The unit

The Unit came into being on 1st January 2014 with the merger of the Annual Crop Systems (SCA) and Agricultural Engineering Systems (SIA) units. It has around 80 staff members, including 55 researchers, with a wide range of skills. It comprises five research teams motivated by the collective will to implement interdisciplinary approaches working for ecological intensification. The demand from society and the development requirements of today create a need to study, design and propose annual cropping systems (rice, wheat, sugarcane, cotton, etc.) that satisfy agricultural and environmental performance requirements.

  • Challenges

    Fields of sugarcane in La Réunion © Cirad
    The three research teams of AIDA research unit have been defined in such a way as to focus the skills available in the unit on all the facets of ecological intensification (EI). They interact with each other in order to jointly take up three major research challenges facing these novel cropping systems.

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  • Organization

    Cotton transportation. © T. Brévault, CIRAD
    The Unit comprises a management team and three thematic research teams. The Unit has its own board.

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  • Unit members

    Members of Aïda Research Unit. © E. Gozé, CIRAD

    The unit employs more than 80 people (permanent and fixed-term contracts, post-doctoral fellows and PhD students on CIRAD research grants), who are attached to the management team or to one of the research teams. They are based in Montpellier and a dozen other sites. The files below present the unit's permanent members and give access to their publications.

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  • Geo-partnership network

     Producers and researchers in Cambodia - CIRAD © L. Delatouche
    Through its various areas of intervention and its partnerships, in the South as well as the North, with the public as well as the private sector, the unit relies on a rich and evolving geo-partnership network.

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