Soilless farming suggested as a solution to food shortage in Qatar

Soilless farming could help developing countries with little arable land and harsh for agriculture climate, such as Qatar, to become self-sufficient in terms of their produce. Relying on advanced hydroponics and multi-story vertical growing, the proposed system uses nutrient-enriched water to produce approximately a hundred times more yield compared to when the crops are grown on a conventional farmland of the same size.

The hybrid setup, devised by Nik-Othman Abdullah, biotechnologist at Malaysia University of Science and Technology, is described in his Methods paper, published in the open-access peer-reviewed journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO). In his publication he describes and explains the steps of the approach meant to tackle the food-shortage and enormous import expenditures in the country in line with the Ministry of Environment of Qatar’s recently created National Food Security Programme.

The proposed vertical-horizontal regulated soilless farming is theoretically capable of increasing the domestic produce on such a scale that the country, which has been estimated to have spent USD 11 billion on imported food in 2014 alone, could become self-sufficient.

Furthermore, this type of soilless farming could provide reliable quantity as well as quality of the crops. Grown indoors, where they would be constantly monitored by personnel with good technical and scientific knowledge, the produce would be less affected by factors such as atmospheric conditions, contamination or pests.

The plants would be supplied with the calculated amount of nutrition they need, as well as the exact amount of light and gas exposure. Being grown in a sterile environment and not treated with fertilizers, pesticides, weedicides and other harsh chemicals, the crops would not only look visibly identical, but would also be cleaner, fresher, healthier, tastier and richer in nutrient content. They would also grow faster and bigger.

“Plants would not waste energy in root tissue production because nutrients in pure form will be provided to the plants instead of the plant stressing to search for the nutrients,” explains the biotechnologist. “Therefore, plants grow evidently 50% faster and bigger.”

On the other hand, such farming would be more cost-efficient, since there would be significantly less personnel needed and no expenditure on chemical treatment. Moreover, it would take only 10% of the water used in conventional farming for a same-sized piece of agricultural land. Overall, soilless farming would cost 90% less, although the initial setup would be quite expensive. The latter is also the only disadvantage pointed out in the paper.

The author stresses that such a farming ground can be constructed basically in any location. “It can be set up almost anytime and everywhere, in a greenhouse, warehouse, inside a building, or even in outer space,” Nik-Othman Abdullah comments.

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Original source:

Abdullah N (2016) Vertical-Horizontal Regulated Soilless Farming via Advanced Hydroponics for Domestic Food Production in Doha, Qatar. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8134. doi:10.3897/rio.2.e8134

BioUnify COST Grant proposal brings EU biodiversity scientists and their data together

Mobilisation, coordination and cooperation are among the pillars of the Unifying European Biodiversity Informatics (BioUnify) project, described in a Grant proposal, submitted to the COST Association and published in the open-access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO). Both short-and long-term plans are clearly set to bring together the biodiversity informatics community and simultaneously synthesise the available data from across the relevant disciplines. The outcomes are to eventually translate into efficient global biodiversity policy.

While structuring, aggregating, linking and processing the constantly increasing biodiversity data efficiently is a globally recognised issue, many isolated research groups are working on their own. The large international team of scientists, led by Dr. Dimitrios Koureas, Natural History Museum, London, address the problem by providing a detailed plan, which builds on experience and available data to create a new platform, promoting cooperation across disciplines and expertise.

The proposed COST Action is probably the first to be fully published in the context of Open Science practices. It promises to aid biodiversity research through improving the access and reproducibility of data, mobilised from both natural history collections as well as remote sources from across Europe; bringing together the outcomes of ongoing separate biodiversity projects; transferring skills and technical awareness between researchers and information technologists, and formulating long-term goals in order to ensure that the European biodiversity informatics are aligned with the global ones.

While the common approaches used to achieve scientific dialogue rely mainly on scientific publications and conferences, the authors accept that such practice is time-consuming, while not necessarily focused on specific and urgent technical or societal issues. Therefore, in their present proposal the scientists list a summary of the activities to be undertaken by the project’s initial network of supporters. They include among others 30 Short Term Scientific Missions, 8 Training schools, 6 Joined Student Supervisions, 10 Consolidated Reports/Task-specific documents as well as a website.

“Agile and effective communication between people, at the level (across scientific domains and communities) and timeframe needed to address explicit societal challenges, demands a highly focused network of people and activities,” the researchers explain. “A network that will enable researchers to jointly shape research goals and adjust methodologies for delivering results in scope and on time.”

Having been marked by three external reviewers, the proposal eventually received an average mark of 29.33/40, which fell just a step short of being selected for funding by the COST Association. However, in their present publication, the scientists list the key points from the received feedback, and discuss them.

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Original source:

Koureas D, Hardisty A, Vos R, Agosti D, Arvanitidis C, Bogatencov P, Buttigieg P, de Jong Y, Horvath F, Gkoutos G, Groom Q, Kliment T, Kõljalg U, Manakos I, Marcer A, Marhold K, Morse D, Mergen P, Penev L, Pettersson L, Svenning J, van de Putte A, Smith V (2016) Unifying European Biodiversity Informatics (BioUnify). Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e7787. doi:10.3897/rio.2.e7787

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Image credit: NASA. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/news/vegetation.html

License: Public Domain

PhD Project Plan published to invite community feedback early on

Development and implementation of novel methods for publication, visualisation and dissemination of the constantly growing biodiversity and genomic bioinformatic data are the main objective of the first PhD Project Plan available from the open-access Research Ideas and Outcomes journal, a journal created to publish the outputs of the whole research cycle. Founded on the principles of open science, the project addresses digitally born scholarly papers and digitised data, aiming to make them more accessible and citable, and the results more reproducible.

The gradual realisation of the project, inspired by the Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System, begins with the publishing of data in semantically enriched publications, and is completed when this data is properly linked to the Web of data, also known as the Semantic Web, ensuring its re-usability and citability. PhD student Viktor Senderov and advisor Prof. Lyubomir Penev, both affiliated with Pensoft Publishers and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, believe that this is the way the entire scientific data life-cycle should opera.

A fundamental part of the project is the so-called Enhanced Publication (EP), which unlike a conventional academic paper enables the user to easily access the data contained within a publication, while providing various dynamic features. For instance, there are interlinked external resources or tools that gather information on certain objects or data elements in real time. Most importantly, an EP is an object-based artifact that is highly interactive and machine-readable.

The project’s idea is that all of the featured objects should be exportable and citable. The authors of the project plan give examples with the biodiversity-themed journals ZooKeysPhytoKeys, and the Biodiversity Data Journal, which have already adopted some of the features of an EP.

The plan also includes development of visualisations of genomic and other biodiversity-related data. This is planned to be executed within the BIG4 consortium, where Viktor Senderov is a trainee. Both data from BIG4’s expeditions and from museum collections are to be utilised for the purposes of the project.

“As part of the scientific and methodological results, we expect to develop new approaches, methods and formats for data publishing, and for publishing in biodiversity science,” explain the scientists. “We also expect to develop novel methods for exchange between publications and external data repositories, and to illustrate the aforementioned methods by means of examples using data gathered in the consortium.”

The Open Science Pyramid

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Original source:

Senderov V, Penev L (2016) The Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System in Scholarly Publishing. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e7757. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e7757

 

Additional information:

The work has been supported by the ITN Horizon 2020 project BIG4 (Biosystematics, informatics and genomics of the big 4 insect groups: training tomorrow’s researchers and entrepreneurs), under Marie Sklodovska-Curie grant agreement No. 542241.