As part of The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) meeting focusing on IGAD/RDA : Sharing Experiences and Creating Digital Dialogues, Pietro Bartolini, International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA); Asma Jeitani, International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA); and Christine Magaju, World Agroforestry (ICRAF) presented a webinar during the ‘Europe/Asia’ group of presentations on May 27. 

The webinar focused on ‘Is there a relationship between data collection, data curation and data sharing? Experiences from a restoration project in East Africa and the Sahel.’ Building on the concept of open data sharing, the presentation aims at providing an overview of the strong relationship between data collection, data curation and data sharing by discussing the data management plan of the ICRAF project ”Restoration of degraded land for food security and poverty reduction in East Africa and the Sahel: taking successes in land restoration to scale”. The project produced a series of dataset surveying rural households in Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali and Niger using ODK questionnaires. All datasets were subsequently curated by ICARDA’s data curation team. We argue that a tight collaboration between the collection and curation teams is essential to produce a good collection plan which in turn facilitates data sharing and results in datasets re-usable by researchers and other interested parties.

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) meeting was set to be held in Rome (Italy) in April 2020 but instead, took place as a virtual meeting from May 25 to 28.  The virtual meeting provided an online platform to continue to build upon collaborations, knowledge sharing and developing innovations with activities including panel sessions, group discussions and presentations.