LANDMARC Meeting in Utrecht

The LANDMARC team is meeting in person for the first time, via an assembly hosted by KNMI in the Netherlands. LANDMARC’s initial 2020 in person kick-off meeting was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and up until now all collaboration between our partners has taken place electronically.

Meeting in person gives the opportunity for detailed discussions around the project’s multiple tools and research methodologies. LANDMARC is a highly interdisciplinary project, combining earth observation technologies, computer modelling and on the ground social science-based stakeholder research.

Integrating these techniques and technologies is a significant challenge, one that needs a common understanding and language around both the aims of our case studies and the project as a whole. Meeting together outside of the confined space of electronic communication gives the team an opportunity to do this.

The meeting began with, quite literally, a field trip. The team visited a peat rewetting project near Utrecht, which was especially interesting to team members only involved in desk-based elements of the LANDMARC project. The farmers involved spoke of the multiple drivers behind their project, and also some of the barriers they had overcome to put theory into practice.

Complex, multinational research projects embraced the opportunity of online communication many years before the pandemic, and the vast majority of the collaboration in LANDMARC has, and will continue to, taken place through online platforms. The Utrecht meeting does, however, remind us of the importance of face-to-face relationships and the need to get our boots muddy from time to time.