WorldFAIR Project (D10.1) Agriculture-related pollinator data standards use cases report

Although pollination is an essential ecosystem service that sustains life on Earth, data on this vital process is largely scattered or unavailable, limiting our understanding of the current state of pollinators and hindering effective actions for their conservation and sustainable management. In addition to the well-known challenges of biodiversity data management, such as taxonomic accuracy, the recording of biotic interactions like pollination presents further difficulties in proper representation and sharing. Currently, the widely-used standard for representing biodiversity data, Darwin Core, lacks properties that allow for adequately handling biotic interaction data, and there is a need for FAIR vocabularies for properly representing plant-pollinator interactions. Given the importance of mobilising plant-pollinator interaction data also for food production and security, the Research Data Alliance Improving Global Agricultural Data Community of Practice has brought together partners from representative groups to address the challenges of advancing interoperability and mobilising plant-pollinator data for reuse. This report presents an overview of projects, good practices, tools, and examples for creating, managing and sharing data related to plant-pollinator interactions, along with a work plan for conducting pilots in the next phase of the project. We present the main existing data indexing systems and aggregators for plant-pollinator interaction data, as well as citizen science and community-based sourcing initiatives. We also describe current challenges for taxonomic knowledge and present two data models and one semantic tool that will be explored in the next phase. In preparation for the next phase, which will provide best practices and FAIR-aligned guidelines for documenting and sharing plant-pollinator interactions based on pilot efforts with data, this Case Study comprehensively examined the methods and platforms used to create and share such data. By understanding the nature of data from various sources and authors, the alignment of the retrieved datasets with the FAIR principles was also taken into consideration. We discovered that a large amount of data on plant-pollinator interaction is made available as supplementary files of research articles in a diversity of formats and that there are opportunities for improving current practices for data mobilisation in this domain. The diversity of approaches and the absence of appropriate data vocabularies causes confusion, information loss, and the need for complex data interpretation and transformation. Our explorations and analyses provided valuable insights for structuring the next phase of the project, including the selection of the pilot use cases and the development of a ‘FAIR best practices’ guide for sharing plant-pollinator interaction data. This work primarily focuses on enhancing the interoperability of data on plant-pollinator interactions, envisioning its connection with the effort WorldFAIR is undertaking to develop a Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework. Visit WorldFAIR online at http://worldfair-project.eu. WorldFAIR is funded by the EC HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-41 Coordination and Support Action under Grant Agreement No. 101058393

To What Extent Does Trade Liberalisation Affect The Financial Performance of Korean Co-operatives?

This study aims at evaluating agricultural co-operative performance in Korea based on financial data vis-à-vis trade liberalisation after subsequent Free Trade Agreements. With the help of the Du Pont expansion method this paper examines the financial performance and its drivers for 1,060 agricultural primary Korean co-operatives between 2012 and 2016 within the Korean National Agricultural Cooperatives Federation. Subsequently, we estimate the effect of the producer protection ratio, agricultural export and import volumes, co-operative size and world food prices on co-operatives' net profit margins, total asset turnovers and equity multipliers. The empirical results show that trade liberalisation has an ambiguous effect on agricultural co-operatives. Increased exports have a positive effect on the co-operatives' return on equity and profitability while imports have a reducing effect. Greater import and export volumes do not result in significant effects on efficiency and solvency. This study provides valuable lessons for countries seeking to alleviate external shocks on farm income and the rural economy following trade liberalisation by emphasising strong co-operative structures, as benefits and bottlenecks of the co-operative organisational structure are displayed