This action supports physical and blended mobility of higher education students and staff from/to third countries not associated to Erasmus+. Students in all study fields and cycles can take part in a study period or traineeship abroad. Higher education teaching and administrative staff can take part in professional development activities abroad, as well as staff from the field of work in order to teach and train students or staff at higher education institutions.

REWILDING is an environmental anthropological project contributing to the budding field of environmental humanities. It focuses on the shifting entanglements between people, flora, and fauna in the world’s largest conservation landscape, the southern African Kavango-Zambezi Transboundary Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA). Inaugurated in 2011, KAZA TFCA is a working landscape of conservation par excellence. Its green future is broadcast globally, but simultaneously bears marks of colonial and post-colonial pasts. REWILDING is a unique attempt to grasp changing socio-ecological relations among humans and other species. It consists of six field studies, each of which will have a comparative component and an in-depth focus on one particular multi-species assemblage. The comparative approach examines how human livelihoods, institutions, social imaginaries, and attitudes change under – and give rise to – new socio-ecological conditions. The second part focuses on six multi-species assemblages (e.g. an elephant assemblage, a Glossina/Trypanosome assemblage, a rosewood assemblage). Each assemblage is comprised of a loose multi-scalar network consisting of different species populations, environmental infrastructures and technologies, and human actors, organizations and social institutions. By pursuing a two-pronged comparative and in-depth approach, REWILDING will advance scholarly knowledge on refaunation and biodiversity in contexts of large-scale conservation. The project is tied into networks of interdisciplinary research on the effects of recent population rebounds among megaherbivores, vectors of epidemic diseases tied to such refaunation, and the socio-economic ramifications of rapidly commodifying diverse flora and fauna. REWILDING is uniquely positioned and purposefully designed to contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of recent large-scale refaunation efforts, and will thereby offer new, empirical insight for the future planning of conservation.

In the realm of advanced optical systems, particularly within the emerging field of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology, which are pivotal for 3D sensing applications across various sectors, a significant commercial challenge emerges from the inherent limitations posed by optical interference in thin-film filters. The core of this challenge lies in the phenomenon known as 'angular dispersion,' a fundamental constraint of interference-based structures in thin-film filter design. Angular dispersion refers to the shift in transmission wavelength of optical filters as the angle of incidence changes, typically resulting in a pronounced blue-shift. This effect, while intrinsic to the operation of optical interference, undermines the performance of LiDAR systems by requiring the filters to have sufficiently broad pass bands to accommodate the angular shift. The SPLiDAR initiative is set to revolutionize the landscape of photonic applications by introducing a groundbreaking approach that transcends the traditional constraints of angular dispersion. This approach harnesses the quantum optical phenomenon of merging light and matter states to create angle-independent transmissive filters, referred to as polariton filters here. This project is poised to redefine of optical filtering and sensing by introducing a novel class of spectrally sharp and angle-independent transmission filters, thereby overcoming the fundamental limitations of angular dispersion in conventional optical devices. The SPLiDAR project will leverage the team's profound expertise in thin-film optics, including transfer matrix and FDTD calculations and structure design optimization, along with a deep understanding of organic absorber properties and a wealth of experience in optoelectronics.

MoMeNTUM aims at developing a next-generation computational code for Hyperbolic balance laws in fluid flow and solid mechanics, based on versatile unstructured Voronoi grids (polygons and polyhedra), and achieving efficiency that can be compared even with that of structured Cartesian codes. The space-time-based methods will be of high-order Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element type, with Finite Volume auxiliary subcell stabilisation. Such a mixed formulation requires new grid generation techniques in order to be extended to moving Voronoi meshes, due to the presence of degenerate and almost-degenerate elements with short or zero-length edges. Using genuine Voronoi tessellations (i.e. nearest neighbour) is important in order to preserve the smooth dynamic connectivity rearrangement naturally emerging from the motion of Voronoi seeds in space, which is a key element for the construction of robust schemes on moving polyhedral grids. Efficiency will be achieved through new hybrid nodal/modal moving basis functions, defined on cell-aligned bounding boxes, that can heavily exploit tensor-type data storage and access patterns, usually available only in structured codes. Additionally, the schemes will be equipped with an embedded mesh generator that can synergistically interact with the computational core so that the behaviour of the on-the-fly subgrid generator for the Finite Volume subcells will be optimised, like the Voronoi grid motion, according to the local flow or stress patterns. The project is a heavily multidisciplinary effort that requires the development and implementation of new numerical solvers and new mesh generation algorithms within a single coherent software architecture, which will be packaged in an open source, massively parallel, high performance Fortran code, in the hope that it will constitute a step forward towards the wide adoption of advanced high-order methods for solving real-world continuum mechanics problems.

Conservationists often use ‘historical’ arguments to justify their visions of which groups of human and non-human species should live where and how. Imagined pasts are central to influential concepts and practices of conservation, such as re-wilding, species re-introduction or landscape restoration. These narratives range from vague references to past equilibriums, that need to be saved, to more specific baselines of past distribution of certain species, that need to be restored, to the re-creation of specific past landscapes in new settings. Historians have hardly contributed to these historicized arguments. Following recent calls for conservation humanities, I apply historiographical methods to engage with conservationists’ ideas of past human-wildlife-land interactions and practices in Southern Africa and the European Alps. Firstly, I analyze, contextualize and compare how conservation organizations use imagined past human-wildlife-land relations and develop a typology of historical conservation narratives. In Southern Africa, conservationists present “Africans” as naturally knowing how to live in their environment or as a threat to nature. In Europe, conservationists’ narratives present historical people as experts or masters of nature. Secondly, I research specific historical moments in both regions, to juxtapose conservation narratives with localized analyses of historical changes in human-wildlife-land relations. Thirdly, by combining critical historical analyses of cases in the Global South with those of Europe, I challenge powerful conservation narratives that often perpetuate global power structures. By this, I critique ongoing conservation debates and practices, and offer novel perspectives of multi-species pasts. A thorough understanding of these pasts is crucial for coping with immense present and challenges in the light of the ongoing climate crisis, as for example formulated in the COP15 agreement to conserve and/or restore 30% of the world’s surface.