The EU has flagged endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which interfere with normal hormonal function leading to adverse health effects, of particular concern. Within different EU regulatory programmes the assessment of EDCs has recently changed significantly and continues to evolve rapidly. Advances in test methods for assessment of EDCs are needed to meet these changing regulatory requirements, and a new generation of toxicologists must be trained to support the implementation of the most advanced approaches. NeXED will address three critical challenges in this area. First, human and environmental EDC assessment have historically been separate disciplines while there is an increasing need to use data across species in a One Health approach. Second, EDC assessment currently addresses single compounds while in an environmentally realistic scenario organisms are faced with complex mixtures of EDCs. Third, new test methods for EDC assessment are needed, covering less well-characterised mechanisms and effects. NeXED aims to facilitate a paradigm shift in EDC assessment by training a new generation of cross-disciplinary toxicologists specialised in using harmonised approaches in a One Health framework. NeXED will train its 14 doctoral candidates through research, secondments and training events using an interdisciplinary and intersectoral training programme. NeXED brings together 10 Beneficiaries and 10 Associated Partners from 10 countries, building upon long-standing collaborations through existing projects including the Horizon 2020 EURION projects and the Horizon Europe Partnership on the Assessment of Risk from Chemicals (PARC). The consortium includes leading researchers from institutions with excellent doctoral training programmes who are all experts in ED assessment, as well as industry partners, regulatory agencies, SMEs and consultancy firms. With its complementary expertise the consortium is ideally placed to train the NeXED generation of toxicologists.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Meeting energy demands in the most sustainable way is a major challenge for society. Offshore wind farms - groupings of wind turbines on submerged sediments - offers part of the solution for the energy transition that is needed to mitigate climate change, and the UK has committed to a dramatic and rapid expansion of wind farms in the seas around the UK. However, shelf sea sediments host diverse and productive communities that play a very important role in processing nutrients and carbon that underpin the entire food web. Many species are also important prey items for higher trophic levels, including sea mammals and birds. At the same time, many sediment-dwelling species, such as clams, worms, shrimp and some fish are so intimately associated with the sediment environment that they are particularly susceptible to disturbance. This raises concern as the expansion of offshore wind currently underway means that marine ecosystems are highly likely to experience a large proportional change in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning if marine policy and the management of increasing pressures on UK marine ecosystems is not correctly guided. In this project, we have assembled marine ecologists, engineers and computational scientists to work together to understand ecosystem responses to the cumulative pressures of a large increase in deployment of offshore wind, considered in combination with other pressures that marine ecosystems are facing caused by human activity (bottom fishing, shipping) and the effects of climate change (acidification, warming, low oxygen). To do this, we will collate available data on many aspects of the marine environment and fill in gaps in these data by collecting targeted information about how species interact and behave around offshore wind structures using autonomous vehicles and use artificial intelligence algorithms to identify any associations and patterns. This analysis will also tell us which species are vulnerable to change and highlight areas of concern. Next, we will carry out a series of experiments that will test whether representative species are susceptible to certain types of noise and vibration, electromagnetism and localised heating which are common sources of disturbance associated with wind farms. We will also bring back intact assemblages from areas experiencing different levels of fishing intensity and expose them to the same pressures to see whether species that are experiencing one set of pressures will respond in the same way as those that are not experiencing other pressures. This will tell us how species respond under current conditions, but the pace of climate change means that an additional set of pressures will also effects these species. Hence, we will carry out the same experiments under simulated future conditions (warmer and with altered seawater chemistry). The results of these experiments will tell us whether species benefit or are compromised by certain combinations of pressures, and our expectation is that some species and communities will fair better than others. We will use this information to develop models that allow us to predict how other species that we have not considered, but which share similar traits, may respond. To do this we will use sophisticated statistical models that take into account wider information and make predictions about what marine systems in the future might look like in the future under different scenarios of habitat use, human activity and climate change. In a final step, we will develop a decision support tool that will allow the complexities, including positive and negative feedbacks, to be taken into account by decision and policy makers so they can see the likely consequences of consenting offshore wind in specific locations. Our tool will support the sustainable growth of the offshore wind industry by helping decision makers to make informed decisions that minimise pressure on our marine ecosystems.

see Master Je-S form submitted by Edinburgh University.

Our planet's natural resources face unsustainable demands and there is evidence that current management approaches are failing to move resource use towards a sustainable future. This failure is particularly acute in marine ecosystems where about 95% of fisheries are fully- or over-exploited. A step-change is needed to achieve sustainability, but such change can only be affected if it aligns with consumer demand, real world fishing practicalities, and with sustainable national policies such as the Natural Capital Approach described by the UK's 25 Year Environment Plan. The 'Pyramids of Life' approach to a sustainable future captures and helps to communicate complex relationships between different species, human behaviours, and marine ecosystem functions. Ecological pyramids represent different size-based trophic levels with the relative scarcity of larger organisms being regulated by well-understood scaling principles based on energy flow from smaller prey. Human needs can also be represented in hierarchical pyramids where lower level physiological needs (e.g. need for food) must be satisfied before higher level needs (e.g. need for self-esteem) can influence behaviour (e.g. value systems). If presented together, information from such pyramids would allow stakeholders to understand complex and dynamic systems and their interdependencies, contribute to inform adaptive decision-making and lend itself to efficient and scalable modelling tools based on existing datasets The problem for the UK's marine resources is that fisheries management agreements typically use metrics which are based, for a given species, on the number of tonnes landed above some given minimum size. This can distort the size structure of naturally productive pyramids, causing local crashes in populations. It can also be wasteful where catches inevitably encompass many species. Consumer preference and market forces also play a role, promoting "plate-sized" catches and well-known species at the possible expense of more ecologically sustainable alternatives. We have shown that management which better respects ecological pyramids, and where harvest at a particular size class is proportional to the production at that size class (in units of carbon per year), can be both more productive and surprisingly resilient to external challenges. The challenge is to convert this academic observation into practical reality. To do this, we need to understand the behaviour of consumers, and of fishers, and to identify where change can be commercially viable as well as ecologically sustainable. Again the pyramid concept, this time describing values and behaviours, is helpful. Co-development with our partner organisations has identified key target species and fisheries, and existing datasets, where targeted changes in management can align with both the realities of human behaviour and economic value, and ecological sustainability. The research combines overlapping expertise in socio-economics and human behaviour (University of East Anglia), ecology and detailed spatio-temporal datasets (Cefas),and mathematics and marine ecology (University of York). Our partners Seafish and Waitrose bring detailed expertise in market dynamics, consumer behaviour and fishing effort, as well as matching our commitment to long-term sustainability. Together, this body of work will provide a multidimensional perspective of the value of marine ecosystems so that future management interventions are based squarely on what is sustainable.