Our food security is at risk. Within the next 30 years, the human population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion, requiring a doubling of crop production. However, the current trajectory of crop yield improvements will not meet these needs, making new agricultural innovations paramount to ensure future food security. Improving photosynthetic efficiency is a promising, yet largely untapped route to enhance crop yields. Our dominant crops (e.g., rice, wheat) use C3 photosynthesis, such that any improvement to this system would substantially impact food security. Under warm, arid, and bright environments, C3 plants suffer from an energetically-costly metabolic process called photorespiration. Photorespiration is a major factor limiting productivity in C3 plants and it will only get worse with the warm temperatures accompanying climate change. If we could find a way to eliminate photorespiration therefore, we could more than double rates of photosynthesis under climate change. However, eliminating photorespiration all together would impact other plant metabolic functions. Therefore, the ideal scenario would be to find a way to maintain photorespiration but minimise its carbon losses. Engineering C2 photosynthesis into C3 crops is the clear solution. C2 photosynthesis is a simple CO2 concentrating mechanism that captures, concentrates, and re-assimilates CO2 released by photorespiration. It is, in short, a natural CO2 recycling mechanism. Although only recently discovered in the early 1980s, the C2 mode of photosynthesis has repeatedly evolved across diverse plant lineages, including four crop families (Poaceae, Brassicaceae, Asteraceae, Amaranthaceae). This FLF will establish the world's first research program specifically dedicated to engineering the rare C2 mode of photosynthesis into important C3 food and bioenergy crops to sustainably improve yield and environmental resilience. Because all of the genes required for C2 photosynthesis are present in C3 species, only changes to regulation and expression would be needed to engineer C2 photosynthesis into C3 crops. Moreover, C2 plants also have similar leaf structures to C3 plants, which simplifies the engineering protocol. Together, this FLF will initiate a robust research program to establish an impactful, yet feasible, C2 crop engineering and commercialisation strategy via seven work packages: 1. Identify the phenotypic components of C2 photosynthesis in diverse plant families 2. Map the spatial gene expression profiles of C2 leaves across three diverse crop families 3. Engineer a functional C2 photosynthesis system into three C3 Brassicaceae crops 4. Design C2 engineering packages specific to three diverse crop families 5. Field trial the engineered C2 Brassica germplasm 6. Commercialise C2 Brassica products 7. Initiate C2 transformations in Amaranthaceae and Asteraceae crops Together, the proposed innovative research program will launch an impactful novel crop improvement program aimed to increase yields and stability under our future unstable climate.

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.

Phase transitions are ubiquitous in systems consisting of a large number of interacting components, which can be as simple as a gas or as complex as human society. Often one observes intriguing associated dynamic phenomena such as a separation of time scales and metastability. A classical example is the liquid-gas transition of water, which exhibits metastability of supersaturated vapour over relatively long time scales, followed by a rapid transition to the liquid phase. A phenomenological description of such metastable states goes back to van der Waals theory of non-ideal gases. Besides a proper description of the states, the relevant dynamic aspects are the lifetimes of the states and how transitions occur between them. In reality transitions are often triggered by small impurities (causing e.g. droplet nucleation in vapour), and in mathematical models this is often achieved by adding randomness to dynamics. Stochastic particle systems, where idealized particles move and interact in a discrete (lattice) geometry, provide therefore a very natural class of models to study and understand the dynamics of such transitions and the concept of metastability.A mathematically rigorous approach poses very challenging research questions, and is an active area of modern probability theory where significant recent progress has been achieved. The proposed research builds on these developments and aims towards a full rigorous understanding of a condensation transition in zero-range processes, a particular class of stochastic particle systems which has attracted recent research interest in theoretical physics. Condensation here means, that with increasing density the system switches from a homogeneous distribution of particles to a state where a macroscopic fraction of all the particles condenses on a single lattice site. Zero-range processes are therefore used as generic models of condensation phenomena with applications ranging from clustering of granular materials to the formation of giant hubs in complex network dynamics. They are also of theoretical interest as effective models of domain wall dynamics separating different phases in more general systems, explaining phenomena like the formation of traffic jams on highways.Zero-range processes show a very rich critical behavior with interesting dynamic phenomena on several time scales including metastability, which have been understood on a heuristic level in statistical physics, inspiring many ideas in this proposal. The aim of the project is to underpin these findings with rigorous probabilistic results by proving scaling limits for the dynamics of effective observables on several different time scales. These concrete outcomes will be put into a wider context and will lead to methodological advances, by improving and generalizing recent mathematical techniques and understanding the exact conditions of validity of heuristic arguments used for predictions. Also conceptual insights are invisaged, by exploring new approaches for the mathematical characterization of metastability phenomena in stochastic particle systems.

The current major explosive volcanic eruption in southern Chile presents an immediate opportunity for scientists to measure the impact of fine ash fallout during and after an eruption. We wish to use this opportunity to collect detailed measurements of the thickness and grainsize of ash which has fallen from Chaiten across a very large area of prime grazing land in southern Argentina. It is important that this work is carried out quickly - before the ash has been moved around on the ground by winds, and before the ash has been leached by rain water. Ash fallout is the major hazard from volcanic eruptions to humans, and their life-support systems (agriculture, transport, communications). Even only a thin deposit of ash can have a devastating effect on grazing animals, since they either refuse to eat ash-dusted grasses (and starve); or they consume the toxic salts deposited along with the ash (and die of fluorosis). At the moment, we so not have sufficiently sophisticated models of where fine ash ends up after eruptions - mainly because we do not have the measurements to test these models. Eruptions such as this, which are major explosive eruptions and which deposit fine ash across accessible land areas (rather than the sea), only happen about once in a decade or more. This is the first such opportunity since the major explosive eruptions of Pinatubo (Philippines) and Hudson (Chile) in 1991.

The role of external drivers of climate change in mid-latitude weather events, particularly that of human influence on climate, arouses intense scientific, policy and public interest. In February 2014, the UK Prime Minister stated he "suspected a link" between the flooding at the time and anthropogenic climate change, but the scientific community was, and remains, frustratingly unable to provide a more quantitative assessment. Quantifying the role of climate change in extreme weather events has financial significance as well: at present, impact-relevant climate change will be primarily felt through changes in extreme events. While slow-onset processes can exacerbate (or ameliorate) the impact of individual weather events, any change in the probability of occurrence of these events themselves could overwhelm this effect. While this is known to be a problem, very little is known about the magnitude of such changes in occurrence probabilities, an important knowledge gap this project aims to address. The 2015 Paris Agreement of the UNFCCC has given renewed urgency to understanding relatively subtle changes in extreme weather through its call for research into the impacts of a 1.5oC versus 2oC increase in global temperatures, to contribute to an IPCC Special Report in 2018. Few, if any, mid-latitude weather events can be unambiguously attributed to external climate drivers in the sense that these events would not have happened at all without those drivers. Hence any comprehensive assessment of the cost of anthropogenic climate change and different levels of warming in the future must quantify the impact of changing risks of extreme weather, including subtle changes in the risks of relatively 'ordinary' events. The potential, and significance, of human influence on climate affecting the occupancy of the dynamical regimes that give rise to extreme weather in mid-latitudes has long been noted, but only recently have the first tentative reports of an attributable change in regime occupancy begun to emerge. A recent example is the 2014 floods in the Southern UK, which are thought to have occurred not because of individually heavy downpours, but because of a more persistent jet. Quantifying such changes presents a challenge because high atmospheric resolution is required for realistic simulation of the processes that give rise to weather regimes, while large ensembles are required to quantify subtle but potentially important changes in regime occupancy statistics and event frequency. Under this project we propose, for the first time, to apply a well-established large-ensemble methodology that allows explicit simulation of changing event probabilities to a global seasonal-forecast-resolution model. We aim to answer the following question: over Europe, does the dynamical response to human influence on climate, manifest through changing occupancy of circulation regimes and event frequency, exacerbate or counteract the thermodynamic response, which is primarily manifest through increased available moisture and energy in individual events? Our focus is on comparing present-day conditions with the counterfactual "world that might have been" without human influence on climate, and comparing 1.5 degree and 2 degree future scenarios. While higher forcing provides higher signal-to-noise, interpretation is complicated by changing drivers and the potential for a non-linear response. We compensate for a lower signal with unprecedentedly large ensembles. Event attribution has been recognised by the WCRP as a key component of any comprehensive package of climate services. NERC science has been instrumental in its development so far: this project will provide a long-overdue integration of attribution research into the broader agenda of understanding the dynamics of mid-latitude weather.