The Research Data Alliance Interest Group for Agricultural Data (IGAD) developed a new initiative called the ‘Coffee Break’ Webinar series, which reached nearly 1,000 professionals worldwide, including webinar participants and views of each webinar recording. The webinar series ran from 16 June to 27 October 2021 and featured nine unique webinars and 12 different presenters.

Each webinar was strategically structured to last in total 30 minutes, including ten to 15 minutes for questions and answers at the end of each presentation. This structure was designed to encourage the exchange of experiences and ideas on agricultural research, innovation and data within the IGAD community and beyond.

The innovative initiative helped to create a dialogue about a range of topics on agricultural research, data and innovation including:

• Aligning AGROVOC and Ontologies to connect semantics to improve Agrifood data annotation and interoperability
• Agricultural market dynamics based on data evidence
• Digital Agriculture and Open Data Systems for Sustainable and Competitive Agriculture of Georgia
• Supporting Open Data in agriculture with F1000Research
• Data innovation and semantics are crucial to the future of animal health
• Developing an information system to support agrobiodiversity conservation in Mexico
• Growing Digital Agriculture from the Grassroots: designing just and sustainable agricultural data applications
• Analysis of time series of Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 data – the new quality of information for Agriculture

To watch IGAD Coffee Break webinars in full visit the RDA/IGAD YouTube channel here.