The AGRI-DRY project has recently reached its mid-term milestone. It is an international  Doctoral Network under the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme funded by the European Commission and the UKRI for interdisciplinary research aimed at tackling the challenges of agriculture and sustainability in drylands of Africa and the Mediterranean region (Fig. 1). The network is coordinated by professors Marco Madella at Pompeu Fabra University and Nicki Whitehouse at the University of Glasgow. The international consortium encompasses six academic institutions across Europe and Africa: Aarhus University, University of Botswana, University of Glasgow, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, University of Salento, and University of the Witwatersrand.

Fig. 1: AGRI-DRY team during the second Summer School in November 2025 in Potchefstroom, South Africa, visiting the Grain Crops Division of the Agricultural Research Council (ARC).

Ten doctoral candidates (DCs) are trained in a variety of innovative and interdisciplinary approaches and conduct research that bridges past land use and environments, traditional knowledge systems and policy pathways. Jointly, the project members aim to trace the emergence and dynamics of dryland land use systems under changing environmental conditions over the Holocene, to understand the impacts of agriculture on landscapes and to inform sustainable and ecological policymaking based on lessons from ancient and traditional systems. These research questions address the contemporary challenges of climate change, food insecurity and land degradation that are particularly pronounced in dryland areas. AGRI-DRY collects and synthesises data from local to continental scales, aiming to identify successful adaptations in the past and present, including traditional crops. Industrialised methods, often rooted in colonial histories, become increasingly evident to be ecologically and socially unsustainable in many dryland regions. In this context, deep-time processes and Traditional Ecological Knowledge are underexplored but crucial sources of information to be integrated into modern policymaking. Given the threat of aridification beyond current drylands, AGRI-DRY's research will also be relevant to areas outside the project's geographical scope.

At UPF, the AGRI-DRY project is embedded in the CASEs research group, which studies cultural, biological and ecological processes from a diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective to investigate past human-environment interactions.

Throughout the duration of the project, AGRI-DRY offers specialised training sessions and workshops to the project’s PhD candidates and other members of the involved institutions. Given the multidisciplinary nature of the team, the subjects range from multiple archaeobotanical approaches, statistical analyses in R and computational modelling to interacting with policy makers.

Every six months, the project members physically meet to discuss research progress and collaboration avenues, and local partners offer hands-on workshops and informative field trips. The summer schools provide excellent venues for interdisciplinary dialogue and internal peer review of the ongoing research process. At this mid-term milestone, three universities have hosted the network meetings: University of Salento (Italy), North West University (jointly co-organised with University of Witswatersrand, South Africa) and Aarhus University (Denmark). 

The AGRI-DRY project is dedicated to science communication to multiple audiences. The DCs present their research to academic communities at conferences and engage in multiple public outreach activities. Final results will be disseminated actively to stakeholders such as community representatives in African villages and policymakers. While research is ongoing, AGRI-DRY reports regularly on multiple channels. Follow the activities on the AGRI-DRY blog, on LinkedIn and Instagram.

  Fig. 2: Photos taken during the summer schools. A: Archaeobotanical lecture held by Prof. Girolamo Fiorentino at Università del Salento. B: Lecture by Prof. Alex Schoeman at the archaeological stone-wall site in the Vedrefort Dome area in South Africa. C: DCs and PIs visiting the seed archive at the Grain Crops Division of the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in South Africa. D: DCs exploring the open-air historical museum Den Gamle By in Aarhus, Denmark.

Funding acknowledgements:

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 101120560 and UKRI, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council - grant number EP/Y03290X/1.