With the shift towards a reduced reliance on external inputs in agriculture, identifying management options that enhance the provision of ecosystem services has become a critical issue. Pest control resulting from the activity of naturally present predators and parasitoids is frequently cited as an important service that could reduce pesticide use as targeted by the French 2018 Ecophyto governmental action. However, the link between management options, pest control level and ultimately crop yield is poorly understood. The PEERLESS project aims to identify alternative management strategies that enhance the crop protection service provided by functional biodiversity and ultimately to optimize agricultural systems, at local and landscape scales, for economic viability and sustainability. PEERLESS brings together six partners organisations with extensive expertise in agronomy, spatial ecology, ecology of interactions and public economy. The project combines: (i) an empirical assessment of naturally occurring crop protection from weed and insects pests in annual (wheat-oilseed rape rotations) and perennial (apple orchards) systems across a broad range of landscape and agronomic situations; (ii) ecological engineering with an assessment of alternative plant protection system to improve crop protection at the local scale; (iii) an in-depth study of the structure of trophic networks; and, (iv) population dynamics of key pests and their regulators in case study areas. These components will support the parametrisation of spatially-explicit, predictive models to (v) test the effect of landscape patterns of alternative local and landscape management strategies on pesticide use, pest control, crop yield and farmer income and (vi) identify landscape scale viable management strategies to control insect and weed pests.

In a report published in 2011 defining the main prospects of the organic food sector, the French Scientific Council for Organic Agriculture underlined that food safety was the prime motivation driving 95% of the consumers of organic food, although very few scientific data were available to support the presumption of a health benefit associated with organic products. The issue is critical for animal-derived food products whose reputation of safety suffers from the multiple cattle crises of the last decades. In particular, the question arises of whether meat and other animal-derived products such as offal from organic production may accumulate environmental contaminants (pesticides, organic pollutants, toxic metals and mycotoxins) or antibiotics. The SOMEAT project aims to provide scientific data to fuel the debate on the presumed health benefit of organic meat products in regard to their possible chemical contaminant contents and the putative resulting toxicity potential for consumers. The project will also give new insights into socio-economic determinants of organic meat consumption and propose new strategies to back-trace contaminants in the meat chain. The first objective of SOMEAT is to assess the chemical contaminant status of both conventional and organic meat. The priority contaminants will be listed, method specifications and sampling strategies will be defined, and targeted environmental micropollutants, antibiotics, pesticides, mycotoxins and heavy metals will be quantified by National Reference Laboratories (NRLs) on a large sample set (n > 250) including both conventional and organic raw meat. The second objective is to assess the corresponding chemical risk for conventional and organic meat consumers. The project will investigate the three main technological and physiological processes that may modulate the toxicological impact of meat contaminants: (i) effects of cooking on the meat contaminants on the priority list, (ii) their bioaccessibility for intestinal absorption based on in vitro digester experiments and (iii) their toxicity in mixtures by assessing cytotoxicty, genotoxicity and PXR activation on in vitro cell cultures of human enterocytes, hepatocytes and hepatomes exposed to realistic mixtures of meat contaminants. The third objective is to identify the socio-demographic variables explaining the consumption of organic meat. To make up for the poor precision of existing data, a field survey and a lab experiment of experimental economics will be undertaken. The survey will be carried out in-store to precisely characterize the consumers' motivation toward organic or conventional meat. The lab experiment will estimate participants' purchase choices under different certification labels or promotion configurations. This characterization of the organic consumption will allow a risk-benefit analysis linked to organic meat consumption. The fourth objective of SOMEAT is to investigate biomarkers to develop new analytical strategies based on their profiling in meat products to back-trace the exposure of meat chain to contaminants. Animal tests on poultry will provide control and diet-contaminated liver and fat. Levels of contamination will be established by NRLs. Metabolomic and transcriptomic analyses will be undertaken on the samples to determine biomarkers of animal exposure to be further validated on real-life samples. This multidisciplinary project covers both basic and industrial research. It addresses, through its main outcomes, the environmental, economic and social dimensions of food sustainability. Novel research and development will be undertaken in analytical chemistry, food chemistry, food engineering, toxicology, risk analysis, experimental economics, metabolomics, transcriptomics and chemometrics. SOMEAT involves 14 partners from both scientific institutes (INRA, ANSES, ONIRIS, AgroParisTech) and research and development organizations of the meat sector (IFIP, ITAVI and IDELE).

The interactions between groundwater (GW) and soil moisture (SM) exert a key role to shape the critical zone (CZ), including soils, water resources, ecosystems, near-surface climate, and social systems. In this project, we focus on several interlinked CZ processes: SM increase by capillary rise from GW that is recharged when SM is abundant; GW depletion or exhaustion by irrigation, 38% of which is GW-fed globally; SM, GW, and irrigation response to but also impact on mean climate and extreme events (droughts, heatwaves, floods), ecosystem productivity (wetlands, croplands) and soil carbon. The relative influence of these coupled processes is difficult to apprehend based on observations, as they exhibit contrasting manifestations in space and time, and are subject to increasing anthropogenic pressures. Thus, we will combine advanced numerical modelling and participatory methods to explore their long-term evolution in the Anthropocene (1900-2100), at two spatial scales: a) Global, with factorial simulations by two Earth system models to compare the influence of anthropogenic warming, land-use and irrigation management, and GW-related feedbacks, on past and future CZ pathways; b) Regional in two "focal areas", metropolitan France and the Mekong River basin, to provide contrasting examples of the studied processes and enable anchored transdisciplinary work with stakeholders, social and natural scientists. The goal is to propose tailored narratives for sustainable management, using participatory approaches to iteratively combine expert knowledge, local surveys, high-resolution Earth system simulations, and integrated assessment modelling of land-use and water management. At both scales, we will consider uncertainties to identify robust responses (likely evolutions and trade-offs, e.g. linked to GW failure to sustain irrigation and ecosystems, or climate change attenuation/amplification). Ultimately, the project will help assess the usefulness of global scenarios and projections at regional scales and frame sustainable CZ management strategies at the global scale.

PUNCH is a collaborative project which aims at providing efficient proposals in order to favor healthier eating behavior in children (3 months-11 years), beyond traditional approaches based on health-related information. Eating behavior will be studied in qualitative (“what” is eaten) and quantitative (“how much” is eaten) terms. PUNCH aims at (1) better understanding the determinants of infant and children’s eating behavior, by taking into account sociological, psychological, experiential, and sensory factors and (2) evaluating the effectiveness of innovative levers of actions in order to modify school-aged children’s eating behavior, exploring tracks suggested by cognitive psychology, behavior science, economics and marketing. The proposed approaches are experimental, with the exception of the sociologic approach. Interdisciplinary, PUNCH associates complementary domains of expertise (6 academic partners). PUNCH is organized as follows: WP0: Coordination; WP1: Understanding determinants of eating behavior (WP1.1. Early determinants of capacity to control energy intake; Task 1.1.1 Impact of socialization on capacity to control energy intake; Task 1.1.2 Impact of milk feeding mode on capacity to control energy intake; WP1.2. Describing responses to food pleasure; Task 1.2.1 Influence of sensory factors on food choices; Task 1.2.2 Using brain imaging techniques to image pleasure; Task 1.2.3 Defining children’s cognitive profiles toward pleasure); WP2: Promoting children's healthy eating behavior (Task 2.1: harmonization of the procedures; Task 2.2: Assessing effect of intervention by measuring paternalism; Task 2.3: Assessing effect of priming on food choices; Task 2.4: Assessing effect of nudging on portion size); WP3: Dissemination (Task 3.1 Roadmap to future actions ; Task 3.2 Final event and dissemination). The main expected results of PUNCH are: -To produce the scientific grounds towards healthier eating behavior in children that could be easily transferred into practice by small changes in children’s environment (i.e. food quality, information, training and parental feeding practices), -To produce the scientific grounds to indicate if it is easier to modify children’s food choices directly or through their parents, - To suggest evidence-based recommendations that would target specific groups of individuals, - In fine, to help to produce public health recommendations taking into account not only nutrition, but also social, psychological and sensory aspects of eating behavior, that could be implemented in tools for health and childhood professionals such as the Programme National Nutrition Santé guides.

The trade-off/synergy dilemma between economic development and ecosystem services is one of the major issues of sustainable rural development. The main research objective of TRUSTEE is to disentangle the complex relationships between economic development and ecosystem services at different spatial scales and on a large European gradient of rural and rural/urban areas. The project implements an interdisciplinary approach bringing together economists, geographers, agronomists, and ecologists. Sub-objectives are: (i) analyse the multi-scaled determinants of economic development and ecosystem services; (ii) increase our understanding of how to achieve mutual benefits for economic development in rural areas and ecosystem services; (iii) identify and assess the governance mechanisms and policy instruments that enhance sustainable rural vitality; (iv) produce synergies among international researchers of varied disciplines and between researchers and various stakeholders at different governance scales. The work plan relies on seven work packages that involve a cross-cutting strategy linking analyses at various scales (Pan European, gradient of EU countries, local case studies). TRUSTEE will provide a first quantification of the many–to-many relationship between ecosystem services and economic development. It will also produce (i) a large scale inventory of the socioeconomic and policy drivers of ecosystem service sets (ii) a large scale assessment of unlocking ecosystem service potential for rural economic development and (iii) a first internalization of ecosystem services in models of economic development. TRUSTEE will also produce analytical tools incorporating scenarios and policy instruments for the assessment of ecosystem services and their impact on rural development. Last, TRUSTEE will build capacity for interaction between a broad range of academics, experts, stakeholders and policy makers.