Work Plan

WP1 manages MELS by monitoring project progress, ensuring timely fulfilment of the planned objectives, quality of the results, management of human and financial resources, optimisation of exploitation and dissemination of results.

Greenhouse gas and ammonia emission factor data and ancillary activity data across the entire manure management chain will be collated, including direct deposition by grazing livestock, into a unified database, based on the one developed in the DATAMAN project. This will include data describing the effect of imposing mitigation measures. The database will be administered to safeguard the security and integrity of the data, avoid duplication and enable access from other work packages. Data from participants not involved in the DATAMAN project will be added to the database. This will include data from both baseline and mitigation experiments. The data interrogation conducted in here and in DATAMAN will be used to inform the Component Modelling (WP3).

Data collated in the WP2 database will be utilised to generate functional relationships between biotic and abiotic drivers of manure and grazing emissions. Existing mitigation measures will be embedded in these functional relationships. The choice of mitigation measures will be influenced by consultation with stakeholders and results will be disseminated via WP6. The functional relationships will be utilised in WP4 and WP5.

A survey will identify and characterize existing farm-scale GHG DSSs. Recommendations will be made for improvements to these DSSs, and to national inventory methods, depending on an assessment of the expected future demands and drawing on the results of developing component models in WP3. This knowledge will also be used to design a prototype farm-scale GHG DSS. Using the knowledge gained in the WP4 tasks and from national inventory methods, the potential role of existing ICT and sensor technology to support farm and national GHG accounting will be assessed.

Applying a Tier 2+ or Tier 3 approach in the national inventories is essential to target mitigation measures where they will be most effective and thereafter to document their effect. Some partner countries already use these higher Tier methods whereas others are facing this development. WP5 will use the knowledge developed in WP3 and 4 to identify further improvements in higher Tier methods. For countries still using Tier 1 or 2 methodologies, WP5 will combine knowledge from WP3 and 4 with that from the higher Tier countries, to recommend how they might move to Tier 2+.

Mitigation measures are associated with costs and savings, both for the farmer and for the wider society. WP5 will attempt to estimate those costs and savings in order to find a balance between reduction efficiency and economic impact of the mitigation measures.

MELS will develop substantial data about mitigating emissions from livestock agriculture. An active outreach program will engage with farmers, advisors, scientists, stakeholders and policy-makers. Traditional and new methods of communication will be used.