The Desertification Research Center (NRD-UNISS) will contribute to the achievement of the project goals by providing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary expertise and knowledge. The NRD-UNISS team will build the research activities in FLOWERED relying on the ground experience in the assessment of sustainable cropping systems and in supporting decision making through the integration of field experiments and participatory research approaches.

• To support for the geological, geochemical and hydrogeological characterization and assessment of test areas selected in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya in order to identify fluoride pollution sources and design a plan to an effective monitoring network (task 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4);
• development of future climate change scenarios for the three test areas in order to assess the role of climate change on surface and groundwater cycles and, hence, on water resource management (task leader 1.5);
• identification and test agricultural practices to mitigate fluoride contamination on productivity of selected food and forage crops through mesocosm and field study in Tanzania and Kenya (task leader 2.2);
• contribution to assess the role of different amendments to limit the plant fluoride uptake in the investigated crops (task 2.2);
• to support for gathering the existing knowledge on agricultural land uses, livestock systems and soil properties of the case study areas (task 2.1);
• to involve and mobilize relevant actors in the rural communities of the case study areas aiming to promote and assess promising agricultural mitigation strategies (task 2.4);
• to collaborate in the implementation of the Web-GeoDB system and crowd-generating data activities related to 4.1 and 4.4 task studies;
• to develop local and international market analysis opportunities and economic exploitation of the results (task leader 5.2);
• to ensure capacity building and a widespread and successful dissemination of technical and scientific knowledge being acquired within the Project at different levels, from local to international researchers and end-users (task 6.3)
• to develop in cooperation with other partners the technical dissemination strategy and tools and deployment of dissemination campaign in order to improving local and scientific knowledge (task 6.1, 6.3);
• to support the deployment of the scientific dissemination also through co-authoring scientific papers in international peer-review journals (task 6.2).