Alterra is a leading research institute within the legal entity “Stichting Dienst Landbouwkundig Onderzoek”, which is part of Wageningen UR (University and Research centre). Alterra is an independent market oriented non-profit organisation for research, development, consultancy and knowledge transfer and assessment in the field of soil, agriculture, land use, biodiversity, water, climate, geo-information and remote sensing, environmental risk assessment, landscape and spatial planning, forestry and governance.

Alterra has a good track record on the basis of its involvement as coordinator or participant in numerous EU research projects as well as in service contracts for different EU DGs. Alterra is strongly involved in Food Security, agricultural and Food Safety research and has strong and deeply rooted networks in international research communities as well as in (open) data networks and data-infrastructures in Food Security and associated domains.

Alterra employs 50 specialists in the field of Information Infrastructures, software engineering, Big Data analytics and processing, GIS & Remote Sensing and agro-environmental modelling. The work of this group focuses on innovative research and applications in these areas, on national, European and global level, including data management, data integration and data-intensive processing, linked (open) data and semantic technologies but also data visualisation and dissemination.

Alterra as a whole is strongly involved in the development and deployment of data and research infrastructures in its working fields, from the development as well as from the user perspective.