This Unit was organized with the objective of moving a step forward in the research and development of the agricultural sciences bringing innovation to the conventional production chains in the fields of agriculture and forestry and respective relations to environment. Thus, the first step, which we beleive is a novel approach, was to bring together a multidisciplinary team in which apart from the conventional researchers of the agriculture and forestry sciences we include ecologists, climatologists (actually physicians) and technological engineers. The integration of this knowledge is used to analyse and define the intervention in each step of the chains in order to answer the challenges of sustainability and competitiveness. Thus, we centered our objectives on a comprehensive knowledge of the production systems particularly on facing the climate changes, on innovation of processes, on technology development and environment sustainability.
The Unit has defined the policy of the 4 I's: Interdisciplinary activities, Internationalization, Innovative solutions and increase links to Industry.
Apart from this driving forces of the Unit we set other objectives which we call co-scientific and are typical benchmarking criteria that are clear part of our priorities:
