Intensive agricultural practices in Europe and Canada have led to high levels of non-point source nutrient pollution, threatening drinking water quality and contributing to the destruction of aquatic ecosystems. Despite widespread implementation of a range of conservation measures to mitigate the impacts of fertilizer-intensive agriculture, nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P) concentrations of inland waters are in many cases remaining steady or continuing to increase. This lack of response to conservation measures is increasingly attributed to the presence of legacy nutrient stores, which cause the long-term release of N and P, hence delaying the expected water quality benefits in receiving water bodies. However, our current knowledge regarding the magnitudes and spatial distributions of legacy nutrients across the landscape, as well as the time scales over which these legacies may contribute to elevated nutrient concentrations in surface and groundwater, remains woefully inadequate. The proposed LEAP project will move beyond a simple focus on nutrient concentrations and fluxes, and instead work towards the explicit quantification of the spatio-temporal dynamics of non-point source nutrient legacies within watersheds and the ongoing and future impacts on water quality. The quantitative understanding of nutrient legacies and the associated legacy-related time lags to achieving improvements in water quality at the project's study sites will allow us to develop an integrated analysis framework and innovative modelling tools to predict agricultural N and P loadings. Due to the strong impacts of nutrient legacies on the time scales for recovery in at-risk landscapes, integration of legacy dynamics into a hydro-economic modelling framework will enable a more accurate assessment of the outcomes of alternative management approaches in terms of both short- and long-term costs and benefits, and the evaluation of temporal uncertainties associated with different intervention strategies. In addition, our mapping of legacy nutrient stores and attention to spatial variations in legacy accumulation will inform the development of targeted, and thus more cost-effective, nutrient mitigation strategies. At a larger scale, our analysis of similarities and differences in agricultural trajectories, and thus differences in legacy nutrient dynamics, across Europe and North America will facilitate the exchange of ideas and perspectives and create new synergies with ongoing EU and Canadian water research and policy development.

The need for innovative strategies for water and soil protection that substitute the time-, energy- and resource-consuming remediation processes with other more efficient and environmentally-friendly is becoming urgent. In this respect, the interest of this project is to promote such solutions for public and private practitioners and to up-rise industrial competitiveness through economically sustainable technologies/products, in the Agriculture Field and indirectly in the Water Management aria. Therefore, this project practically develops protective composite layers (as end-products) with high efficiency towards pollution of underground water and soil, but without affecting the plants growth. ProWsper is an experimental and demonstrative research project conducted in partnership with four prestigious Institutions, from three European countries (Romania, France and Portugal) that face these common problems. In order to succeed, the implementation gap from Prototyping to Marketing and thereafter to practitioners will be narrowed by social/industrial awareness campaigns using various channels.

BECOME will use UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs) as model systems to understand how to manage synergies and trade-offs between conservation objectives and human development, through pluralistic and inclusive landscape-scale approaches to conservation. BECOME will take an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach, combining diverse methodologies for evaluating effectiveness of BR management in supporting conservation and biocultural diversity. BECOME will harness existing data resources and infrastructure, including longitudinal governance and biodiversity data, to analyze BR effectiveness across temporal and spatial scales. The project will contribute to the implementation of global and national policy frameworks towards the conservation of biological diversity by generating actionable knowledge. The research design will specifically account for priority areas of the new post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity. BECOME is uniquely positioned to perform much-needed longitudinal research on BR effectiveness across different metrics. BECOME will go beyond evaluating BR effectiveness through actors' self-evaluations, to help reduce bias and develop common methods to facilitate both compliance monitoring and adaptive management learning outcomes. BECOME will use existing data infrastructure to analyze changing trends in over 100 BRs worldwide whose management approaches have been followed for over 10 years, to understand changes in effectiveness. We will then harness big-data approaches to understand changes in land-use and modeled biodiversity change. The long-term monitoring of ecological and social variables performed in BECOME will help provide rare longitudinal trends related to social-ecological change and effectiveness of BRs. We will investigate the effectiveness of the zonation system as a combined “land-sharing” and “land-sparing” approach, to understand how this system supports biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of landscape resources. In addition to longitudinal studies supported by governance and big-data infrastructure, we will use case studies to take a mixed-methods approach to evaluate management and context-dependent meanings and measures of BR success, both present and future. BECOME will explore the potential of combining intergenerational practice with participatory scenario planning, collaborating with BR stakeholders to explore desired futures in BRs which work for biodiversity and people. BECOME will work with stakeholders to capture and develop context-dependent but generalizable metrics which are adapted to BR objectives, facilitate the adaptive co-management learning feedback loop, and reflect synergies between conservation and development objectives. By evaluating both process and outcomes of BR implementation, BECOME will help to capture the complexity of social-ecological phenomena while encouraging learning through participatory transdisciplinary processes.

The DISPOSED-H project is dedicated to the scientific data of the Humanities and Social Sciences. It aims to give visibility to SSH resources and data at European and international level by providing a dedicated multilingual services platform. It responds to a need due to the great disparity of journals and locations of data in SHS that make them difficult to reuse, to share and to spread. It also helps to internationalize the scientific output of researchers, who often remain in a national configuration. The DISPOSED-H project aims to respond to these pitfalls by relying heavily on the ISIDORE tool, and in particular its Isidore on demand service developed by the Huma-Num TGIR. This SSH-specific search engine builds on the principles of the web of data and makes it easy to find resources while giving authors the ability to enrich their own metadata. The DISPOSED-H project is not intended to provide an alternative to scientific publishing in SSH. It marks the transition to Open Science by offering a multilingual environment and a strong commitment to Open Access. This objective justifies the choice of the INFRAEOSC call since it is then necessary to integrate the discovery platform resulting from the work of the DISPOSED-H consortium at EOSC. In doing so, the work and data of researchers in SHS will be visible both by their peers, but also by civil society (citizens, public institutions, companies). One of the contributions of this platform will be for example to link scientific productions with concrete achievements, reading recommendations, help with documentary research. The DISPOSED-H project will feed the future OPERAS infrastructure, which aims to engage in open scientific communication in SSH. The network is mostly built from the OPERAS consortium, but not only. The multidisciplinary dimension is evident here since it concerns all the sciences that we are accustomed to bringing together under the heading "human and social sciences". The activities of the partners offer a spectrum of possibilities large enough to meet the requirements of the call but also to develop a European environment open to the services of scientific publications in SSH. To do this, the network is structured around three types of partners: a first circle that will provide specific services related to the uses and visibility of scientific data, a second to organize the platform for integration into the EOSC, to work on its design in particular according to the different target audiences, and finally a third devoted to the issues of multilingualism, both for the platform itself and to work towards the alignment of the standards in most European languages for the ISIDORE service. The network is designed on the one hand to prepare the main issues related to the creation of the platform, such as the harmonization of standards, integration into the EOSC, possible uses for civil society and on the other hand to strengthen collaborations and exchanges between partners so that everyone has the autonomy and ease necessary to fulfill their commitments and rely on members. The DISPOSED-H project also meets the European performance criteria by the potential for innovation it brings insofar as it contributes to the structuring of the field of SHS and where it aims to promote the appropriation of the results of research by all kinds of audiences. Finally, it relies on national and European infrastructures that are already recognized in Europe and have experience in both European projects and the development of digital tools.