for you to have an overview and follow the progress of the course, but also allow self-organization of the learning path. Such approach is useful in order to better fit the proposed course to the users’ expectation and needs, and will allow achievement of results also in the cases of users with very limited availability of time, due to work impediments. In the Sections you will access to several Activities (Videolessons, Video interviews, Scientific articles, Learning materials, Quiz, Simulation exercises on the Simulator). Moreover, the course also hosts a set of key resources including: Glossary, External Resources, Case studies.

The students have to pass all the questionnaires to receive the attendance certificate.


Francesco Marinello

Francesco Marinello

Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry

Viktorija Bujauskė

Viktorija Bujauskė

RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND INFORMATION DEPARTMENT