19th MARS annual conference is taking place in Vilnius, Lithuania. This year we are participating with CleverMaps, with whom we are currently working on various projects, related to GIS and farming.

This year new CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) arrived and technical impacts are expected on many topics of the IACS with consequences on tool use, control methods, data need, management and update. There is a need to discuss and gather from Member States views and opinions on these aspects in order to identify areas where overview studies, specific studies, and technical guidelines and technical supports would be necessary.

This new CAP gives lot of flexibility to Member States to decide on choices and details of many implementing rules. Thus, the main advice from the Commission is to set the pace to make everything administrable and controllable. In order to do so, some lessons from the past are also necessary to take into account and will be discussed.

Three main topics are proposed:

• The framework for quantifying Ecological Focused Areas (EFA)
• Update of control and management tools (CwRS included)
• The assessment frameworks (standards, methods, evaluation, indicators)