Marhaba everyone,

it was an interesting week in Beirut, Lebanon. What a great city to wake up in.

Since we are already interested in working more closely with the American University of Beirut, it seemed like a perfect match to involve the Nature Conservation Center, previously IBSAR, a research group at the AUB. From previous experience, Dr. Najat Saliba, a chemical engineering professor, had been of great help. Her expertise in native rural farming can come in truly handy as agricultural behaviour can greatly influence the use and management of water in a community. In the past, NCC as Ibsar has published a recipe book of native meals that can be easily made using the existing plants in Lebanon's rural areas, that often remain undermined. The recipe book is an aesthetic approach to community outreach and to create more civic engagement in maintaining Lebanon's rich biodiversity.

The Nature Conservation Center states their aims "to promote conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity for the purpose of enhancing wellbeing of people and nature by providing an open innovative and collaborative platform. Their mission is achieved through research, education, community outreach and knowledge dissemination. They hope to establish a recognised reference centre for the study and sustainable use of dry land biodiversity."

This is extremely interesting for us as the Rock Village is, as the name implies, an arid area of rural land. Together with the NCC we thus discussed not only the issues of water management in general terms but also the possibility to promote native agriculture, rather than invasive and imported species of agricultural seeds, that can also lead to extra produce so that farmers can build a strong network with economic benefits to the community. This will be discussed further in the coming month together with skilled staff and academics that could potentially join us in Arnoun.

Nassib and Maria El-Solh, the wonderful people of the Al-Amal Center, will take these discussions forward from now on.

At the same time, the timing of these meetings with the NCC worked well for everyone of us as many AUB professors and courses are participating in the IBDAA competition, the International Biodiversity Day At AUB in April this year. This means, students from various disciplines, such as Computer Science, Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, Writing, Social Sciences, Landscape Architecture and many more, come together to form teams and work on projects around the theme of Water and Biodiversity in the region, preferably Lebanon. As there were still students who had not chosen a project, we were able, with Maria, to present the Rock Village project in one morning class and offer it to students to get involved in. Within a day, several students from varying courses showed interest and are now looking into setting a focus to investigate further. They will also travel to the site to gain a better understanding. This can help us advance a lot in the research phase as we are slowly but steadily building a bigger picture of the project.
As the final IBDAA presentations are not too far from our final presentations, we can easily highlight their contribution within Aalto as well, which would benefit all the students involved and bring some attention towards the doings of universities in the Middle East, a field often overlooked in Finland.

HERE you can find the short presentation we held at AUB.

Thanks for a great week and many interesting meetings. We will be back in March and are looking forward to visiting the site!

- Nina