This section presents a selection of Practice Abstracts developed within the RUSTIK project to translate research into practical, usable knowledge for rural actors, policymakers, and practitioners. Here you will find 7 of the 10 planned abstracts, offering concise, action-oriented insights drawn from both scientific and non-scientific work published in international and national journals, rural development magazines, and project activities.
The Practice Abstracts highlight innovative tools, participatory methods, and data-driven approaches that support rural transformation, from web and data scraping to smart dashboards, participatory mapping, GIS applications, youth engagement, and agent-based land use modelling. Alongside future policy briefs, these materials aim to bridge research and practice, empowering rural communities and decision-makers with clear, accessible, and locally relevant knowledge throughout the RUSTIK project lifecycle.
Practice Abstracts
Web and data scraping refers to the automated extraction of information from websites, digital platforms, and online registries. These techniques allow users to gather large volumes of geolocated and structured data from sources such as OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, or public databases, often in real time and at a relatively low cost.
In local and rural contexts, where official data sources are often fragmented, outdated, or lacking in detail, web scraping offers a practical solution to fill information gaps. It enables the collection of valuable data on infrastructure, services, businesses, mobility, food supply chains, and socioeconomic dynamics, many of which are not covered by traditional statistics. Combined with official datasets and local inputs, scraped data supports the creation of customized indicators and interactive tools, such as dashboards, spatial maps, or decision-support systems.
The approach is easily replicable, scalable, and adaptable to different territorial contexts. It strengthens the capacity of local actors to access relevant data and supports more informed, place-based planning and policy design. However, to ensure responsible use, particular attention must be paid to data quality, interoperability, privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR), and licensing issues. Validation procedures and clear documentation are key to guaranteeing transparency and ethical standards.
Used consciously, web and data scraping can play a strategic role in expanding data availability and enhancing evidence-based policymaking for sustainable territorial development.
The Smart Dashboard is a custom-built, innovative digital tool designed to empower practitioners to process, analyse, and visualize data without needing a background in data science. Developed by the University of Gloucestershire, it ensures full control over its functionality, scalability, and security, providing a robust platform for data-driven decisions.
Its core functionality is delivered through a wizard-based interface that guides users step-by-step. Users can import CSV or Excel datasets or explore datasets available online. The platform is built with a focus on security, employing a unique access key for registration and implementing advanced tracking to block brute-force attempts during both registration and login. The main outcomes of the tool are its powerful analysis and visualization features.
The Smart Dashboard allows Cross-Reference Analysis, enabling users to explore complex relationships between multiple datasets at a single geographical level. It also includes an intuitive Heatmap Visualization feature that uses the latest UK geo-boundaries to display data distribution, with normalized values represented by a colour gradient for numerical data and a dynamic legend for categorical data.
The geographical coverage can be broadened to other countries, enhancing its use and widening its potential beneficiaries.
The main practical recommendation is to use the Smart Dashboard as a comprehensive yet simple tool for uncovering valuable geographical insights. Its most significant added value is the use of AI to generate text-based summaries and full reports of the analyses. This ensures that even complex findings, including figures and tables, are presented in an easy-to-understand format, directly supporting entrepreneurial activity and informed decision-making in rural areas.
The dashboard is currently in a prototype phase and is not yet publicly accessible.
By strengthening ties between local producers and consumers, Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs) contribute to more resilient and self-reliant rural economies. They reduce intermediaries, keep more value within local communities, and promote environmentally friendly practices by minimizing transport and encouraging local sourcing. When linked to tourism, they generate additional benefits by enhancing the visitor experience and creating new market opportunities for producers.
The Maptionnaire platform was used to identify and map SFSC participants supplying restaurants and guesthouses in the pilot region. It also provided insights into their level of satisfaction with the collaboration and highlighted the challenges they face. Unlike standard surveys, this tool enables the spatial visualization of SFSC actors, their classification (farmers, processors, hospitality providers), and their interconnections by product group (e.g., vegetables, meat, dairy), offering a clear picture of the supply chain’s structure and relationships.
For SFSC actors, the tool highlights potential partners, unmet demand, and opportunities for collaboration and market expansion. Understanding the geographical distribution of suppliers and buyers also supports more efficient logistics and targeted business strategies.
For municipalities, the tool provides a solid foundation for evidence-based planning, helping to identify priority areas for support (e.g., infrastructure, policy incentives, investment in cooperatives) and to design more effective rural development policies.
đź”— Link to the Survey on SFSCs
Geographical Location: đź“ŤSerbia
Engaging with younger working-aged people (aged 16–44) is a challenge for rural local authorities, as they do not regularly use council-run support services. Capturing information at the local level on factors that may encourage this age group to live in the county can also be difficult.
To address this, a survey to capture residents’ views on the county was created in Maptionnaire, a platform for the design and management of map-based community engagement. The survey was co-designed with stakeholders across the county to ensure it captured relevant data. It was shared at public engagement events with residents aged 16–44.
This approach increased engagement with a cohort that has historically been under-engaged and improved understanding of residents’ views of the county and key areas for improvement. The survey also generated georeferenced data, which allows for targeted interventions to improve residents’ quality of life. These data can be combined with secondary data to explore how people’s experiences vary by income, household type, and other demographic characteristics.
Co-designing the survey with stakeholders ensures the data collected are relevant to a range of audiences. Carefully consider the most appropriate questions to capture the necessary information and ensure the final version of the survey takes no longer than 10 minutes to complete.
It is also advisable to engage potential participants in person and then share the online survey QR code with them afterwards.
For those without internet access, workshops can be held that include pinning comments onto a physical map. Ongoing engagement with local authority stakeholders is also important to share findings and ensure the data remain accessible.
đź”— Video on Survey
Geographical Location: đź“ŤWales
When a project focuses on young people, it is essential to actively involve them in shaping it. In the case of RUSTIK, their participation was crucial for two main reasons: we could not fully understand their needs without their direct input, and meaningful local involvement fosters a sense of ownership, increasing the likelihood of lasting impact.
From the outset, we learned how important clarity is. Young people need to understand what aspects of a project they can influence and which elements are already defined. Without this clarity, expectations can quickly become unrealistic, leading to frustration. While teenagers bring energy and creativity, they also require guidance to ensure ideas remain feasible. Striking a balance between openness and clearly defined boundaries proved essential.
To reach a broad and diverse group, we collaborated closely with schools. Teachers played a key role by distributing our survey link and allocating time during classes for students to complete it, resulting in a strong response rate. However, we also recognized that relying solely on schools risks overlooking less engaged or more marginalized groups. To address this, we partnered with trusted intermediaries—such as youth workers, local organizations, and employers—and invested time in building trust through transparency and clear communication about data privacy and its intended use.
The choice of engagement methods also mattered. Workshops and focus groups were most effective when they included practical elements and treated young people as equal partners in the process. For surveys, using clear and accessible language was essential. Conducting a pre-test of the questionnaire with a small group of young people helped us identify and resolve potential issues early on.
Finally, involving young people requires early planning for consent procedures, strict adherence to data protection regulations, and deliberate strategies to avoid engaging only the “usual suspects.” Although this approach demands additional effort, the results are worthwhile: deeper engagement, richer insights, and solutions that genuinely reflect young people’s realities.
đź”— Involving Young People through Dialogue Events and Surveys
Geographical Location: đź“ŤGermany
The GIS platform “On the Way of Local Food in Troyan, Apriltsi and Ugarchin” is the first map of its kind in Europe to geolocate agri-food actors and provide insights into local food systems at the level of individual settlements and municipalities.
It was developed in response to a gap in Bulgarian public policy—namely, the lack of connectivity and structured knowledge about agri-food actors within a given territory: who they are, what they produce, where they are located, and what their production capacity is.
The platform features ten thematic maps highlighting a wide range of agri-food actors, including restaurants, accommodation providers, organic producers, beekeepers, livestock farms, local food shops, slaughterhouses, distilleries, municipal markets, food festivals, and food-oriented vocational schools. It also includes a dedicated map of all beneficiaries of the Local Development Strategy implemented by the Local Action Group Troyan, Apriltsi, Ugarchin. Each entry is described using standardized indicators, such as location, types of food produced, and animals raised.
An additional map is currently under development to showcase specific local products, making them more recognizable and accessible. Local producers can also contribute supplementary information directly through the platform.
The system relies on publicly available data from official Bulgarian registers. Its innovation lies in integrating and connecting these datasets to generate new insights into potential business partnerships and access to local food.
The platform creates opportunities to produce a new type of spatial data that can support both business development and public policy decision-making. Data are updated annually, at the beginning of each calendar year.
During the 7th National Conference “Good Food,” organized under the patronage of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food to mark World Food Day, the platform received an award for digital innovation in the field of local food and tourism.
đź”— Access the platform, available in Bulgarian and English.
Geographical Location: đź“ŤBulgaria
The Land Use Agent-Based Model is a forecasting and exploratory tool developed within the RUSTIK project to support local planners and decision-makers. Rather than providing deterministic predictions, the model enables users to explore possible patterns and dynamics of land-use change under different assumptions and constraints.
The core purpose of the model is to inspire and guide local-level planning by simulating the complex interactions among different types of land use, primarily residential, industrial, agricultural, and forest areas. It allows users to observe how residential and industrial expansion may lead to the reduction of agricultural land and forests under various spatial, economic, and regulatory scenarios.
Land-use change is simulated through a stochastic, path-dependent algorithm that reflects both the unpredictability of real-world development and the emergence of structural patterns over time. Users can explore how initial conditions—such as the number of households, industrial units, or farms—as well as boundary conditions, including planning regulations and maximum land capacity, shape future development. The model also integrates interdependencies between land uses, agglomeration effects, and spatial diseconomies, providing a nuanced representation of territorial dynamics.
Developed entirely in Microsoft Excel, the model is designed to be fully transparent and user-friendly. Users can input their own data, adjust model parameters, and even modify the algorithm to better reflect local realities. Its non-linear, stochastic structure allows for flexible experimentation while offering valuable insights for long-term land-use planning.
đź”— More Information can be found in chapter 5 of the following RUSTIK report: Report on databases development
Geographical Location: đź“ŤSpain