European marginal grasslands are biodiversity hot spots owing to ecological constraints, biophysical heterogeneity, and centuries of agriculture. Currently it is not clear whether these unique systems are vulnerable to ongoing environmental, socio-economic and political changes, or if they have developed a high resilience over their history of co-evolution between humans and ecosystems. In the latter case the limits to this resilience are unknown, and their prediction hazardous. This uncertainty lies largely in the poor knowledge of resilience mechanisms of both the ecological and human sub-systems, as well as those underpinning robustness or vulnerability of the entire system coupled through land management decisions and ecosystem services. REGARDS aims to unravel the mechanisms underpinning resilience of marginal grassland systems to global environmental and social change in order to enhance socio-ecological resilience from farm to regional level. We ask the following questions: (1) Can we identify safe areas vs. tipping points in the combined effects of changing climate, including extremes, and management on grassland ecosystems? (2) How does coupled above-belowground functional diversity buffer or amplify grassland ecosystem responses to combined changes in climate and management? (3) Which landscape structures enhance or decrease ecosystem resilience, and thereby the resilience of ecosystem service provision? (4) Can multi-level governance structures react faster to socioeconomic changes that affect biodiversity and the related ecosystem services? (5) Can system openness, which increases with regional integration and globalization, enhance resilience through its effects on flows of goods and ecosystem services, people and information, or does it threaten a historically resilient system? (6) How can such knowledge support pathways towards increased resilience? REGARDS will address these questions for mountain grassland sites in Austria, France and Norway, where contrasted biophysical and human situations will allow us to explore complementary dimensions of socio-ecological resilience. Questions (1) and (2) will be addressed using an experimental approach combining manipulations of plant functional diversity, climate and management with state-of-the art analyses of soil microbial diversity, transcriptomics, and fluxomics. Remote sensing will be used to quantify landscape functional structure and its role in facilitating or impeding flows of ecosystem services (question 3). Question (4) will be addressed by an assessment of how local, regional, national and EU programs affect farmers responses and resilience in the context of the variety of socio-ecological factors influencing decisions at farm level. Question (5) will be addressed by reconstructing past land uses and exchanges with other regions of each site, and by comparing indicators of socio-ecological resilience through time and across sites. Finally we will build on this mechanistic knowledge (questions 1-5) to address question (6) using a participative scenariobased approach. Scenarios varying openness of the human-environment system and governance structures will be defined with key local and regional stakeholders and decision makers. Evaluation of scenario outcomes in terms of biodiversity, ecosystem services and material well-being, and associated tipping points will be used to foster knowledge building about socio-ecological resilience at farm and local/regional level.

The underlying remarkable material properties of diamond offer the prospect for semiconductor devices with extraordinary potential in high power applications, as well as those requiring operation at high temperature and in high radiation environments. However, despite their tremendous potential, the progress in developing diamond high voltage devices has been severely impeded by challenges associated with the availability of good quality substrates, limitations in thick and high quality epilayer growth and advanced device processing technologies . Moreover, advances have been additionally hampered by the lack of shallow n-type dopant species. However, recent progress by the applicants in developing diamond technologies make these above listed challenges considerably reduced enabling further advances in pursuit of developing high power diamond electronics. In this context, the applicants' recent discovery of the highly novel steady state deep-depletion concept for diamond devices opens routes for further advancements in the field of diamond power devices; critically, deep-depletion devices remove the need for an n-type doping. Vertical Deep-Depletion (D2) Diamond MOSFETs and Trench MOS Schottky barrier diodes (TMBS) will be realised offering exceptional performance in terms of power handling capability, size, switching frequency and thermal-radiation resilience. Developing more energy-efficient high-power devices will lead to efficient power converters, key for the drive to more efficient power generation and distribution systems within the context of the low carbon economy. However, additionally, diamond devices proposed will be that these devices can tolerate extreme operational environments and offer enormous potential in key sectors such as automotive, aerospace, and nuclear industrial sectors.

Glacial habitats host an astonishing diversity of species and life forms; however, most of the world’s mountain glaciers are melting due to climate change, threatening glacier biodiversity and the functioning of mountain ecosystems. In Europe, glacier retreat is particularly severe for the southernmost, peripheral chains, where the smallest glaciers occur. The European Habitat Directive includes Permanent Glaciers in the list of habitats deserving conservation, and glacial habitats host several endemic species. However, none of these species is listed in the Habitat Directive, and information on biodiversity of these environments is scarce, hindering our ability to manage mountain socio-ecological systems. PrioritIce aims at identifying trends, threats and processes acting on the biodiversity associated to glacial habitats (i.e. species living above the glacier or in glacier forelands) in Europe, with a focus on Alps and peripheral chains hosting critically endangered habitats. By combining traditional and molecular (environmental DNA) approaches, our consortium has already gathered data on 1) the distribution of key taxa (bacteria, fungi, nematodes, tardigrades, earthworms, arthropods, plants), and 2) a range of ecosystem functions (pollination, soil respiration and nutrients) from 52 study sites across the European Alps and southern European mountains. Building on these data, we will: 1) provide an exhaustive assessment of the taxonomic and functional diversity of organisms living in glacial habitats. We will complement the rich database of the consortium with additional samples from peripheral glaciers, with a special focus on poorly known endemic species; 2) analyse biological interactions to identify how species contribute to ecosystem functioning and services in glacial habitats. We will build on existing databases and develop machine learning protocols focusing on the impact of glacier extinction on the diversity–functioning relationship; 3) provide evidence-based priority programs and actions for managing glacial habitats and devising strategies for anticipating the consequences of glacier retreat under climate change scenarios. Together with a broad set of stakeholders, we will inform decision-making and environmental policy to preserve, support, and manage these ecosystems. Studying the distribution, abundance and functions of biodiversity across mountain environments, PrioritIce will enhance evidence-based protection approaches and shed light on the conservation of a poorly known, unprotected biota. Integrating statistical modelling approaches with innovative molecular methodologies will allow us to improve the ecological representation of biodiversity and its role in the functioning of glacial habitats in order to identify priority conservation areas. This will provide practitioners, managers and policy makers with the much-needed knowledge for defining adequate strategies for preserving biodiversity and mountain ecosystems.

The impact of global change on ecosystems prompts researchers to develop new conceptual and modeling frameworks to understand and predict the dynamics of biodiversity across levels of complexity, i.e. from population to species assemblages and from ecosystems to landscapes. This challenge requires cross-fertilization of dispersed disciplines such as ecology, evolutionary biology and the science of the earth system. Predictive models of biodiversity should no longer ignore the legacy of evolutionary history and biotic interactions. We need to know how species have responded to past changes in habitat distribution to understand current patterns of diversity and to evaluate how organisms will track future changes. ODYSSEE aims at integrating ecology and evolution to understand and predict the dynamics of species assemblages at a biogeographical scale. The project will focus on the high mountain ecosystems of the Alps and the Carpathians that represent a hotspot of plant diversity in temperate Europe and that are particularly exposed to severe habitat loss due to global change and land use changes. These nowadays highly fragmented landscapes have undergone severe periods of contraction and expansion over the last two millions years. Moreover, the impacts of Quaternary climatic variations on the spatial distribution of cold habitats have been very different between the Alps - which were largely ice covered - and the Carpathians - which were impacted far less by glacier advances than the Alps. This contrasting history has had profound consequences on the location of thermal refugees, post-glacial recolonization routes, and community re-assembly following climate warming. However, these historical footprints have been documented for a few species, and never for multi-trophic species assemblages (such as plants-soil microflora-soil mesofauna networks). This hinders our capacity to forecast the response of integrated levels of biodiversity to global change. ODYSSEE will build on existing knowledge to assemble an unprecedented dataset on the biodiversity of two types of widely distributed mountain grasslands across the Alps and the Carpathians: the extensively managed alpine meadows dominated by Carex curvula and the more intensively managed subalpine grasslands dominated by Nardus stricta. Different components of biodiversity will be studied including phenotypic and genetic diversity of keystone plant species, taxonomic and functional diversity of plant species assemblages and molecular diversity of soil microflora and mesofauna. This will provide unique opportunities to examine spatial co-variations across levels of biodiversity and across multi-trophic species assemblages. ODYSSEE will integrate our best knowledge of how community assembly is driven by ecological processes (environmental filtering, biotic interactions, mass effect) and past evolutionary history. The ultimate challenge will be to develop and test meta-community models able to track the response of species assemblages to environmental changes in a dynamic landscape. The empirical data gathered in the two targeted mountain ecosystems will be used as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of this new integrated framework. ODYSSEE will make use of key innovative approaches in the science of diversity including (i) the reconstruction of megaphylogenies, (ii) the assessment of soil molecular diversity using DNA metabarcoding (iii) the development of spatial multivariate analyses, (iv) the improvement of community-based modeling of biodiversity. Beyond these fundamental objectives, ODYSSEE will aim at sharing scientific knowledge and methodological expertise among French and Romanian partners and will include an ambitious training program for graduate students, researchers and technical staff of both countries.

Recent studies suggest that transgenerational metabolic impairments induced by endocrine disruptors (ED) exposure are key contributing factors in amphibian population decline by altering individual fitness. However, several questions remain to be explored: How do obesogenic EDs act in frogs? What are the crosstalks with other hormonal axes?) Which parent transmits the metabolic disorders to progeny? Are transgenerational metabolic disorders dependent on epigenetic modifications or linked to diminished reserve stores in eggs by females thereby affecting the progeny metabolism? To what extent may delayed life history traits changes in progeny compromise the demographic maintenance of amphibian populations. The Macdonald project will address these questions by studying the effect of a mixture of 6 obesogenic EDs at environmental concentrations over 3 generations of X. tropicalis (F0 exposed and F1/F2 unexposed). The effects of mixture will be evaluated at each generation through growth parameters, reproductive, thyroid and neurodevelopmental effects, metabolic impairments and transgenerational inheritance. Finally, stage-structured population models will be built based on the developmental and reproduction parameters recorded to assess potential demographic impacts of ED exposure.