Dear  Valued Readers,

For the third quarter of 2020, our Centre kept on continuing its activities to provide scientific knowledge, products and services to beneficiaries, not only for Indonesian people, but also for the Southeast Asian community.  Still, due to the  Covid-19 pandemic, our Centre prioritized to conduct online activities instead of face-to-face activities. Other than contributed to  enhance skills and capabilities  of the external beneficiaries, the Centre also organized activities to develop its internal human resources.

Series of Webinar on SMARTS-BE Program Talks and online Training Course on Urban Agriculture were conducted during July to August 2020 and participated by students, teachers, researchers and communities. The Centre also conducted an online training course on Geodatabase Management of Monitoring and Diagnostic Application System for Plant Pests and Diseases on 10 – 13 August 2020. The training method is interesting, since the participants had to join live streaming on practice session by the resource person; demonstrated the use of drones and other GIS and Remote Sensing equipment, at the field. 

Since the occurrence of Covid-19 pandemic, learning activities were mostly conducted by online platform. Thus, the Centre developed its human resource capability in producing educational video, by organizing an in-house training course on Educational Video Production on 6 – 13 July 2020. To assure the quality of management system, our Centre also conducted internal surveillance on ISO 9001:2015.

The Centre has a long-term plan to establish an Agro-Eco-Edu-Tourism Program.  As the initial activity,  the Centre organized a Focus Group Discussion to formulate the concept of SEAMEO BIOTROP Agro-Eco-Edu-Tourism Program on 25-27 August 2020. This program will be implemented in collaboration with Institut Pertanian Bogor (Bogor Agricultural University-IPB)  and private companies.

Through an online talk series activity, the Centre was also pleased to share how Cajuput Trees are utilized in Post-Mining Land Reclamation.

There are more interesting news and information in this issue. We share only to our Valued Readers.

Stay healthy, stay safe, stay happy!