Coherent catalogue with a selection of most promising NSWRM including results from MARG exchanges. Deliverable D2.1 of the EU Horizon 2020 project OPTAIN.

Deliverable report D2.1 of the EU Horizon 2020 Project OPTAIN (Grant agreement No. 862756)

To gather and organise the knowledge collected and created by OPTAIN on NSWRM, the Work Package 2 developed a catalogue of NSWRM. It presents each NSWRM considered in the project and contains all the associated information. The objective of D2.1 is to make qualitative and quantitative information on each specific measure available to various stakeholder groups, like all end users and NSWRM implementers. It enables to allow them to select, design and implement one or more NSWRM on their farm (or territory), or extract specific data and information they need for supporting the development and promotion of NSWRM use.

Summary

During the first reporting period of the H2020 project OPTAIN, the task 2.1 partners focused on framing the concept of Natural Small Water Retention Measures (NSWRM) and on identifying and documenting existing and underutilised NSWRM in all 14 case studies (CS) of the project. Therefore, a systematic approach was developed involving all relevant stakeholder groups in Multi Actor Reference Groups (MARG), comprising the following steps:

• identification of existing or potentially suitable measures,
• prioritisation of measures with a high potential in the local context of the different case studies,
• selection of a set of 3 to 7 measures per case study, which are relevant for the case studies and the OPTAIN project.

Once the NSWRM have been selected, all case study implementers started to collect data on their individual measures and to document them by using the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) questionnaire on Sustainable Land Management (SLM) Technologies, thus generating a standardised factsheet of each measure. All entered data on the WOCAT SLM database will then be linked to the Natural Water Retention Measure (NWRM) platform. The OPTAIN catalogue will be accessible from both websites as well as through the project’s own “Learning Environment” which will include a section dedicated to OPTAINs catalogue of NSWRM.

Overall, the prioritization in the 14 case studies resulted in 66 selected NSWRM. The case study teams started documenting these selected NSWRM with the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) Technology questionnaire, including description and classification, technical specification, implementation inputs and costs, natural and human environment, as well as ecological, socio-economic and socio-cultural impacts. To help in this process, a two-day virtual WOCAT training for all case study teams was organised and conducted by the task 2.1 team.

In parallel, the task 2.1 partners conducted an analysis of the commonalities and differences between both WOCAT and NWRM.eu databases to provide an integrated view. The result of this analysis was d that there are only a few differences and a smooth integration could be possible. All entered data on the WOCAT global SLM database (https://qcat.wocat.net) will thus be linked to the NWRM platform (http://nwrm.eu/).