SmartCow will be the first initiative to integrate and open European state-of-art cattle RIs to all European researchers, from both academia and industry. This will have a strong impact on the structure of the cattle research community, which is currently fragmented both in thematic communities (nutrition, genetics, health, behaviour and welfare, production systems) and in regional ensembles (linked to types of cattle and to production systems). As an innovative initiative to integrate existing knowledge, science and technology, SmartCow will help the European cattle sector to cope with the challenges of moving towards more sustainable production (notably reducing the environmental impact of food production and improving animal welfare).
Expected impacts of SmartCow:
- A wider, simplified, and more efficient access to the best RIs
- To develop synergies and complementary capabilities within Europe
- To induce further research collaborations and make new experiments possible
- To educate a new generation of researchers through the access to RIs
- High quality project results generated
- Unification of methods and protocols across Europe for cattle research
- Unified ontologies across Europe
- To contribute to the interoperability of data
- A better management of the continuous flow of data collected or produced by RIs and other cattle projects
- Improvement of cattle phenotyping abilities of research infrastructures
- Reducing constraints in animal experimentation
- Improvement of competitiveness of research infrastructures and industries in Europe
- Improvement of experimental methods and animal welfare
- Increased transparency of animal experiments to the public
- Improvement of livestock farming