BELGIUM

Science for Sustainable Land and Life

AnaEE Belgium focuses on the ecological and agronomical challenges posed by environmental change, and conducts experiments that offer us a look into the future. AnaEE-Belgium manages seven state-of-the-art experimental facilities that enable such forward-looking research.

Contact Person

Nadia Soudzilovskaia

Membership status

Observer

Facilities

An overiview

AnaEE-Belgium features high-level facilities that can experimentally simulate environmental pressures including elevated CO₂ levels, climate warming, flooding, biodiversity loss, pollution, and others. A variety of ecosystem types can be hosted, from natural to agricultural, and from terrestrial to aquatic. The facilities offer opportunities for companies, interest groups and research institutes to examine ecological hypotheses, try out management strategies, test new products, or put a wild idea into practice. Technicians and administrative staff support users, and know-how of university researchers can help fine-tune the users’ goals, planning and measurements. Users can run sub-projects within ongoing experiments, or rent (part of) a facility to conduct independent experiments, depending on availability.

QPear

An example is the currently running project QPear. This project is led by UHasselt and is conducted at the Macro-scale Ecotron in collaboration with PCFruit and VCBT (Flemish Centrum For Preservation Of Horticultural Products). It assesses how pear orchards, pear cultivation and fruit preservation will function in the climate of 2040. The question is of key importance for Belgian horticulture where pear orchards play a significant role. In the QPear project researchers assess what measures will farmers need to apply to counteract negative impacts of climate change such as droughts and early frosts. Both ecological aspects of pear orchard functioning as well as economic aspects of climate change mitigation are examined.