The scientific objectives of the NIDYFICS project are to understand and quantify the nickel availability and mobility in ultramafic ecosystems located in the Goiás State, impacted by the mining activity, and to assess the environmental risk associated to the reutilization of pyrometallurgical wastes (particularly slag containing metals like Ni) in the sugar cane production. The double objective, fundamental and more applied, of this pluridisciplinary project requires the involvement of soil scientists, spectroscopists, geochemists and agronomists, which already started to work in synergy on this topic. This joint research and exchange project will lead to the acquisition of basic results about Ni dynamics in ultramafic impacted areas, localized in the biome Cerrado (i.e. the Brazilian savannah), and to the proposition of valuation strategies for the pyrometallurgical wastes in Goiás. It will also provide the opportunities for young researchers to be trained together with “young” senior scientists (the major part of involved researchers are less than 40 years old) recognized in their scientific area in combining new developing techniques (isotopic geochemistry, spectroscopy).

To make this project successful, we have decided to divide our work plan into 5 interconnected scientific WPs with staff exchange and knowledge transfers between them. Among the scientific WPs, four of them can be considered as basic actions, whereas the last one is an application-oriented action. Besides these WPs, two WPs are dedicated to management and results dissemination. Moreover, the project has 23 tasks in total.