Plenary speakers

Firat Arslan is currently working in the Department of Biosystems Engineering, Rafet Kayış Faculty of Engineering, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, Antalya/Türkiye. He started his academic career as a research assistant at Kahramanmaraş Sütçü İmam University and completed his master’s degree in Biosystems Engineering at the same university in 2016 and his doctorate in 2020. His doctoral thesis is on geospatial and statistical analyses in land consolidation projects, and his master’s thesis is on RAP-MASSCOTE approach in the modernization of irrigation schemes. He joined Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University as an assistant professor and received the title of associate professor in 2024. He has held administrative positions such as Director of the Research and Application Center at the university, served as Head of Department in the past, and served as Chairman of the External Relations Board in the Ministry of Youth and Sports. His main research interests include irrigation management, evaluation of land consolidation projects, geographic information systems. As part of his teaching activities, he teaches courses such as Geographic Information Systems, Irrigation, Drainage and Land Consolidation, and Hydraulics.

Lingling Li is a Dean of Agronomy college in Gansu Agricultural University, focusing on technical and theoretical research on conservation agriculture and rainfed farming systems for the Loess Plateau of China, finished more than 30 research projects funded by Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), Ministry of Science and Technology of China, Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) etc., including 1 research project finished together with International Crops Research Institute for SemiArid Tropics (ICRISAT, India) team. She published more than 200 papers in the referred journals and conferences. She received 6 awards of “Advancement of Science and Technology” and “Natural Science” of Gansu province. Also, she was awarded “Outstanding Young Teachers in Universities” by “Fox Ying Tung Education Foundation” of Ministry of Education of China, received “Youth Award”, and “Leading Talent” award of Gansu Province.

Ilija Djekić is a full professor at the Faculty of Agriculture – University of Belgrade. Holding an engineering PhD in life-cycle assessment joint with over 25 years of experience in the food sector his teaching and research areas comprise of food sustainability, food safety and food quality modelling. To-date he lectured to over 1,200 students at all three levels of studies and supervised 30+ PhD and master’s theses. He participated in 15+ (inter)national scientific projects and his contracted scientific consulting was performed in 100+ food companies. His scientific portfolio is deployed to evaluating food industry performance by using existing and / or developing new diagnostic models and tools for analyzing food sustainability / food safety and food quality performance at product, process and company level and identifying improvement possibilities throughout the food supply chain. Ilija Djekić has (co-)authored more than 250 full papers out of which (180+) in journals included in the © ISI Web of Knowledge as well as ten chapters and five books. Since 2022, prof. Djekić has continuously appeared on the Stanford list of top 2% world’s most-cited scientists.

Vojtech Lukas is an associate professor at the Faculty of AgriSciences, Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic. His research is primarily focused on the precision agriculture, particularly on the spatial mapping of soil and crop heterogeneity through the integration of conventional and advanced sensor-based methods. His work aims to support decision-making processes and provide agronomic recommendations for farmers. He has extensive experience in the application of remote sensing technologies for monitoring soil and vegetation, analysis of the spectral characteristics of plants, digital soil mapping, image analysis, and the assessment of spatial variability in soil and crop parameters. His expertise also includes data processing and spatial analysis using Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Branislava Lalic has long experience in the dynamical modeling of biophysical processes and the development of biometeorological models. She BSc in Physics, but during her postgraduate and Ph.D. studies, she focused on modeling physical processes describing biosphere-atmosphere interaction and their implementation in numerical weather prediction and agrometeorological models. For her work on seson transitions, in 2022 she received the EMS Tromp award for the outstanding contribution in biometeorology. She is a chair of the Cost action CA20108 FAIR NEtwork of micrometeorological measurements (FAIRNESS). Currently she is involved in exploring new venues of Physics – Informed and Biology-Informed Neural Networks applications in biosphere-atmosphere interaction modeling.

Marie Trydeman Knudsen is full professor at Department of Agroecology, Aarhus University, Denmark and Head of Section of Agricultural Systems and Sustainability. She is agronomist and has a PhD in life cycle assessment (LCA) of food and agricultural systems. In addition, she is a member of the Danish Council on Climate Change that advises the Danish government on cost-effective climate policy solutions for all sectors. She has more than 20 years of experience with research, policy support and teaching on environmental impacts and mitigation options in food and agricultural systems using system analysis and life cycle assessment (LCA) as the main tools. She has worked on improving sustainability assessment methods such as including carbon sequestration and biodiversity in LCA and on reducing environmental impacts in various food and agricultural systems such as crop, vegetable and livestock production, agroforestry, organic production, biorefinery and other alternative protein, growth substrate and fertilizer productions plus climate and ecolabelling. She has been supervising or co-supervising more than 20 PhD students and has participated in more than 20 national and international research projects.

I did my master’s thesis at the Department of Soil Science of the Agricultural University in Bydgoszcz and defended it in 2001. On July 10, 2006, by the resolution of the Council of the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Technology and Life Sciences in Bydgoszcz, I obtained the academic degree of doctor of agricultural sciences in the discipline of agronomy. In 2020, I did an internship at the Institute of Agrophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Lublin. I obtained my habilitation in 2021. I conduct teaching activities in the field of agricultural experimentation and biometrics. Scientific and research activity mainly concerns soil moisture as a methodical aspect of agricultural research and agrotechnical conditions of field plant production. I was a contractor of 2 research projects. The result of scientific and research activity is 54 scientific papers published in national and international journals and two patents.