INRAE (Research for Agriculture, Food and Environment)

Humankind and the planet are facing global changes that will create new challenges for research to address: limiting the effects of and adapting to climate change; increasing food security and nutrition security; transitioning to new agricultural systems; preserving natural resources; restoring biodiversity; and anticipating and managing risks. It will also be important to consider more regional issues like living conditions, farmers’ salaries, the economic competitiveness of companies, land use, and universal access to healthy and varied diets.

As the world’s top institute for **research** on **agriculture, food, and the environment***, INRAE will help address these concerns. It will use research, innovation, and support for public policies as tools to guide the emergence of sustainable agricultural and food production systems. The institute aims to carry out science dedicated to life, humans, and the Earth that uncovers solutions to our most pressing concerns.

INRAE was formed by the merger of INRA, the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, and IRSTEA, the French National Research Institute of Science and Technology for the Environment and Agriculture. Both institutes were known for the quality of their research and their great expertise. Their union has generated a critical research mass and has pooled their major infrastructures (e.g., observatories, technical platforms, data repositories), including some that are one of a kind in Europe, and fostered an stronger openness policy for research with the creation of a Directorate for Open Science and implication in major data, and other research outputs, sharing initiatives and platforms.

INRAE & RDA

INRAE has been involved in RDA since the very beginning at the first plenary in March 2013. Since then, INRAE has identified RDA as an opportunity to contribute to the identification and/or construction of data standard. We have been consistently actively advocating for RDA, joining the Organisational Assembly in 2023 and contributing to many working and interest groups, particularly the IGAD interest group, the Wheat Data Interoperability working group and the Agri-semantics working group. Beyond these, groups, INRAE has been consistently monitoring and testing the outputs of many other groups of interest, as the SHARC IG, Data Policy IG, FAIR4RS WG or Data Discovery Paradigms IG.