Germany to fund €7.5M international rice project

15 Jun 2011 | News
The Helmholtz is to lead a major investigation into the sustainable development of rice ecosystems in Southeast Asia involving 22 research institutions

An international consortium of 22 research institutions from Germany, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, the UK, Bulgaria and Spain are to participate in a new research project called LEGATO, which will be launched on June 14, 2011, in Penang, Malaysia.

LEGATO - Land-use intensity and Ecological Engineering – Assessment Tools for risks and Opportunities in irrigated rice based production systems - aims to advance long-term sustainable development of irrigated rice fields, against risks arising from multiple aspects of global change.

The project will be coordinated by Josef Settele of the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Germany, who will be leading a team of more than 60 ecologists, social scientists, engineers, and agronomists. The project has been granted total funding under the BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) research programme in Sustainable Land Management, of €7.5 million.

The overall objective is the elaboration and testing of generally applicable principles within the frame of ecological engineering – an emerging discipline, concerned with design, monitoring and construction of ecosystems. Ecological engineering aims to maximise ecosystem services through exploiting natural regulation mechanisms instead of suppressing them.

The project plans to quantify the dependence of ecosystem functions and the services they generate in agricultural systems in three countries in Southeast Asia: Malaysia (Muda Irrigation Scheme), Vietnam (Mekong Delta in the South and the Red River Valley along a transect from Sapa to Hanoi) and The Philippines (along a transect from Northern to Central Luzon).

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