The world demographic growth and global climate change are major challenges for human society,hence the need to design new strategies for maintaining high crop yield in unprecedented environmental conditions.The objective of TomGEM is to design new strategies aiming to maintain high yields of fruit and vegetables at harsh temperature conditions, using tomato as a reference fleshy fruit crop.As yield is a complex trait depending on successful completion of different steps of reproductive organ development, including flower differentiation and efficient flower fertilization,TomGEM will use trans-disciplinary approaches to investigate the impact of high temperature on these developmental processes.The core of the project deals with mining and phenotyping a vast range of genetic resources to identify cultivars/genotypes displaying yield stability and to uncover loci/genes controlling flower initiation,pollen fertility and fruit set.Moreover,since high yield and elevated temperatures can be detrimental to quality traits,TomGEM will also tackle the fruit quality issue.The goal is to provide new targets and novel strategies to foster breeding of new tomato cultivars with improved yield.The main strength of TomGEM resides in the use of unique and unexplored genetic resources available to members of the consortium.It gathers expert academic researchers and private actors committed to implement a multi-actor approach based on demand driven innovation.Tomato producers and breeders are strongly involved from design to implementation of the project and until the dissemination of results.TomGEM will provide new targets and novel strategies to foster the breeding of new tomato cultivars with improved yield under suboptimal temperature conditions.TomGEM will translate scientific insights into practical strategies for better handling of interactions between genotype,environment and management to offer holistic solutions to the challenge of increasing food quality and productivity.

If global warming runs its course, what will be the effects on our planet? More specifically, how will the Earth's richest ecosystems - the tropical rainforests - cope with future changes? Some of the answers to these questions may lie in the ancient geological past. Three hundred million years, the Earth experienced global warming on a massive scale, completely melting the polar icecaps. About the same time, the tropical rainforests began to dieback. Did global warming trigger extinction? Not everyone agrees. Others point the finger at the jostling of the Earth's tectonic plates that forced up a Himalayan-scale mountain belt on the edge of the tropics. They claim that changes in elevation and geomorphology caused rainforest wipeout. From 2008-2013, I plan to lead a large team of international experts to investigate this important sequence of events in enormous detail. We want to know exactly how and why rainforest dieback occurred. Was it a slow protracted decline or an abrupt crunch, and was global warming or mountain building responsible? To achieve this end, we intend to work in the underground coalmines of Illinois, Kentucky and Indiana, USA. Here spectacular fossilized forests are preserved that date from the crucial time period. When we first reported these amazing discoveries back in April, they really captured the public imagination and triggered something of a 'media frenzy'. The extraordinary thing about these fossil forests is that they have been unearthed over thousands of hectares (the size of a city). This allows geologists like me to literally walk through the forests and see how species make-up changed across the ancient landscape. This shows us the forests were very complex, patchy ecosystems much like rainforest today. My team has now identified seven fossil forests stacked on top of each other. The fossil forests span a period of about two million years and crucially date from before and after the rainforest dieback. By studying these forests we can learn exactly how dieback occurred. What species were lost? How did ecosystems reorganize? How abrupt was the change? Of course, understanding rainforest dieback in this kind of detail doesn't tell us the cause. However, our North America rainforests were located more than a thousand kilometers from the nearest mountain belt, so we can rule out that option that a cause of change. So what about global warming? To find out what the climate was doing during the extinction event we plan to study pores in the leaves of the fossil trees called to stomata. Stomata allow plants to absorb carbon dioxide. Studies have shown that the more carbon dioxide there is the air, the less stomata plants produce. So, in effect, fossil leaves allow us to detect changes in the carbon dioxide levels. As carbon dioxide is an important greenhouse gas, changes in its concentration will affect climate. My colleagues will use other techniques using fossil soils to get independent estimates of past carbon dioxide levels. Together we will put together a high-resolution record of climate change through the key time interval. We will then see how the timing of climate change corresponds with the timing of rainforest dieback. Of course, even if it turns out that two events coincide, it doesn't necessarily mean that climate change caused rainforest dieback. You can never prove 'cause and effect' in the fossil record. However, colleagues will input our findings into computer climate simulations. This will test to see whether our observed climate change would lead to the observed rainforest dieback. This will help support any inferences we make about climate change and extinction. Although our three hundred million year old rainforests are not directly comparable to modern rainforests, our work will generally contribute to discussion on the nature and rate of rainforest dieback in the face of climate change, and help us better predict future changes.

The UK has a rich heritage of film and radio material. This can provide crucial insights into life during the past 100 and more years. It is a hardly tapped resource for researchers in many disciplines from medicine to fashion, from linguistics to geography.\n \nIncreasing quantities of archive television and film content are now becoming available online to the general public (eg Pathe, BBC Archive Collections) or the academic research community (eg. ITN news through the JISC's Newsfilm Online, BUFVC collections, BFI InView). Online catalogues now exist for those collections that can be accessed only by other means, such as archive visits. More will be released as the twin processes of digitisation and copyright negotiations proceed.\n\nHowever, this content is often prepared and delivered as 'collections'. You have to know where you are likely to find something before you look. There is no one place where you can search for content about a particular subject, locating material from cinema newsfilm, television or radio. This presents a considerable barrier to anyone contemplating using audiovisual content in their research.\n\nThis project will build such a place, by producing a common scalable search interface for the nine databases developed and/or curated by BUFVC. These cover material from the earliest of cinema newsreels to next week's television. It would enable a researcher interested in the break-up of Yugoslavia to discover in one place and moment:\n- contemporary ITN reports\n- the BBC's 'first draft of history' documentary series 'The Death of Yugoslavia' from 1995\n- contextual footage of the history of Yugoslavia from newsreel footage of Tito's partisans\n- a 10 minute Visnews resume of the background history. \nIt would allow a geographer to find footage of the same place or the same natural phenomena from the beginnings of cinema to the present; a biographer to discover the many radio and TV interviews given by their subject and any other programmes in which they participated.\n\nAt all times, the nature and provenance of the material will be made clear: a newsreel from the 1930s has a very different 'feel' to TV news of the 1960s, as does 1960s news to that of today. Understanding the origin of the content is key to recovering its meanings and then to reusing it for contemporary purposes. The nature of the source collections of content is still vital in this process, as with the equally necessary process of finding content where it is not already available in an online digitised form. Where content is available, an embedded hyperlink will enable it to be previewed as part of the search and discovery process.\n\nThe interface will enable researchers to select filters to exclude irrelevant material. It will have a strongly visual design. The design of the interface will be extensively tested with researchers from a wide range of disciplines as part of the project.\n\nThe project will create a framework into which further information can and will be inserted when it comes available. Once in place, any relevant information (eg from BBC or overseas archives) can easily be integrated. BUFVC has a 60 year history in providing data on moving images to the academic sector, and is core funded by JISC as well as having over 90% of UK higher education institutions in its membership. BUFVC's continued curation and expansion of this data framework is thus assured.\n\nTwo further features will ensure that this database and interface remain a living and growing entity. The software that underpins the work of integrating the existing nine databases in BUFVC's curation will be developed by BUFVC and will be considered for release to the open source community. Second, the Web 2.0 aspects of the interface will allow users to feed in their own information: hyperlinks to specific footage, more detailed metadata and free-text descriptions, contextual material, published academic research work etc.