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See main proposal PI Francis Livens (Manchester)

Over a 6 million square km region of the central Pacific ocean, at abyssal depths of almost five thousand metres, lies a vast mineral resource in the form of small potato-sized deposits called polymetallic nodules. They are highly-enriched in metals of importance for industry, including the development of new sustainable technologies. Although the region lies in international waters, countries have now signed 16 exploration contracts with a UN-organised international regulator and the United Kingdom is sponsor to two of these, covering an area more than the size of England. It is a requirement of both the regulator and the sponsoring state to ensure that serious harm is avoided to the marine ecosystem in this region - a hitherto untouched deep-sea wilderness. Developing a sustainable approach to polymetallic nodule mining is a challenge as the nature and importance of the Pacific abyssal ecosystem is largely unknown, as are the capacity of the ecosystem to cope with and recover from mining impacts. Our project aims to provide the critical scientific understanding and evidence-base to reduce the risks of this industrial development, taking advantage of two new and unique opportunities to solve these problems in a single programme. Firstly, the UK contractor that holds the UK-sponsored exploration contract (UK Seabed Resources) is planning a mining test in 2023, which will allow us to test the immediate impacts of a seabed mining vehicle for the first time. Secondly, as a partner in the first full-scale mining test done in 1979, they have been able to release new data on the location and results of a 40-year old large-scale mining operation. Our project team have secured access to data and test plans, to allow detailed experimental evaluation of impact and recovery from realistic mining disturbance on a decadal scale of vital relevance to understanding the long-term sustainability of deep-sea mining. The project aims to better understand the ecosystem in the Pacific abyss and how the different components interact and interconnect. We will start by assessing the water and its dynamic flows over time and space. This complex physical environment will be monitored for a year to capture its variabilities, particularly "storm events" near the seabed. We will use this to make predictions about where the sediment plume generated by mining will be transported and settle back to the seafloor. We then assess the linkages between the water, sediment surface and sub sediments, evaluating the natural cycling of nutrients and metals that is important to maintain ecosystem health. The impacts of mining and recovery of these processes will be assessed. Mining will lead to changes in the structure of the seabed, its shape and the physical nature of the sediments, which will be mapped and linked to biological patterns. The biological processes that lead to these patterns will be assessed by detailing the life histories and reproduction of the organisms present and their connectivity between areas near and far, and then determining their role in maintaining structured communities of life, a high biodiversity and a functioning food web. We will then evaluate the functions in the ecosystem that these organisms provide, which help maintain a healthy ecosystem. The impact of mining and recovery of all these patterns and processes will be determined using our experimental areas to assess the biological and functional consequences of disturbance in the deep sea. These changes are likely complex, so a range of mathematical models will be used to better understand and predict the consequences of mining activities at larger time and space scales. Such predictive power, along with the evidence from the scientific assessment, will provide information that is critical for understanding and reducing the environmental risk of future mining activities.

Seafood production through aquaculture is in a unique position to contribute to healthy and sustainable diets and help to tackle the rising burden of chronic noncommunicable diseases and malnutrition in the UK, if environmental sustainability challenges and barriers to consumption are adequately addressed. Diversifying production, especially towards species of higher environmental sustainability, such as seaweed, mussels and sea urchins, and in particular through Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA), can serve a significant purpose towards bioremediation, while also allowing for product diversification and increased public acceptability of the industry. However, continued challenges to the commercial implementation of IMTA have hindered investment. This project will address barriers to the diversification of aquaculture systems in the UK by evaluating the contribution of IMTA to the nutritional value of aquaculture-produced seafood and to the environmental sustainability of the sector. To support aquaculture diversification, targeted interventions at the levels of business models, policies and consumer acceptance will be investigated. To assess the nutritional contribution from IMTA (WP1), we will compare the total fatty acid budget on monocultures and IMTA systems, using data from desk-based reviews and direct data collection, from seaweed farms and culture trials of mussels and sea urchins, as input to growth models and mass-balance trophic models parameterised for fatty acids. Socio-economic values will be integrated into biophysical analysis by developing a bioeconomic model and assessing the potential social license to operate of IMTA systems (WP4), to comprehensively evaluate the provisioning, regulatory and socio-cultural ecosystem services linked to IMTA systems. Further to describing the potential of IMTA to contribute to healthy and sustainable diets and ecosystems, the project will address implementation challenges by producers and consumers towards the diversification of aquaculture. To identify policy barriers to the adoption of IMTA and diversification (WP5), the project will assess the existing policy priorities and identify the underlying interests and incentives that affect the environment for reform towards IMTA. It will further explore the potential of seaweeds and invertebrates produced in integrated systems as candidates for nutrient and carbon trading credits. To assess the scope for improving consumer acceptance (WP3), the project will test the power of retail interventions in an experimental online supermarket with the aim of identifying seafood products with high market expansion potential. This assessment will be followed by a sensory experiment to evaluate the acceptability of novel products from IMTA, using facial recognition software to monitor the taster's displayed feelings during the task, which will help identify within each seafood category (e.g. algae) those varieties that consumers appreciate the most, therefore informing the research on business models. To address economic challenges to industry uptake, existing business models for aquaculture production in the UK will be described and a classification will be derived to identify how the these could be improved (WP2). This analysis will be complemented by stakeholder workshops to design innovative business models, using the Business Model Canvas. The workshops will explore new value propositions to the customers and opportunities for companies' market differentiation. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the project will collectively assess and document the environmental, nutritional and economic benefits of IMTA and aquaculture diversification, providing the industry and policy-makers with insights to facilitate the transition to healthier and more sustainable aquaculture.

It is very important for us to find out how climate changed in the past. Without knowing, we cannot predict how the future climate might behave. Global, systematic measurements of climatic variables have only been collected over the last few decades but we need to know how it varied through longer periods of time. We particularly need to know about this in the North Atlantic shelf seas which are currently experiencing accelerating climate change. The layers of ocean sediments in these regions contain the skeletons of microscopic organisms which can provide information about past climate. Benthic foraminifers in particular live in these shallow ocean habitats and their microscopic calcite shells accumulate through time providing a high resolution record of past environments. Communities of specific species (assemblages) are associated with the regional habitats of the shelf seas and this relationship is applied to similar assemblages found in time slices in the sediments (transfer functions). Forams also incorporate into their shells the physical and chemical signatures of the seawater in which they grow. This can be used as a geochemical 'proxy' to reconstruct the past environment in which they lived. All these past climate reconstructions are based on the assumption that the shells of a single species were constructed in the same range of environmental conditions. Using a unique DNA marker in living forams, we know that this is not always true. Individual morphospecies sometimes represent several distinct genetic types (genotypes) which may be adapted to different environments within a morphospecies range. It is highly likely that these are different species. Scientists are unknowingly analysing a mixture of different species because they look very similar (cryptic species). This will introduce noise and possible error into the data of both transfer function methods and geochemical proxies. To overcome this, we propose to genotype all the important benthic morphospecies used for past climate reconstruction throughout the regional habitats (biogeographic provinces) of the mid to high latitudes of the northeast Atlantic. We will sample these with the help of our four project partners from Norway and Iceland. We also have to bear in mind that these regions experience a wide range of environmental conditions as the seasons change. To address this, we will take samples from regions where seasonal studies are being carried to find out whether different genotypes appear as the environmental conditions change. Central to this study will be an extensive morphological investigation of shell shape to find out whether we can find subtle differences to help recognise the new genotypes in the modern ocean and most importantly, in the fossil record. We hope to genetically and morphologically define all important benthic morphospecies used for past climate reconstruction in the North East Atlantic to produce a unified classification scheme. From our high resolution sampling, we will be able to produce a new bioprovince distribution map for the present day northeast Atlantic/Arctic. We will discover whether 'generalist' species really occupy different bioprovinces or represent a series of different cryptic species with different ecologies. Finding identifiable new species will improve our understanding of how bioprovinces have migrated North/South as the glacial cycles have come and gone. Do different cryptic species appear in the same place as the seasons change? Their recognition would allow the exploration of seasonality in the fossil record. Do foram shells of the same species have a different shape in different environments? Confirmation will provide evidence of specific environmental conditions in the present day and in the past. This link between present and past also provides important clues about how extreme changes in these dynamic marine environments affect the survival of species and drive their evolution through time.