On 27 November 2024, the ReCLEAN Joint Initiative organized its first Stakeholder Workshop in Bern.

The aim of the workshop was to present the goals and activities of the ReCLEAN Joint Initiative and discuss possible synergies with the current work (data and knowledge) of ReCLEAN’s stakeholders.

34 participants attended the workshop and had the opportunity to listen to the presentation about ReCLEAN by Prof. Athanasios Nenes, main Principal Investigator of the project, and Dr Jun Zhang, Scientific Coordinator of ReCLEAN. This introductory presentation was followed by two presentations from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) on “Nitrogen-containing air pollutants and ecosystems” by Pascal Blanc, section Air quality management, and on “Monitoring of nitrate in Swiss groundwater” by Jana von Freyberg, section Hydrogeological basis. Finally, Christof Ammann, Climate and Agriculture Group Leader at Agroscope, gave a presentation on “The contribution of agriculture to the nitrogen cycling in Switzerland”.

This plenary session was followed by group discussions on the challenges and opportunities for each compartment (air, water, forest, agriculture/grasslands), in particular the identification of sources and sinks of reactive nitrogen, the known and unknown processes determining reactive nitrogen dynamics and the potential solutions to deal with reactive nitrogen.

The ReCLEAN team thanks all participants for their valuable insights and ideas.