After one year of project duration, approximately 200 soil scientists from all over Germany met at KUBUS Leipzig for a first status seminar of BMBF’s funding imitative “Soil as a sustainable resource for the bioeconomy – BonaRes”. Prof. Hans-Jörg Vogel (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research), who is BonaRes’ project leader, welcomed all participant and the seminar was then opened by 2 keynote presentations by Prof. Katarina Hedlund (Lund University) and Bernd Hansjürgens (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research).
This introduction was followed by project presentations of the Bonares Centre and its 10 collaborative projects. With so called poster pitches, each project presented their current results in short presentations. In the evening, those presentations were completed with an extensive poster session containing more than 100 posters situated in a friendly get-together.

On the second day of the status seminar, BonaRes scientists met in cross-project workshops on topics such as modelling, measurement techniques, sustainability and governance, the meaning of agricultural long-term field experiments as well as biodiversity. Project crossing ideas were discussed and plans for a better networking as well as shared publications were made. In a final wrap up session, results of all workshops were presented to the BonaRes community. The successful conclusion of the seminar was the awarding of the best poster pitch – which Prof. Lijbert Brussard, member of the Advisory Board, handed to the scientists of the collaborative SIGNAL project. Their presentation convinced with its choreography – performed as a chat show which was introduced by a trumpet solo.
After the seminar, approximately 20 young scientists took part in an early career event which offered room to discuss ideas and opportunities the funding initiative BonaRes could bring up for young researchers.