Members of the GEOLAND Project team met in the town of Rethymno, Crete 15-18th September 2021. Due to Covid restrictions the meeting was hybrid with some partners participating online and others able to visit the coordinating institution the research centre IMS Forth.
The project focused on administrative and practical actions to deliver the key outputs of GEOLAND and specifically:
1 an educational handbook for monitoring European Landscape
2 a training course via a Web-based GIS platform
3 policy outreach for higher education students related to the European Landscape Convention (ELC) and
4 an online gallery of student work, and
5 a Digital Readiness Tool, DERT, for the assessment of the digital readiness of higher education students and courses.
On the first day of the meeting the project partners focussed on the purpose and content of the GEOLAND handbook and its structure and approach. On the second day the GEOLAND platform purpose and its developments were discussed and the approach agreed and issues addressed. The role of open data from students and the activities related to survey gathering and citizen science were raised.
After the conclusion of the meeting a cultural visit took place, with a visit to the Monastery at Arkadi and a hike through a gorge identified as an area of outstanding landscape value.
