Successful kick-off meeting for DAKIS Pro held in Berlin

On October 6 and 7, the DAKIS team met for the official kick-off of the second funding phase in the lecture halls of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The event schedule included presentations on the individual work packages and coordination, workshops, team-building activities and a joint dinner to celebrate the successful extension of the project.

Sonoko Bellingrath-Kimura, project manager, opened the kick-off with a big thank you and welcome to all old and new team members in the project. “The achievements of recent years are reflected in numerous publications and a steadily increasing awareness of DAKIS in research, politics, consulting and agriculture. We can now continue to build on these successes,” says Bellingrath-Kimura.

The event focused on the exchange of knowledge between the 9 partners in the project, which was launched in January. The challenge is the interdisciplinary cooperation of the individual work packages in the project, which are to be implemented through coordination.

The highlight of the dinner was the DAKIS board game on agri-environmental measures and biotope networks, which had already been presented for the first time a few days earlier at a family event at Futurium Berlin (see Futurium press article) and visibly generated enthusiasm among our team. The newly developed game conveys the basic idea of DAKIS: to make agriculture more diversified, small-scale and networked through targeted measures in order to promote ecosystem services and biodiversity, taking economic aspects into account.

On the second day of the event, the focus was on workshops to develop important input for the further course of the project.

In the first workshop, Amir Armaghan and Marvin Melzer presented two new AI web tools that can be used to transform scientifically based ideas and concepts from the project into clickable web applications using so-called “prompts”. The functionality of the AI tools was put to the test and critically discussed in three groups.

The second workshop, moderated by Ariane Voglhuber-Slavinsky and Ewa Dönitz, examined how user interactions with DAKIS can be optimized. The workshop also served as preparation for a workshop with agricultural advisors and farmers planned for January 2026. Various interaction formats were discussed and further developed in exchange with the modelers, programmers and social scientists involved in the project.

In the third workshop, specific goals were set for software development in the coming months. Scientists and software developers met in three groups to determine the “must haves”, “should haves” and “won’t haves” by the end of March. The one-hour workshop was the preparation for a two-day strategy meeting of the software developers led by Nishita Thakur, which took place directly after the kick-off meeting.

The coordination team of the DAKIS project can look back on an eventful week in which the team came closer together and was able to exchange views on many topics of the second phase. They are now motivated to work together for a sustainable agriculture with “DAKIS pro”.