The AGINFRA+ project started on 1 January 2017 and will last for 36 months. AGINFRA+ aims to exploit core existing e-infrastructures such as EGI, OpenAIRE and D4Science, to serve European scientists from user communities around Agriculture and Food. Specifically, AGINFRA+ project aims to provide European scientists with Virtual Research Environments (VREs) facilitating them to collaborate and execute resource-intensive experiments (by liaising with D4Science), offering them access to a vast amount of research publications and datasets (by liaising with OpenAIRE) and cloud and grid resources for intensive computational applications (by liaising with EGI).

AGINFRA+ targets three main user communities, which address problems on:

• Predicting short-term and long-term agricultural yields in the face of both operational, within season decision making, and longer-term decision and policy making with respect to climate smart agriculture and climate adaptation.
• Identifying emerging food safety issues at an early stage and handling of large-scale datasets, to visualize complex data, mathematical models as well as simulation results and to deploy generated data processing workflows as web-based services.
• Food security, namely the need to efficiently analyse data produced by plant phenotyping and its correlation with crop yield, resource usage and local climates.

The AGINFRA+ project partners have already initiated a strategic discussion with the key players trying to shape the thematic cloud on agri-food as part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and have participated in various workshops and brainstorming meetings. Thus, the vision of AGINFRA+ project is to develop a common technical infrastructure that could initially serve the three aforementioned user communities and it could be evolved to an AGINFRA food cloud demonstrator that will be positioned as the EOSC agri-food thematic cloud.

This is expected to be achieved by:

• implementing the e-infrastructure roadmap for open science in agriculture and food, which is currently being developed by the eROSA project.
• running pilots in larger scale aiming to address all stages across the food value chain.

To this end, the AGINFRA+ project will collect and promote appropriate and mature use cases through the AGINFRA+ dissemination channels. The project will also organise hands-on workshops jointly with other H2020-funded projects where use case stakeholders can test the AGINFRA+ project services. Finally, AGINFRA+ will develop a pipeline of mature use cases that could demonstrate the potential of a large scale piloting in an AGINFRA food cloud demonstrator.