Welcome, everyone, to the six GESAP Lectures in Planning series. Today we have the pleasure of welcoming Nima Khurvar, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. Nima's research focuses on international organization, particularly issues related to small cities and their regions and on institutional structures for equitable planning and development at the local level. She has explored various aspects of the role of public agencies and non-governmental organizations in planning and development, primarily in South Asia but also in the US. She also has an interest in pedagogical experiments around citizenship and sustainability planning. Khurvar is the faculty leader of the Nilgeries Field Learning Center, a disciplinary collaboration between a group of faculty at Cornell and the Keystone Foundation in India since 2011. Today's lecture will focus on the Field Learning Center's Water and Waste Project based in villages and small towns in the Nilgeries to both describe their work being done at the NFLC and the ways in which it shapes theorizing in the realms of engaged research and learning and small city urbanization. After the lecture we'll open the floor for questions and with this please join me in welcoming our speaker. Thank you, guys. I'm wondering if you want to come forward. It's sort of strange to see all the empty seats and so we can just have a conversation. I have some prepared comments but we can open up and just do, yeah, just have a conversation. Might be more fun. And you can leave midway. You don't have to sit at the back. So thanks, Guy. Three thanks for the invitation and for the rest of the committee who I met very briefly. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to do three things.  We call it the NFLC. So you know a little bit about the place and the project that has been in the making for the past eight years. Second, I want to describe this pedagogical experiment. And within that, you know, there's something that we do called the Crossing Boundaries Exercise that the students have dubbed the CBE. And I'm going to walk you through one of those to show you how it links out to both the thematic and the methodological learning that takes place at the NFLC. The CBE also demonstrates how we, and I'm quoting here from an article we wrote, invite and structure cultural collisions that present opportunities for fundamental reflections on what constitutes valid knowledge, the fluidity of cultural norms, and the range of social and ecological interactions that structure opportunities and constraints to conservation, unquote. And I must add, they're also two livelihoods. The program is bilingual. It is conducted in Tamil and English, and it is multi-vocal, by which I mean we seek to integrate knowledge pluralism, interdisciplinarity, lived experience, and diversity into each interaction at the NFLC and into the ongoing research projects. The projects themselves have emerged from conversations with community members. So finally, I want to take what we learned from the Water and Waste Project, which is one of several at the NFLC. I co-lead it, and I want to take that project to make some observations on small city urbanization and sort of theorizing small cities and think about that problem space of this larger theoretical project that I've been engaged in for close to 15 years. I mean it's a bit of a tall order, and I might rush at times, but slow me down if you need to, and I thought it's worth a try. So these are sort of the seven binaries that we work against at the Neel Giri's Fiend Learning Center. So the NFLC, it's a deeply intentional collaborative experiment that brings together the expertise and the lived experience of four groups. This is the landing page of the website, and I'm just going to take pieces of it to walk you through what the project is. And so these four groups that I'm talking about are the Adivasi Communities of the Neel Giri's Biosphere Reserve. It's the first sort of UN-declared biosphere in the world. It includes the staff of an eco-development NGO, the Keystone Foundation. You see them on top over there. And a group of faculty researchers at a U.S. university, Cornell, and two groups of students, Cornell undergraduates from across disciplines, much like their faculty, and young people from the Adivasi communities that Keystone works with. So the NFLC is based in Kota Giri. It's a small town in the Neel Giri's district, which Gayatri has visited, I know, and some others here in the audience, including my daughter who's sitting right there. And so it's a small town in the Neel Giri's district in the biosphere. And the biosphere itself is part of this very large area, the green diagram there, called the Western Ghats. And it sort of goes all along the southwestern coast of India. And this is a very important region for India, not only because of its biodiversity, its mountainous and forested, but it also regulates all of India's monsoonal climate. So it's extremely important. Now in parts, the Western Ghats are highly urbanized. And you can see that if you place the two diagrams next to each other. And it has a thriving economy, again in several parts, I mean, it changes a lot. But the economy is typically based on commercial agriculture and on mining. And in terms of agriculture, it's tea, coffee, spices, rubble, the further south you go. And it has a thriving tourist economy up and down the Ghats. So our classroom is on Keystone's campus. And these are some of the cities in the Western Ghats. And our classroom is really on the Keystone campus. And so, which is in Kota Giri, as I mentioned before. And we roam Keystone's production centers. They have four across the biosphere, the towns and the villages in the biosphere itself, and the varying ecologies of the biosphere. You can see that in the images there. The NFLC is anchored around a year-long commitment that students make, where they spend one semester in Ithaca or in Kota Giri, depending on which group they belong to, preparing to be a part of the NFLC. And then they spend 15 weeks together in Kota Giri, engaged in an integrated curriculum on sustainability that requires them, again, to spend seven weeks in the classroom and seven weeks in the field doing research in teams. And these research projects, as I mentioned before, are really, as you see them here, in the various parts of the NFLC. And here's the program. And like I mentioned before, the projects have emerged in conversations with community members. So it took us three years to actually put the projects together. And then we launched the part which included our students. So Keystone's Tribal Advisory Council, community members from the places where we work. Keystone staff, they are about 70 now. Government officials and others who we engage with all come together through these various projects. And they all attend the presentations that the students make in summer at the end of the semester. So our research focuses on, and there are these learning rhythms that take place over the semester and stuff that we have learned to structure it over the years that we've been doing this. So I'm going to go back to that. So our research focuses on four main areas. The first is ecological conservation. And it follows projects that Keystone runs in their Satyamangalam Center, which is now in the middle of a tiger reserve, a newly declared tiger reserve in India. We have a whole set of projects around environmental governance or planning, environmental planning, where we study the impacts of things like the Forest Strikes Act. We try and understand how non-timber forest produce collection works and its impact on livelihoods and why lands are left fallow and so on and so forth. There is a health and nutrition stream and it follows maternal and child nutrition. It follows traditional health systems, as well as community wellness more broadly. And finally, there is the urbanization stream, which is the piece that I'm connected to. Ironically, the Nilgiris is Tamil Nadu's most urbanized district after Madhya Chennai, which is the main center and Coimbatore, which are the two largest cities in the state. Now our focus in terms of the urbanization stream, there's a long-term project where we've been studying water and waste. And it's the backbone infrastructure that undergirds the urban. So we look at that. But like all other projects at the NFLC, we are stretched and pulled and influenced and shaped by our interactions with the other work that happens. So we've done a series of projects that look at human wildlife interaction, particularly the presence of wild bison that are leaving the forest to come into the towns, the gore. We also look a lot at health questions, health of people and environments and how that ties in with questions of waste in particular. So now you have a sense of the NFLC and I am, how many slides behind? Not that bad. And I'm going to sort of move, shift gears and talk about what I said would be the second part of the talk, which is really this idea of a crossing, this pedagogical experiment called the crossing boundaries exercise, right? Now these exercises take place most mornings during the first seven weeks of the classroom phase of the Kottagiri semester. At its core, the CBE, as the students call it, is designed as situated language learning. You're learning two languages at the same time and it's grounded in experiential knowledge of the weekly theme. So the entire semester is structured around weekly themes that tie back to our research projects. It intentionally focuses on our bodies and ourselves and the places we inhabit in the process creating what we think of as cross-cultural collisions on many fronts. The teaching teams, we always work in a team. It's a Cornell faculty member or we have faculty from Hawaii and Syracuse who are part of our group. So but it's a US-based faculty member along with an NGO staffer. And so the teaching teams have honed in on a common structure and that's what you see laid out on that slide. And we sort of, we share a certain rhythm to the structure of the CBE. We populate it with the content that sort of emerges from our themes. And then, you know, we link it back to both thematic and methodological issues in our week, the week that we teach. We have also learned that the conversations that are sparked during these exercises and the debriefs that follow with each group of students present some of the most important learning frontiers at the NFLC. I've already talked about the teaching team. I'll tell you very briefly that the US-based faculty come from the fields of medical anthropology, natural resources, ecology, musicology, and planning. Okay, so there are many examples of CBEs. There's one, you know, and like I said, we've designed, I didn't say that, but we've designed maybe over two dozen. There are multiple CBEs every week. Now, what I'm going to do, and they typically, you know, they have this structure of five questions with a certain rhythm with certain things that we always do. And remember, it's about learning language. So the English speakers are learning Tamil and Tamil speakers are learning English. What I want to do here is actually walk you through maybe this one, counting and taking measure using the body. So it's like the third exercise we do. And the idea here is to start thinking about measurement and to start thinking about what it means to take measure. You know, so for an American student, you're just going to say, oh, yeah, we use the inch and the whatever or, you know, use a metric system. But our Adivasi students, for them, this is a culturally grounded method. And so the carpenter uses the RD, which is this measure, right? The wild honey hunter groups that we work with, the corumbas and the irula measure creepers to weave ladders using the mar. And you'll see that on the on the drawing up there. We buy Jasmine in local markets by the mullum, which is this measure, right? And it goes on like that. It allows us to think about, you know, how deep do you dig to measure a grave? It allows us to talk about those questions later in the so it opens up several ideas about what we use measure for and how it's grounded in daily lived life and experience. And of course, the Americans are at a real disadvantage because all they can say is in feet mile, you end there, right? And it's really quite an interesting exercise. It allows us to do several other things. Later in the week, we talk about sort of other ways of representation and we think about how indigenous communities across the world in Australia. This is from an aborigine map or the Marshall Islands. You've seen the stick maps for ocean currents or various communities in the US, how they map and represent their worlds. We learn about sort of the abstraction of a culturally grounded method. So we go around and we learn a method, right? We learn the survey. We go around the entire classroom or the campus saying how much is each person's mullum? No two people are going to have exactly the same mullum, but then it allows us to teach the concept of survey, right? And an average and therefore abstraction and what that means. So we're able to both methodologically talk about mapping, representation, distance, and the idea of the survey. So we have another exercise where we map the campus in parts and that's the image that you see at the bottom. And you're only allowed to use your body to map the entire campus. So and you learn, you know, the importance of collaboration to produce knowledge about place. Because the Adivasi students, of course, they know each tree, they know each leaf, they know the various kinds of soils and our students all having to learn that across this language barrier. And then we also learn because everybody has to collaborate to create the entire map about sort of representational scale, right? So through this very simple CBE that opens up the question of measure as grounded culturally, we're able to get to so many other questions. The mapping and representation exercises extend out so that people can learn, you know, so we're doing other field trips and they learn to sort of create sort of other kinds of maps. We hear they're making maps about the biosphere reserve and then they learn how to actually use maps to elicit information. You sort of doing participatory action research methods, right? So I'm sure you're all familiar with transit, walk, social mapping, things like community timelines. So all of these are very fundamental methods that are used when you do participatory action research. So all of that work in this one week is feeding into these various kinds of methods that our students do when they go out into the field. So when our students do go out into the field, which would be seven weeks from when these exercises happen, all they're learning, all the learning that they're doing in the classroom and more sits behind whatever they're doing out in the field. And the observations that they're making that translate back into maps and things like QGIS because they also learn stuff all the way to doing that. The CBEs, therefore, in this example that I gave you, are a critical, pedagogical tool that together operationalize the tensions and the complementarities evident in these seven binary relations that I laid out that I just sort of showed you in the beginning. And that are fundamental and central to how we, to what we work against and through at the NFLC. Okay, I'm going to shift gears again and talk about the project on water and waste. It's one of the four streams, the urban, it's one of the sort of two sets of projects within the urban stream and one of four research streams at the NFLC. So I co-lead this, as I said before.  There isn't a single place, you know, even deep in the forest, there's trash. And the most common sort of trash are these tiny plastic single-use sachets and packets.  And so there's pan masala packages, there's shampoo sachets that, you know, promise to turn your hair into that like dreamy white girl who's on TV. It's just very strange and deeply sad thing.  This is in Kothagiri, beautiful hill town. And then if you can see, you know, just next to the tea plantations, right? We still call them plantations.  Now, this is a big community concern. So when we started to have conversations in the Neil Guineas about the kinds of projects that we wanted to focus on, garbage and trash would come up all the time. So so this project, much like all the projects in the Neil Guineas, like I said, emerges from these community conversations. And it seeks to build on the expertise and sort of practical expertise that Keystone already possesses. So Keystone has done a lot of work for about 15 years when we started working with them on water, on water resources. They've mapped them, they host something called the India Water Portal, which is a water portal that NGOs use. They host the Neil Guineas Water Portal and they've done enormous amounts of work doing resource inventories, right? So they had all this prior work and practical expertise on water.  And I have worked, I mean, my prior work is on waste as well. And so we brought these pieces together in the water and waste project. So Keystone's sort of, you know, understanding of water, the hydraulic territories within the Neil Guineas, the hydrology of the Neil Guineas, understanding water as a cultural resource, different Adivasi communities have different relationships with water. So, you know, and the linkage of water to both health and human rights. I mean, all of this was central to the project. The other thing that they had done, which I just want to show you briefly is, you know, so these are some of the kind of mapping things that they have. They've also done restoration projects because the ecology of the Neil Guineas is such that the, you know, the Neil Guineas, there's a lot of spring, seasonal springs that emerge in certain parts of the year. And these seasonal springs are tied very closely to certain sorts of native species and solar montane forests. And so they've been involved in smaller kind of experimental projects to do reforestation with native plants, to work the, you know, sort of the whole sort of toilet rebuilding infrastructure with government funding, bring that together to think about both wetland and spring restoration projects. So they have that sort of experimental knowledge as well. So keeping all this in mind, Bala, who's my co-lead at Keystone, and I mapped a five-year project, right? And what our interest really was was to take a rural urban transect. And this, of course, goes back to what I know of how small city urbanization sort of work occurs. And so the rural urban transect is a super important piece for us. And so what we really did was we drew this transect and we took Adivasi and non-Adivasi communities, you know, along one particular river, the Kulur River, which is a fairly important river in the Nibiris, in this part of the Nibiris, and we sought to actually describe and understand the water and waste problem. I mean, the real nice linkage is that all waste flows along the water streams, right? And so we sought to do that. So our projects focus started at the level of the household and the person. We collected information on what was working, what was not working. I can tell you all kinds of things about the way gender works, the way age works, in terms of how people use facilities, how they put together facilities. We looked at how bacterial contamination takes place, the role of sort of livestock, wild animals like monkeys, and so on and so forth. We tracked, we continue to track health outcomes and our students help quite a bit. You know, they help the community health workers doing advocacy work. So this was all sort of happening and continues to happen, you know, every year as we work our way through the projects. Now, along with looking at household and community level infrastructure, we also sought to understand and I'm showing you drawings that were made for community presentations, right? So you'll see everything is in English and Tamil and it's drawn by folks in the villages and by our students. And so we also study waste collection mechanisms, management systems. We understand, we try and understand the role of civic and municipal bodies and we follow the waste stream as it takes over springs and rivers, right? And it contaminates water that is used by people, by wildlife, by the forests, in the guards. There is a piece to this which sort of is about how we would work if we continued to go downstream to Coimbatore or the cities of the Congunadu, which are the cities in the plains or the larger cities like Chennai. But for now, we're really quite focused within the Nilgiris. Now, the other thing that we've also done is we've tracked recycling networks and this is quite important, right? And so this is work that I've done in other parts of the country as well. But in the Nilgiris, what's really important is that it operates in some ways much like the rest of India where there is a thriving informal economy around recycling and trash as a source of livelihood. But it's important in that it links the Nilgiris to the plains in completely different ways than one would expect or what even folks who live in the Nilgiris expect, right? Now, this is what leads me to the final part of this talk and then we'll open up and have a conversation. And what I want to do here is really theorize for a couple of minutes, small city urbanization. So why do small cities matter to us? And I'm going to skip over this slide. Why do small cities matter? There's a simple demographic fact. Most people live there. And when I say small cities, I'm talking about cities less than 100,000 in population. The majority, the bulk of the world's urban residents live in these places. In India alone, about 70% of India's urban residents live in small places. Yet, and these are places that are poorer and I've written a lot about it and there's a lot of writing coming out about it. They are poorer, they are less well resourced and lower capacities for planning or for any other kind of economic development work than their metropolitan counterparts. And yet, all our theorizing is rooted in big places. And it makes me so uneasy. So we've managed to shift away from all our theorizing being rooted in London, Frankfurt, Munich, New York, and LA. We've moved away from that. But we haven't, and then we've moved away from that and now we talk Mumbai, Shanghai and, you know, I don't know, Lagos. You can name many other very large cities. We're about 20% of urban residents in the global south live. We don't talk about the Kota Giris and the Mangalors and I can name you many, many, many other places where, like I said, everybody lives. So this is sort of my, the problem space and I'm using David Scott's term here. You know, this is the problem space that I inhabit and I've been inhabiting now for over a decade. So, and here's a map of, yeah. So look at how many smaller places there are just in southern India. Southern India is more urbanized than northern India. But look at this, this is Kaila, right? This is a typical sort of desiccota pattern. And look at the number of cities we're talking about, right? This is Mangalore, at the tip over there, and this is where the new uses. So I'm in the western cuts in terms of all my work either in the hills or in the coast. So my, you know, the largest small cities project has many facets and I'll just mention a few here. I don't want to go into them in any detail. So I explore at some length, I have explored how identity markers, such as caste, indigeneity, gender or class, remain salient, right? And they are durable. So there are durable inequalities that keep getting reproduced regardless of the kinds of interventions one makes. And these durable inequalities shape political and economic outcomes. It shapes planning, whether you're looking at planning as city maintenance or a city design or a city building. I have explored how informality in land and labor markets and waste disposal in other selected economic activities. There's a whole range of them, including floriculture, right? How it's deeper and more widespread in the smallest places that I look at. What I want to do here though in closing is to really focus on just one issue. How small cities allow us to theorize scale, right? And for those of you following urban theory, you know it's a big deal. Because when we think about scale, that's when we're able to think about intervention. So for planners, assuming many of you are, and for geographers, theorizing scale becomes quite central to how we think about action. So in Mangalore, I studied mobility. And I followed, like I said, various commodities, the jasmine flower production, sort of including being one of them. I looked at trash, much like I do in the Nilgirdies. Now in a neighborhood focused ethnography where people had come together to establish a waste collection and disposal system, I showed how a different notion of the middle class prevailed. It was not the middle class of the big cities in urban theory. These were people closer to the idea of, if you follow Kwame Anthony Apaya's work or Vinay Gidwani and Shivi's work on Rooted Cosmopolitans. You know, it is much closer to that idea of cosmopolitanism. It's bound strongly by strictures of religion, caste and gender. And it's more rooted in the rural sense. Even though these rooted cosmopolitans seek a kind of modernity that allows for garbage-free streets, parks to take children to, clean water from taps. So there's a very particular kind of modernity that is being sought out, imagined, fought for. Now these are not the cosmopolitans of urban theory that we all read so much about. Neither are they the subalterns that sort of southern urbanism, southern urbanist writers now extoll, right? Or that the southern turn would like to see. This is not a subaltern urbanism of that sort. Now putting aside the people for the moment and focusing just on the trash, what fascinates me is the ways in which the materiality of trash, like that of water, separately and written a lot about, produces scale, or it produced scale in the work that I was doing. Now unlike production and disposal, which occurs within or close to city boundaries, recycling follows a completely different logic. So in Mangalor, and I do want you to look at this diagram. So this is Mangalor city. And these are all the other cities that are around it in this region, right? So all the pet bottles from the entire region all go to this one town, Karkar, where someone who's very high caste and this is highly unusual, right, has set up a very mechanized, swank new facility to recycle these pet bottles and to create plastic pellets. These reprocessed plastic pellets that are being produced in Karkar go all the way to Delhi. That's how good quality they are. Mangalor is a rich town. The buses, the public buses that run in Mangalor, because it's a very well-established region. So between Mangalor and Budapest alone, for example, there'll be up to about 50 buses a day. And there's swank new Volvo buses, right? We're not talking about the old buses that clatter around in northern India. So these swank buses are sold seven years to the dot, to Bihar, Jharkhand, the poorer regions in India. And there is an entire economy of recycling and repurposing that works across the country. And that's the networks that Mangalor is and Dakshan Canada, this region, and Udpi, are all sort of hooked into. Similar systems operate in the new cities as well. So these are the little towns that we're talking about. There's Kothigiri, Kunur, and there's Utti over here. So your home will be somewhere here, right? Here. Okay. So in the Nilgiris, you'll see, okay, that little diagram isn't there. Oh, it's not there. I'm ending, I'm ending soon. Okay. So in the Nilgiris, and you might have seen sort of images elsewhere in the talk, a first order recycler is often a chap on a bicycle or a moped or a little motorbike. And he's got loads of things tied all over to his vehicle and he's going from village to village, hamlet to hamlet, collecting things, buying things. These first order recyclers make their way once in two months, once in three months into the forest, into the villages that are in the forest as well, right? So there's a very active economy of recycling. There are cell phone arranged truck pickups and routes all along the Nilgiris where these first order recyclers bundle and leave things at appointed places that the trucks then pick up. There are second order recyclers or bundlers in the various towns as well. And all the stuff that is bundled goes down to a place called Metropolium, which is in the foothills of the Nilgiris. And from there, depending on what kind of plastic or paper or metal we're talking about, it will go to various other towns which are, here's Metropolium, it should go to various other towns which are in the coconut belt, so Eero, Salem, and so on. Now what's really interesting is that these territories of recycling operate at different scales and these are regional scales, right? Very different from how we think about the city and how we think about how you plan for a city. They're not bounded in the same kinds of ways. In large cities like Mumbai and Delhi, people like again, Gidwani who studies waste in detail, notes that most of these networks are located within city boundaries. So it allows cities to think about waste and recycling in completely different ways. So scale and related to it, action, planning, right? Is that shaped by the analytical unit one is looking at? Are we talking water? Are we talking floriculture? Are we talking cardboard recycling and so on, trash? It is shaped and this seems kind of self-evident but something we don't think about enough. It is shaped by the size of the place where a particular process takes place. But I think what's not self-evident and I've given you some stories, some hints, not very much, we can talk about it more. But what is much less self-evident is the ways in which scale is shaped. All our actions are shaped by networks of relations amongst all the people who actually operate within that particular economic activity, right? And that there are temporalities that are particular to place in region. That again, structure and shape these relationships. So I'm going to end here and what I wanted to sort of go back to was I started to talk about, to describe a collaborative project, right? The NFLC, it works across several binaries and boundaries as I pointed out. I produced particular pedagogical instruments and I used one, the Crossing Boundaries exercises to really talk about the kinds of work we do within the classroom, sort of writ large, right? And it allowed me to also sort of present to you particular ways in which the research strategies began to emerge. What it has sort of allowed me to do, which was the last part of the talk, was it's allowed me to sort of feel my way through this profound unease I have with urban theory and urban theory informs all planning. And so I remain deeply uneasy and uncomfortable about the way we do urban theorizing. And it's allowed me to find a language through engagement. So the NFLC project, the project that I do on small city urbanization will always remain unfinished much like the cities and environments that it seeks to understand. I also know that it will always involve invention. We're constantly talking about how we create new mechanisms, modes, tools. We borrow, we invent, we reinvent, we change. And there are multiple small experiments ongoing in data collection and storytelling and in exploration. So with that thought, I'm gonna end and just open up. Hopefully we can have a conversation about your concerns and mine. So thank you.


Hello, everyone, and welcome to the AgriVoke Making Research More Visible Across Languages webinar. Thank you very much for joining us today. My name is Chelsea Scalese, and I'm a communications specialist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, also known as FAO. And I'm also part of the FAO Agora support team. I will be presenting today's webinar along with my colleague, Kristen Colches. So just some housekeeping notes before we begin. I see, you know, people are still trickling in, so I'll try and begin here a little slowly so no one misses anything important. But we are recording today's webinar and the webinar recording and presentation will be available after the webinar is finished. We will distribute the recording to all of you, all of you that are here participating today as soon as it is ready. We ask that while we're going through the presentation, if you guys could just keep yourselves muted. There will be a more interactive portion of the presentation where I believe Kristen will ask for some input and we'll do that via the chat box. We should also have some time at the end for questions and comments. You'll be welcome to unmute yourselves at that point.  If you have questions or comments throughout the presentation and you don't want to forget them, feel free to just put them in the chat box and we'll do our best to answer all of those questions at the end. If you do feel at the end, we haven't gotten to one of your questions. You can always email us at agora at foul.org and we'll again, we'll do our best to answer all of those questions. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and get started. So today I wanted to start off with a little bit more information about foul. So the Food and Agriculture Organization or FOU is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Our goal is to achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high quality food to lead active, healthy lives. And currently FOU works in over 130 countries worldwide. We accomplish our goals by making scientific research and technical knowledge related to all aspects of food and agriculture available and accessible worldwide through a series of initiatives, including agora, agravoke and agris. And these three initiatives help us to promote the accessibility of scientific information and data and food and agriculture. They also help to strengthen the engagement of international, regional and national organizations and helping to increase access to agricultural data. And they also help to improve the quality and effectiveness of agriculture research and education. And this exchange of knowledge information and importantly data not only support FOU's work for a world free of hunger and poverty but also contributes to the achievement of the sustainable development goals. Now today we're going to touch on all three of these initiatives and learn a little bit more about each. We're going to have a heavy focus on agravoke and its importance for research for life and agora users. And just for some, as a side note and additional background information, research for life recently integrated FOU's agravoke as a reference source in the agora collection. And this new development allows research for life and agora users to access agravoke directly through the agora content portal. And this is one of the many reasons we thought today's webinar would be insightful and helpful for all of you joining us today. I'm going to allow Kristin to explain more in depth to you about agravoke and its importance to research for life and agora users once she takes over in just a couple of minutes. But I just wanted to be sure to highlight the connection between research for life and agora and agravoke before we continue in today's webinar. So with that, we can continue and I'm going to highlight some information about agora. So what exactly is agora? And I'm sure many of you are already familiar and, you know, a lot of this was mentioned in the video we highlighted at the beginning. But FOU has led the access to global online research and agriculture, also known as agora collection since 2003. And agora provides access to thousands of high quality journals, ebooks and other information resources covering all of FOU's areas of interest in public institutions and eligible countries throughout the world. And the goal of the collection is to reduce the knowledge gap and improve the quality and effectiveness of agricultural research, education and training in low and middle income countries. And agora is one of the five collections that make up research for life, which I just previously mentioned. And so what exactly is research for life? Like agora, the goal of research for life is to reduce the knowledge gap between high income and low and middle income countries. And in addition to the agricultural partnership, research for life has with FOU. Research for life also provides affordable access to critical scientific research in the fields of health environments, applied sciences, law and innovation and many other subject areas. So in addition to agora, like I said, the other research for life collections include HINATI, which is Research for Health, OARE, which is Research in the Environment, ARTI, which is Research for Innovation and GOLI, which is Research for Global Justice. And I've also included a link on this slide directly to more information about all of the other research for life collections. And today, like I said, we're focusing specifically on the three FOU initiatives I already mentioned, including agora, agrivolc and agris. But feel free to also check out the link here and learn more about the other collections available through the different partnerships in Research for Life, if you feel interested. So with that, I am going to hand it over to my colleague, Kristen. So over to you, Kristen. So hello everyone. Thank you, Chelsea. That was wonderful, as always. We will go into the presentation. Let's see. Can you see the slide? Okay. Yes. Fantastic. So as Chelsea said, agora, HINARI, OARE, and GOLI and Research for Life for All are fantastic programs. They're all about improving the access and flow of information, especially research. And that, of course, is key to you as Research for Life users, which I think many of you are. So you may be a researcher, a student, a lecturer, a librarian. You may be working in information systems. So overall, you consume, you produce, and you provide research and information. So you know that using the correct keywords is really important. And of course, much of the information and research published today is published in English. However, you could be doing research or creating data sets in any language. And that is why we think that AgriVoc can complement Research for Life and Agora. And as you know, some of you will have done the Research for Life online courses. You know that information to receive is key. And when you are looking for information, it could be a data set, an article, and anything. Using the right keywords really impacts what you find. And those of you who are librarians, please feel free to add comments on this in the chat. I know that information is there, but finding the right coherent up-to-date information keywords make a difference. Also, if you are publishing, you may be publishing articles. And the journal will usually ask you to submit keywords. How do you know what the right keywords are to include? This is why AgriVoc can be a useful tool for you in this and help at using the right keywords will help make sure that your articles are findable, visible, indexable, and accessible to people. And this goes back again to the fact that using standardized terminology is really important. So AgriVoc, Chelsea mentioned this. So AgriVoc, you may have heard about it, you may have not. It is a multilingual thesaurus and it covers concepts and terminology under fouls areas of interest, which of course overlap very closely with research for life's area of interest. Fisheries, forestry, social sciences, statistics, nutrition, much, much more. It is coordinated by FAO, but we have a wonderful AgriVoc editorial network, which is a group of organizations about 34 from 24 different countries, and they manage different language versions and different domains. We have specialists working on land governance on fisheries and soil science, other topics. And I've seen that some of the AgriVoc editors are here today. So they're also welcome to provide comments in the chat if they want to add anything. We have about over 41,000 concepts. And I think today we actually hit about 995,000 terms. These are labels for each of them. I'll come back to this. And up to 42 different languages. And so it's a huge collection of information, but it is structured and it is accessible. And why it is useful? It is useful because it is used to index publications, documents, websites, datasets. And importantly, AgriVoc is used by both humans and machines, which is important for making information accessible. And the link to our website is here. I will continue. So again, why is it useful? You could be someone searching for keywords. You may want to know the synonym for soil science, for animal health, for disease. You may want to know what land governance is in my language. I could be a journal editor saying what are some keywords you could use in a standardized way to present your article. I could be a library. I could be a library. And also looking for how do I make accessible information accessible? And how do I search better? I could be a researcher. And looking to select the right keywords to describe my dataset or article or information. Or I could be looking to find information. I could be someone using an information system, a website backend of something. Or I could be a translator. We have a wide range of users and we know it's used a lot, which makes us really happy. But some of you may be new users, which is why we're very happy to have the chance to talk to you today. So I'll come back to where you can find us. The website, of course, is fow.org. And I'll show you in a little bit where you can find it on the research for life and agora pages. So just to go back a little bit, how, when we say it's used to tag and index publications, what does that mean? So I hear a couple of examples. You can see on the left we have our CGR colleagues. They have, there's a publication about karma days. You can see here at the bottom, I've chosen a selection of keywords, climate change, conservation, agriculture, carbon, carbon sequestration. These are all really important words. And I've used those to tag the keywords so they can find it. On the right, with a green image, you can see we're also looking at CIFOR. This is the forestry organization in the CGR. We are using an Agrival Key which will look through publications because there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of publications. But I want to CIF through a little bit. They can be really useful to choose a keyword to go deeper, which of course we'll also have done once we've used the research for life interface and summon. I think many of you will also have the pleasure of using Agris. Agris is another of our sister systems, the international system for agricultural science and technology. And also here, you will see on the lower left here in blue labels, these are AgriVoc labels used to index and tag in Agris resources. So there's always new ones coming in. And it's really important for us also to see the influx of keywords there. And of course, we highly recommend you explore Agris. It's another set of literature that may be very useful for you, especially as researchers. So we talked about keywords across languages. So here's an example of a relatively new FAO publication. You can see the set of keywords here in English, but we also have the same keywords in the other six FAO languages. And this is the beauty of AgriVoc, not just these six languages, but also wider. I can go and search for cost-benefit analysis, cost-benefit analysis. I can find publications in Thai. I can search in Thai and find documents in Ukrainian. I can search in Ukrainian and find documents in Belarusian or Brazilian Portuguese. So it's all about being able to find materials across languages, which is the beauty of something like AgriVoc. Any questions in the chat? Please, please stop me. So as Chelsea mentioned, we are really pleased that AgriVoc has just been added to the Research for Life resources. And if you haven't seen it, we just wanted to highlight these are a couple of different ways you can find AgriVoc through Research for Life. You could go in through the recent online information resources and you can see things that it added recently. And of course, the Research for Life team is wonderful about looking for new resources that may be useful to you in your work. So we're pleased that we are included there. So you can see it's the third one on this list. I can see somebody is asking in the chat, is the difference between a keyword and a thesaurus? We'll come back to that. A thesaurus includes keywords. So a thesaurus is a collection, a structured collection of keywords. But in that you would have concepts like fisheries, forestry, carbon sequestration. Those would be keywords. So yes, we can, I see question of animal health. That's a very good point. We can look that up when we do the search examples. Another way to find AgriVoc is if I go in through the Agora portal, I can also find it listed under reference sources. So just two different ways to find it. So if you clicked on that and you clicked on AgriVoc, I'll show you very quickly what you would see. Then you would go to our interface. And this is the typical interface we have. On the left we have the alphabetical list of the 41,000 concepts. There's a hierarchy. You can also search that way. I just want to highlight that you can also change the content language to the 42 different languages available. Or I could also change the interface language which you can choose to change to English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic and Russian. And as you can see, we have monthly releases and we just updated AgriVoc this morning. So this is the absolutely newest version online today. And if I was going to search, I'll show you that before we go into the practical one. I want to highlight first that an important thing to know is that when you're looking in AgriVoc, you could look at a concept that could have a preferred label. I could have alternate labels. So here I might be interested in the topic of water conservation. And that is in English, the preferred label. But I could also look for entry terms. These are what we call alternative labels or synonyms. So there I could also be searching for conserving water, water protection as resource or water saving. And those are all synonyms for water conservation. So I can search for conserving water and I will find water conservation. So just be aware you may find synonyms. So there are a couple of different ways to find the information. And if I am searching, you will see there's a search bar here on the top right. That's where it says search. You can put things in. But before we go into the live search, because you might want to try this yourself. If I simply search for here on the left, you can see the example of APPLI appliances. Applied research, etc. So that gives me everything that begins with the words, letters, APPLI. If I actually want to search for anything that includes it, then I have to use wildcards, which is asterisk. APPLI asterisk. I will show you how that works. I'm going to go into the live chat, live search. So we will go exactly, here we go. So this is example where we're using the wildcards. Instead of looking for registration, I'm looking for star, R-E-J-I-S star. And I get everything that includes register, registration, land register. Things that could also be very relevant for you. So with that, we will go into, you can see the live chat that Chelsea has put into the chat, the link for the live search. So if you want to try yourself while we go along, please let's do that. And I'm going to jump into this. Can everyone now see the search screen? Yes. Fantastic. So I can see, so please go ahead and try this as well. So if I use the example here, I can search for research. And I get everything starting with research. There's about 20 of them. And you can see some of them have many, many languages. Some of them have a few research facilities, research grants, various other ones. Maybe I want to expand it a little bit. Then I put the wildcard in, like this. This is a really useful function. And then I expand it similarly to 52 research related terminologies. So maybe I want to look up agricultural research systems. So here I can see it's a relatively new one for the recent years. IROVC is more than 40 years. So we have new concepts and ones that have been there for many, many years. But here I can look up agricultural research systems in different languages. I can see that somebody was asking about zoonosis. So if I type in zoonosis, I can see that we have zoonosis. But I also have an entry term called zoonotic diseases. So it's a synonym. And here we have the concept zoonosis, which tells me that we're talking about animals, diseases or infections transmissible from animals to humans. This is very important in today's health research. I can see it's those examples of various zoonosis included. I can scroll down and see it's related to one health. There's a couple of different synonyms, anthroposoonosis and zoonotic diseases. It talks a little bit of other related ones. And I can scroll down and see labels for zoonosis in many, many languages, hopefully also some viewers. Do we have any, I think somebody also asked about animal health. So this is not research in itself, but it's keywords related to these things. So you could use these keywords in an information system to help you find things. So this is Mr. Said was asking about animal health. You can see there are examples of narrow terms utter health, welfare, veterinary services, other areas that are also related to animal health. And again, and we have just labels for the concept animal health in many, many languages. And these are generally contributed by the network of Agrivoq editors. So, yeah, I can see a question there from Ola saying a lot of African languages are left out. Absolutely. We have an excellent collaboration at the moment with Thromakeret University when we are working on improving Swahili numbers at the moment. And, but if someone is interested in contributing to other languages, of course, we're absolutely interested in this. Generally, they would like someone to engage from an institutional point of view. So generally, editors don't serve in a personal capacity, serve on behalf of a university, a library, a research system, a ministry. We have a very diverse group of network of editors. But if someone is interested, please get in touch with us. Our email is agrivoqatfau.org. Especially if you have a use case where you said you might use, you might need to have amharic or kinyarwandan in an information system. Let us know. It's also possible to start with a smaller group of concepts. It doesn't have to be 40,000. It can be a smaller group if that is useful. Someone said there's a problem with the sound. Can you hear me okay? No, I can hear you perfectly well. Good. I can see a question possible from Madagascar, Fontanana. Do we have to sign in to use the platform? No, you do not. You can sign in and use agrivoq even outside Research for Life. It is very accessible. I think perhaps we can put the link in the chat again. Do we have any more examples of something you would like to look for? Yes, you're obviously right, Evanson. It is largely spoken in certain areas. So we are happy to include other languages. But again, it's usually we need to be working with an institution. Because the institution then curates the language, looks after it. Do we have any questions? Are there any examples of something you would like me to look for? In the meantime, I can use the example here of switching to French just to have one of the... We're going to focus on English today, but there are many, many other languages. I can switch to French. And then I see the terminology listed in French. You can see when I did that, also the hierarchy here on the left switch to French. I could also switch the entire interface and go to French if that's more useful for you. So then you can see we've switched there. I'm going to go back to English on the content, but I could look for the languages here. So if I needed to search for... You can see there are a range of languages here. I can search any specific language. I can search in any language like this. So if I want to look at quality. Now I'm searching in any language. I want to look at quality. And you have a whole range of different quality-related concepts. I have a question for COVID. Yes, I will come back to that in a minute. That is a very good one. So you asked about do we have COVID? Yes, we do. And this is an interesting one because COVID is one of our newer concepts, of course. I was suggested by IFFRI, a research institution in the CGR. And they said we need to index things. This was back in... We can see when it was created in 2019... 2020, we created it. And they said we need to index things about it, but we don't have the keyword. So we added it, and then of course it is then picked up by their information system they were able to include it. So here we have COVID. We have definitions of it in three languages. I can see it's type... It belongs under zoonosis. And we also have history notes because we started out initially listing it as the longer name with the coronavirus disease 2019. But as time went on, WHO said no acronym... We're going to use the acronym here because that is actually used more both by both the public and especially by technical experts. So in that case, we changed it. So we can say it's caused by the virus name. So the virus belongs there and it causes COVID-19. But this was a nice example where someone needed to index something and they were able to contact us and say, please, can you include COVID? So we COVID-19. So we can index it and we added it. And it remains a very popular keyword unfortunately in our repertoire of... Let's see. I can see a couple more questions in the chat. Let's see. Adkul is asking... Hello, Adkul. How many different languages can someone browse the list of concepts in AgriVoc by making a language selection in the content field? Let's have a look. So this is... There we go. This is the list of languages. It should be 42. I think the very, very newest one. But these are only the languages that have more than 150 turns.  So we have about 58 languages in the back end. But in the front end, we only show you those that have more than 150. So Belarusian is the newest one. We have colleagues at the Belarusian Agriculture Library are very active and they've been putting in a lot of Belarusian terms, which is fantastic. So that is the newest one that went, was added to the list. If I go back up here and I need to search for... Let's see. Food safety. Safety. You can see what I'm typing... As I'm typing in it says, do you mean this one? Do you mean this one? Which one are you thinking of? I can scroll down. Food consumption statistics. Food fraud. Very interesting. Food hygiene. Food intake. There's a lot of really interesting ones. But I can say, no, I actually want food safety. I can that. But if I wanted to search there, I could search in the 42 available there. But if I... And those are the 42 you'll find available there. So does that help very good? Otherwise, please let us know. Okay, thank you. I'm glad we could answer that. I can see Ansonhen also has a question about how does the curation process work? It's a... It's a... Always very busy. It's a great question. If any of the AgriVoc editors who are present would like to jump in and put something in the chat, please go ahead. So FAO coordinates AgriVoc. We work with the University of Virgata in Rome. Make the little thing mute that. And they manage the technical infrastructure for us. But the network itself is a network of 34 organizations that look after something. So if we have brand new concepts coming in, then they will look at them and see, oh, what is the concept of my language? Each month we actually publish on the AgriVoc website, which maybe somebody can put in the chat in the news. There's the new ones that were added this month. And the editors will also go in even before it's published and say we have bovine babiosis. We put in some animal diseases this month. There are food safety ones coming in, soil information, soil health, various ones come in. The editors look at the concept in the back end. We have an online editing platform and they add terms in the language. They could add definitions. They could add scope notes to describe it. So these are put in to help people look at this because I may want to look at food safety and say, well, in some languages, food safety and food security are very close to each other. So then it's really helpful to have definitions that explain what exactly do you mean by this. And here you can see there's a scope note that also explains this. So this is food safeties about the impact on health. But if you're talking about food safety in the terms of availability, then you should use 10967, which is food security. So the editors are very, very active and they are invaluable when it comes to making sure that we have this in as many languages as possible. We could not do it without that. When something has come in, it is reviewed by a small curation team. And if something is approved, it is then published in the next release, which is usually monthly. We also talk to the editors. They may have questions about where does something fit in the hierarchy? Is it the same as this? How is it different? We look for definitions to make sure it's as clear as possible for everyone. So it's a... And of course, people are generally working on a volunteer basis. So we appreciate their effort and it's really impressive that it's moving ahead so well. So yes, I see some questions here. Let's see in the chat. Just jump in Chelsea if I'm missing something. Let's see. I can see... Patrick is asking, is it possible to add other foreign language like Setswana and Botswana and Isizulu in South Africa? Technically, we can add any language that we can have a language code for, but we also need to have an institution that looks after each language. So we can put it in, but somebody needs to say, I will be the curator. My organization will be the curator of Setswana. Then it is possible to do that. Yes. So if anyone is from an institution that is interested in this, please get in touch with us so we can have a talk. We do almost everything together online. We have new network. We have calls. We have mailing lists. We have an annual meeting, which I actually managed to have in person this year. Otherwise, it's very much an online system. And we try to make it as accessible as possible. But yes, of course, we're always interested in including more languages, especially least-developed countries' languages. And that would be really wonderful. But often the barrier is having someone to say, I can take on curation, not just sending in a list of 100 translations, but I can look after this for the next two years, five years, 10 years, at least someone to help us make sure that there's a quality control in this. Because of course we do not speak all of these languages ourselves. We trust that the language, the Agrivoque editors, who are very often librarians, information specialists, they could be subject matter experts in fisheries, forestry, animal health, et cetera, they know that this is a correct term in their language for this concept. So it's very much a collaborative effort. I can see Evanson has suggested some keywords. Let's see. So I cannot research directly for, I can look up aquaponics, but I cannot use this, I cannot research, look up research directly through Agrivoque. I can look up aquaponics. Here we can see the concept of aquaponics with the definition related to aquaculture, hydroponics, et cetera. But I cannot use this to look up research directly in Agrivoque. But I can go to a system like Research for Life, like Agris, like CG Space, and I can look for documents and publications and data sets about aquaponics there. So that's why it could be useful also to be able to look it up in your own language. Because many of us are not English mother tongue. So we want it to be possible for you to look up things across languages. So I hope that helps, Evanson. Chelsea, am I missing anything? We have. So a question here. Rice is the staple food of Bangladesh, but nowadays rice blast is one of the major threats of successful rice production. Do you have any research program on rice blast disease? We don't have any research programs directly on rice blast disease. We could use this to go in and look up information on it. We can see this came in, but we don't actually have very many terms on rice blast disease. This is something we might highlight to our editors and say it would be great if we could add some more languages here. But again, we wouldn't use this directly in Agrivoque. I would go to an information system like Summon, for example, and look up rice blast disease. So there's plant diseases of many, many different ones. So again, somebody might notice that something is missing. They suggested to us, if it's accepted, we add it to Agrivoque, and the Agrivoque editorial network adds the terms and more definitions. So it can be used because, of course, many people could be using this, not only in English, they could be using this in Spanish, in Swahili, in Georgian, in Moldovan, in their own information systems, in Slovakian. So it's important to them that diseases are represented and available in their own languages. Let's see, I see some more questions here. Somebody asked, how do we detect articles from predators? So that's a really good question, that we know that there is a lot of predatory publishing. So for Agrivoque, again, we don't necessarily use this directly to, we don't include actual research on this. So Agrivoque would be used for keywords to find information, but as opposed to detecting what is predatory, that is something you would have to probably learn about it in the Research for Life online courses or authorade. There are ways to think about what could be predatory, but Agrivoque is not involved particularly in something as predatory or not predatory. We had simply a list of keywords, in a hierarchy, in a structure to find information. Oh, a wonderful question from Combo, thank you. Do you also publish Agrivoque tutorials apart from Zoom meetings? Well, if you go to the Agrivoque website, maybe somebody can put that in the chat. I'll put it in the chat now. Okay, there you can look, there's a list of publications. So there's not so much tutorials as such, but there are publications about Agrivoque, about editing Agrivoque, there's an online course, but it's more targeting editors. But at least there's information there like the, we have an Agrivoque brochure, it's very short, it's only four pages, that's available in 26 languages translated by the editor network. So if that's something that could be useful for your institution to say, to have a, to show a a brochure about Agrivoque in your library, it's only four pages and you could show it, display that in Kiswahili, in Georgian, Ukrainian, Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese. So we want the materials to be available to you. But of course the Agrivoque website has a lot of information about this. So the idea is it should be simple enough to use, you wouldn't need a tutorial to search so much. The main thing is then searching. Now you can switch languages and lessen language so you can find the easy access to our CIO filecard is really important. I see Marcy has her hand faced. I don't know. I think you should be able to unmute yourself. Hi Christina, I see like there may be some people that joined a little bit later. So like the difference between AgriVoc as a database and other databases that indexes journals, books, and stuff. Thank you. That came early. That is really useful. I'm turning off my screen sharing so I can see some of your faces again. So, yes. So a lot of you are asking about, AgriVoc is a thesaurus. It's a controlled vocabulary. So it's a very, very long structured list of keywords. You don't use those keywords when you go to a system like your library system. You might be using Scopus. You might be using Summon. You might be using other information systems. Even if you're searching online, you're very often using keywords. So use those keywords to find information. So it's a key to help you find materials, but it's not a direct link to something like... You wouldn't go into AgriVoc and search for something on animal health or rice disease, rice plus disease. You could take those keywords and use them in an information system like, of course, you've all used... I think you've all used Summon, which is a wonderful resource, but you know that Summon can give you hundreds of thousands of results. And you really need to filter down and be precise. Maybe it's rice blast, rice blast disease. You might want to try different alternatives. If you're not sure about the alternatives you want to use, it could be useful to look at AgriVoc and see what is a different way. Should I be using water conservation, water saving, conservation of water? There are maybe different terminology used for the same concept. And we really also try to talk to researchers to say what is the term used when you're talking about disease and occurrence, a social phenomena of some kind. Am I talking about social sciences like population distribution, population dynamics? Are there other keywords for this I'm not aware of that I should be looking for? So again, you wouldn't search for information directly from AgriVoc, but when you're searching you might want to go have a look there first to say, I need to look up something on food safety, what is the list with the terminology provided in Swahili or Spanish, and then go and search in that. I would really try different keywords and then try using a system like Agris, for example. Again, if someone has that in the chat, it's a wonderful resource, and you will see the difference that different keywords will give you different results. It's all about you being able to dig down to find not just 10,000, but the three 10 that you really need for your research and your investigations. Christian, can I add on to that? So take for example, when you are doing your research, you have got a research question. So take for example, my research question is to like talks about the effects of COVID-19 in Africa. So that is my research question. So going with that complete question in a database might be difficult. You might not find relevant results that address your information query. So you might actually, from that question, you need to identify what is called keywords. Keywords are the most important words in your question. So for that topic, for that research question, we can identify keywords like COVID-19 in Africa. Then now I am going to, because when I did my search in any database, take for example, in PubMed, I didn't find relevant results. So I want to look for alternative terms to my keywords. So take for example, for COVID-19, we saw that Christian showed us like the search for COVID-19, the keyword for COVID-19 in Agrovo. So I can go to Agrovo because it is a thesaurus. It gives me broader, similar terms are the terms that I can use for my search instead of COVID-19. So there is COVID-19, there is Africa. So if I go into a thesaurus like Agrovo, it will actually help me with keywords. So take for example, for some of you that are in the health discipline, you know about mesh, which is the medical subject headings. Those medical subject headings guide you to search in PubMed. So similar to like Agrovo, it guides you to search in agriculture related databases. So I think I just wanted to clarify some misconceptions from the questions that are being raised. Thank you. That's extremely helpful, Marcie. Thank you so much. Also, you know, for the COVID example, maybe the person, the researcher who published it, published it in early during the pandemic. At that time, coronavirus 2019 was the accepted way to describe it. So it was not, it's not the common one now, but it was correct at the time. That's something we also use. We keep, we have what we call legacy terms, even though now the short form COVID-19 is the most used one, we keep the previous one because it would still a valid synonym and it was useful in the past. And it was used in the past to document and to index things at the time. I saw there was a question about, can I search for either? Yes, you can use either. And it could also be a preference. It could be that, let's see, what did you ask? Somebody was asking about alternate terms. Yes, you can use both alternate and can I use preferred and entry terms together to describe an article? Again, it depends on you. If you are the subject matter expert and you have something that you say, no, I want to actually want it to both. It depends what the journal recommends. Of course, I'm not an indexing specialist. I know there are some librarians of the crowd. I can see your name here. So you can also feel free to jump it in the chat on this or contribute to us. But yes, I would say, if soil health and soil quality in some cases could be synonyms, maybe I want to use both because both are valid. Maybe they're slightly, so it depends. It really depends. Let's see. So someone is asking about, if I find the right material in the databases, how accessible are full term publications? That's again a question. If you're going to research for life platform, you wouldn't get research article text directly from Agrabok, but you'd use it in a system like Summon to find documents. And of course, we prefer to find columns. So sometimes your database is not easily accessible. I assume to find recent publications. I think this is the question about using research for life. So I will hand that over to Chelsea or to Mercy if you want to answer that. Yes, just about, sorry, just about accessing research for life. So we can put, I can put in the chat here just a couple useful links to access the, there's the Agora content portal, which is specific to agriculture research. And then there's the general broader research for life content portal, which gives access to all five of the collections, which are the five that I highlighted at the beginning and to access. So I'm going to put here in the chat the Agora homepage and you can actually access the Agora content portal right from the homepage. You'll see on here search the Agora content portal and then there's a link. You can also access from the research for life homepage, which I'm going to put that link in the chat here too. And there you'll find a tab called access content, and that will take you directly to the research for life unified content portal. And not sure about if you're from an already registered institution or not. That's a whole other, a whole other subject that we actually have gotten into in a couple past webinars. So again, if you have questions about eligibility and registration, I didn't really go over that today, but you can email us. So I'm going to put in here right now Agora at file.org. There's a lot of information again on the Agora website, also the research for life website about eligibility and registration. I can also share with you the recordings from a couple of previous webinars that Marcy and I have done really diving into the eligibility criteria, the registration process, and then Marcy did a great tutorial about how to search properly in the Agora content portal. So again, reach out to us and I can share all of that content with all of you. I don't know if I missed anything, Marcy, if you want to add anything to that. Yeah, like just a summary of the eligibility. So we have got two groups of countries that are eligible for research for life. So there is group A that can register and access research for life at no cost. And once you have registered for one of the collections, for example, you have got access to all the five collections. So that is group A, which is free access. And we have got group B countries that can access the programs. It subsidize the cost of 1,500 United States dollars. And like just like the countries, once you subscribe to one of the programs or collections, you get access to all the five collections. Thank you. And before like research for life accepts institutions, institutional registration, you can register as an individual. So before you can actually register, because some of the users, they are not aware that their institution is registered. So on the research for life website, they've got a list of institutions that are registered for the program. So before you could request for registration, just to check if your institution is not registered. If it is registered, you might need to consult your library, your institutional library to get the username and password. But like if you are in an institution that is authenticated through IP, once you are in the institutions network, you can actually access research for life. You don't need login details. So if you have got any inquiries, you can send an email to research for R4L at researchforlife.org. If you don't, you can't find the login details or maybe the person who was your librarian at your institution, they moved to another institution. They are no longer there. You don't have the login details. You can just write to R4L at researchforlife.org. Thank you, Chelsea. Thank you. I'm just checking through the chat just to see if we missed any questions. Oh, I see we have a hand raised. Go ahead. You can go ahead and ask your question. Yeah, I would like to know when the editors are adding terms to the thesolas, do they only rely on people out there? When the editors are adding terms to the thesolas, do they only rely on submissions from people out there or do you also do your own research to find out what are the necessary terms to be added to? You also do your own research to find the terms to add it to the thesolas or you only rely on it or you wait for people to submit to you. It's a great question. It's a combination. So if we have something like full quality, I would for the for foul languages, I would check our terminology resource called foul term, which has English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic, we would post it. But then the editors would put in their languages, but they might say I'm not sure what it is in German and they might talk to a soil expert to say what is the nuance between soil health and self quality. The, I get if any editors want to say something in the chat, please jump in. So, you know, we, they are responsible for curating Georgian, for example, for Belarusian. They, they do that, but they may be, they may have questions about something and say, I'm not sure about the nuance between food safety and food security. So for that, they might want to look up resources at their own language that could be research, it could be government websites, it could be publications. The language is complicated. And it's not usually a straight way. I would say it's not just translating. It's about localizing it. It has to make sense in your context to say, what would you use to describe some, if something it's taken some like a disease or a plant or something is, is very is clear is easier in some ways to translate. But if it's something it's could be more sensitive, you want to be careful about it. It's appropriate. You know, someone has to know what's appropriate. So it's not that they, they will usually think about it. And they will put in the terms in their own languages, but they may need to talk to experts, subject matter experts in forestry, fisheries, economic statistics to say, how do I describe this method in my language. And as they will, they know it is not always simple. So I see a question about, but that's a great question. Yeah. Okay. I was checking the term Napa cabbage. Napa cabbage is a popular food in South Korea and is becoming a global Napa cabbage. So I tried to check just now under the solar system. It's completely give me blank. There's no anything related to Napa cabbage, but it's very popular in South Korea and it's becoming global. I myself am in Malawi, Africa. But, you know, because of globalization, I'm also interested with what is ever happening in other countries, what the foods they eat and other things. So I'm very interested in the South Korean culture. So I was checking Napa cabbage. It's a, it's a, it's a food. Yeah, but it's not available in the solar system. Maybe in the future, you might consider. We can absolutely consider it. That's a wonderful suggestion. Every month we add 35 to 40 new concepts and sometimes it's indexers, sometimes it's editors, sometimes it's other people saying this is a really important word and we need to add it. Can you consider it? So I will put Napa cabbage on my list of ones to look at before the next release. And maybe we have with the Latin name, but we don't have the common name. And that is important, especially because we really focus on things that are economically important. And it could be a crop, a disease, an animal, a pest. And we want to include things that also regionally important. So it's really helpful to have emerging ones like that. So I have made a strong note of that. And we're almost at the top of the hour, but there's a question about, I can see somebody says, can international organizations like ETA register? Well, we actually have a really good collaboration with the CGR system. So if you want to talk about those afterwards, let us know. I'm not sure if ETA is in that network, but we have Illyri and Icarus and others also contributing concepts on a regular basis that we really interesting new keywords come in from the CGR. So yes, Agrabok is large, but every month people suggest new concepts. We're happy to hear suggestions. And also if you look for something and it's not there, you can write to us and we will, we can look it and including something. Yeah, Kristen, there was a hand from Richard Lampti, who is the Research for Life Country connector for Ghana. Thank you very much. Thank you. Just a quick one. I had a meal from one of our faculty members. He submitted a paper in a journal called Meet Journal. And here is the case, while he was submitting a manuscript, they asked about the fact about the APC where Research for Life can do a waiver or whatever for them. And here is the case, the person stated that his institution or his country is eligible to research for life products. And therefore he is eligible for a waiver. But here is the case, he sent it to them and then they replied that he said that we are unable to waive open access publication fee as the journal Meet signs offers both gold and subscription publishing model. And therefore the person cannot publish on the gold open access platform. Please, with this work and the person do. I just had a, there's a second one that is coming to me and I didn't know how to respond to the person. Sorry about that. Okay, thank you Richard for your question. So as Research for Life, we don't provide waivers, but on the Research for Life website, we've got a waiver guideline document or page that gives the users of Research for Life waivers about information about waivers for different publishers. So after this meeting, I'm going to send you that at the link to that page, then you can share it with them. Thank you for the question. Thank you very much. I can see this couple more questions, but we have to, I think we have to wrap up with the top of the hour, but I've taken note of the questions in the chat. Well, and also just to say one last time, if you do have additional questions, you can feel free to email us at foul at agora at file.org and then also at agravoke at file.org and we will definitely get in touch and respond to all of those those questions. And we appreciate everyone being here today. And as I mentioned, at the beginning, once the recording is available, we can share that along with the presentation. If you're interested in that. And yeah, I don't know, Kristen, if you have any last. Thank you for all the energy and the interesting questions. Yes, thank you. Yes, thank you.


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Let's discuss case series on skull-based lesions but before we jump into the skull-based pathology we should first understand the anatomy, various visors, buraminas and neurovascular structures that are associated. CT and MRI are the imaging modality of choice and they help not just in narrowing down the differential but also in pre-operative localization and its relationship with the adjacent neurovascular structure. So, we need to know that in MRI we should take even non-fat-sat sequence as extra-cranial fat are better appreciated which are located in the orbital cortex, teregopalate and posa in area medial to teregot muscle which get obiturated in infection, inflammation, tumor pathology. So the skull-based is divided into an anterior-middle and posterior cranial posa. This is an arbitrary division not a rigid. However, for ease of understanding the anterior skull-based is bounded anteriorly by the frontal bone posteriorly by the lettering host minoid. The anterior cranial posa is majority formed by the minoid bone anteriorly bounded by the tuberculum cellae anterior-cranial process posteriorly by the peterous bone and dorsum cellae and posterior-cranial posa bounded anteriorly by the clivus bone and posteriorly by the mastoid part of temporal bone and squamous occipital bone. So anterior-cranial posa we can see on sagittal and coronal sequence section of the CT where we can see the cribriform plate and the crista galle and olfactory nerve which will be better appreciated in MRI. Then we have axial section showing the optic canal in red and supereo-optalamic fissure in blue, optic canal giving passage to ophthalmic artery and optic nerve, supereo-optalamic fissure giving passage to third, fourth, V1 division and sixth cranial nerve. On axial section again on CT we can see foramine oval in blue and spanosome in red, oval giving passage to mandibular nerve, excisory meningiol artery, lecipetrosolam and emissary vein and foramine spanosome giving passage to medial meningiol artery. This is the coronal section showing the spinoid sinus and peregrine plate and then we have two openings laterally we have foramine red-tendum on red giving passage to mandibular nerve and infromidally we have median canal for the passage of median nerve and artery. In the axial section we can see median canal connected with the medial cranial posa via foramine laser. Then we have inferior-optalamic fissure which gives passage to inferior-optalamic vein and nerve and then on coronal section we have foramine oval, on axial section we have foramine rotundum and finally we have coronal section showing optic canal with optic struts separating it from supereo-optalum. Then we have posterior cranial posa where we can see the internal auditory canal giving passage to 70 cranial nerve along its labyrinth side artery. Then we have foramine magnum, lateral to it is the hypoglossal canal for the passage of 12 cranial nerve. Then we have carotid canal and medial to it is the jugular paramen for the passage of 9 cranial nerve through fars nervosa and internal jugular brain, 10th and 11 cranial nerve through fars vascularis. These are the fars of jugular foramine only separated just by fibrous tempa. Now this is the sequence of MRI. We can see olfactory nerve and olfactory nerve optic nerve. Then we have third cranial nerve oplomatria at the level of midbrain. Then we have thick cranial nerve at the level of fars which is trajamanal nerve and then we have vestibular copliar nerve and facial nerve at the level of cerebellar pontine angle passing through the internal auditory canal. So this was the case of 23-year-old woman presenting with nasal discharge with episodes of seizure and meningitis. MRA revealing a large defect in the grippy form plate with herniation of the CSF field stack that contains orbital frontal gyrus and gyrus rectus and meninges. The nasal cavity shows expansion and there is hypertrophy of the left inferior terminate. This was the case of frontal atmodal meningo enkypulocy. Usually it is congenital however it can be seen in urtus due to trauma or idrogenic force. This was the case of 45-year-old man presenting with sudden onset diplopia. MRA reveals due to hyper intense lesion with evident enhancement involving the spinoid bone and left hub of the lesser wing with extending extension into the orbital epics and displacement of the left optic nerve. Cities can reveal permeatory lysis and destruction of the spinoid and clivis bone epicenter in the spinoid atmodal fissure. So this was the case of controsarcoma. Its counterpart caudoma can be differentiated as caudoma is midline not off midline and it involves the clivis bone and controsarcoma usually has higher ADC values as compared to caudoma. Now this is the known case of rhododorferment disease. 27-year-old man presenting with proptosis swelling in the orbit with multiple fibrobenics swelling. The MRA reveals obliteration of the migratory sinus cavity with heterogeneous enhancement in the migratory bone spinoid and atmod bone. Cities can show the ground glass expansion of the medullary cavity with cortical thinning. Now other ancillary findings this patient had were the coreate plexus diploma, enlargement and T2 heterogeneous hyperenters of the Lycroman gland and multiple enlarged cervical lymph nodes in the city scan. So the teaching point was that in a known case of fibrous rhododorferment disease if you see such bony lesion it is associated with fibrous dysplasia. So this is the case of 27-year-old man presenting with facial deformity environment duration. You can see the clinical picture MRA is showing the T2 heterogeneous hyperenters lesion with obliterated margin. Involving the left half of the face, auron is the pharynx with bilateral processes. The lesion shows patchy areas of enhancement with diffusion restriction and areas of necrosis. On cities there is a lactic destruction of the spinoid bone, cryptophon plate, erygoid plate and left orbit. A provisional diagnosis of synonyms of carcinoma was made. However, the histopathology proved to be an adenoid cystic carcinoma. It is the second most common malignancy after mucoepidermal carcinoma affecting the minus livery gland. Lung metastasis is quite common which was seen in this case. 40-year-old woman presenting with insidious onset loss of vision on the left, MRA revealing T2 hyperenters lesion, lobulated, involving the intraorbital segment of the left optic nerve with heterogeneous enhancement showing diffusion restriction. This was the case of optic nerve glioma. Most of them are pylocytic astrocytoma, WHCN is grade 1. They are associated with NF type 1. However, in adults it can be aggressive. This is 16-year-old boy presenting with multiple episodes of frank nasal bead, MRA showing T2 hyperenters lesion with multiple provides giving salt and paper appearance. On post-conference sequence, there is avid enhancement, the lesion is represented in the left, teregopalatin fursa. This was the case, of course, a case of juvenile nasopharyngeal angiopibroma which is benign, but locally aggressive bascule tumor which is almost exclusively seen in meboids. Now we have three cases of shornoma. 61-year-old woman presenting with tinnitus headache, MRA revealing a solid cystic lesion, the solid component showing heterogeneous enhancement, the lesion is calling expansion of the internal auditory canal. So, this was the case of vestibular shornoma which is the most common intracranial and most common cerebellopontan cystinal mass associated with NF type 2. Shornomas passes through the porous acousticals while meningeoma doesn't. That's how we can differentiate if there is any lesion in the cerebellopontan angle. Now, this is the case of particular woman presenting with tinkling sensation in the left half of the face, MRA revealing low obliterate T2 hyperenters lesion in the left mechal scape showing heterogeneous enhancement causing mass effect in the form of obliteration of the cystinal space and displacement of the left hemipons. Trageminal was not seen separately on the left while on the right it is seen, so this was the case of Trageminal shornoma. It is the second most common site after vestibular cochlear nerve if there is a shornoma and sensory nerve are the most commonly affected as compared to pro-pure motor cranial nerve in shornoma. While olfactory nerves and optic nerves do not contain shell cells, these sensory nerves are never affected in shornoma. Now, this is 30-year-old man presenting with proposes, torses and diminishing of vision, MRA revealing a low obliterate dumbbell shaped T2 hyperenters lesion with heterogeneous enhancement and in the mechal cave extending into the orbit through orbital epics. This was the case of given division of Trageminal shornoma. So, two-third of the mechal cave given as shornoma, we have linking mechal sign in which the normal mechal cave is filled with CSF and appears bright. However, any lesion that fills this space will cause obliteration of this T2 hyperentersity and then contrast will be seen with the opposite bright side. Finally, last case, 70-year-old man presenting with type and dimities headache and left ear discharge. There was hyperintensity along the pitrus bone obliterate loss of flow by signal along the right ICI and T2 hyperintensity in the middle-year cavity. This was the case of skull-based hoistomalitis, which was a typical infection arising from the temporal bone and not from sinusitis or deep facial infection, which is a typical and usually involves the central skull-based. So, the take-home message is that both CT and MRA have the imaging mortality of choice for skull-based pathology. We need to have thorough knowledge of anatomy, apart from knowing various imaging characteristics of any particular lesion and our role of radiologist is not just limited to diagnosing it but also to describe the relation with the important structure and its extent. Thank you so much.