The ageing of populations is a global phenomenon. National governments are concerned about the financial implications of this. In particular, the extent to which states can provide services and support through public transfers of funds. This raises further concerns about the equity of transfers away from a declining younger generation toward a growing older generation. There are significant debates to be had around the level of taxes, availability of benefits, and age of retirement. This however addresses only half of the issue, and ignores the private transfers that take place within families. The transfer of private wealth (and in-kind support) is increasingly important not only for the life chances of younger generations but also the protection of older ones. Younger people's opportunities are increasingly dependent upon the level of assistance they receive as they face key life events (such as education, starting a family and home ownership). Furthermore, as limited public resources are stretched, support from families has (once again) become an important aspect for older people as an insurance against poverty and increased care needs. Much current works focuses on this 'generational conflict' - whether transfers happen, and which direction they operate: a public focus on upward transfers (from younger to older generations) or a private focus on downward transfers (from parents to children and grandchildren). But little research considers the implications of these transfers for the reproduction of inequalities and the welfare and wellbeing of future societies. The issue of transfers across and within generations is thus an emerging and growing area of concern at national and international level, but much research has concentrated on single countries. Comparative research is developing, however, there are still restrictions due to data availability; a focus on western developed nations; and lack of funds/resources to build and develop connections with other scholars. Institutional, policy and cultural differences exist across individual nations, however, the nature and need for inter- and intra-generational transfers is universal. This new network of researchers will bring together expertise in the field, share current knowledge and importantly identify key gaps in understanding. The INTEGRATE Network will have a specific purpose of developing international research, and maintaining international links for the continued sharing and exchange of data, research and knowledge.

Anglophone scholarship has overwhelmingly privileged the history of correspondence in early modern Europe at the expense of knowledge-making (and sharing) across Northern and Baltic locations. Our workshop series responds to this gap, with the primary aim of drawing a new map across Northern European centres of learning. The objective is twofold. Firstly, the network emphasises the impact of academic mobility through the early modern migration of people and ideas, identifying, for the first time, an epistemic unity from the Baltic to Central Europe which linked geographical areas that might otherwise seem separate. Secondly, this focus fosters closer, interdisciplinary work on collections of early modern knowledge that have been hitherto marginalised within Anglophone scholarship. The network transcends national and disciplinary boundaries by bringing together intellectual historians, historians of science, literary scholars, art historians, maritime historians, linguists, and curators, from the UK, continental Europe, and North America. Northern Networks provides a platform for these different academic communities - who rarely otherwise collaborate in research - to meet, share and expand knowledge of the understudied intellectual networks across early modern Northern Europe. The first workshop will be held at the University of Aberdeen in March 2022. The focus will be on sixteenth and seventeenth-century medical research and academic mobility between Scotland and continental Europe. Our aim, drawing on the rich collections at the Sir Duncan Rice Library, is to reconsider the foreign transactions in medical research that paved the way to Isaac Newton's era in the British Isles. This workshop will focus especially on the archive of the physician Duncan Liddel (1561-1613) and the work of the Edinburgh-born medical practitioner John Craig (died 1620), who was first physician to James VI, later James I of England, and a practicing astronomer. Both the geographical focus and the designated time period of this research have been overlooked by past scholarship, which has tended to focus on continental academic activity during the 'Republic of Letters', later in the seventeenth century. The second workshop takes place at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Our disciplinary focus for this gathering is the history of collecting, and the methodology is artisanal epistemology, or making as a way of knowing, which enables a brand new study of mathematical communities in Central Europe who negotiated with their Northern counterparts. We chose Prague because of the well-known presence of Kepler and Tycho Brahe, but also to complement Aberdeen and Uppsala with a major imperial court. Within this scheme, we will attempt to highlight the rich cosmological production of makers such as Erasmus Habermel (1538-1606), Joost Bürgi (1552-1632) and the Prague-born clockmaker Heinrich Stolle. Building on the existing expertise of local scholars, who will 'dissect' a few selected pieces, this object-based workshop makes full use of the digital dissemination we explain in our management section of this bid. The third workshop will be at Uppsala University in March 2023. The Carolina Rediviva Library houses a collection of early modern astronomical texts known as the Copernicana, thought to have been owned by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) - the largest number of texts with his provenance in the world. In addition to its invaluable contribution to Copernican studies, the library also provides rich resources for the history of early modern medical research in the Waller Collections, which hold over 50,000 natural philosophical works dating from the middle ages to the 1950s. With a focus on the contents of these extraordinary archives, this workshop will reconsider the substantial, yet significantly understudied, early modern Swedish contribution to Northern European intellectual networks.

The ageing of populations is a global phenomenon. National governments are concerned about the financial implications of this. In particular, the extent to which states can provide services and support through public transfers of funds. This raises further concerns about the equity of transfers away from a declining younger generation toward a growing older generation. There are significant debates to be had around the level of taxes, availability of benefits, and age of retirement. This however addresses only half of the issue, and ignores the private transfers that take place within families. The transfer of private wealth (and in-kind support) is increasingly important not only for the life chances of younger generations but also the protection of older ones. Younger people's opportunities are increasingly dependent upon the level of assistance they receive as they face key life events (such as education, starting a family and home ownership). Furthermore, as limited public resources are stretched, support from families has (once again) become an important aspect for older people as an insurance against poverty and increased care needs. Much current works focuses on this 'generational conflict' - whether transfers happen, and which direction they operate: a public focus on upward transfers (from younger to older generations) or a private focus on downward transfers (from parents to children and grandchildren). But little research considers the implications of these transfers for the reproduction of inequalities and the welfare and wellbeing of future societies. The issue of transfers across and within generations is thus an emerging and growing area of concern at national and international level, but much research has concentrated on single countries. Comparative research is developing, however, there are still restrictions due to data availability; a focus on western developed nations; and lack of funds/resources to build and develop connections with other scholars. Institutional, policy and cultural differences exist across individual nations, however, the nature and need for inter- and intra-generational transfers is universal. This new network of researchers will bring together expertise in the field, share current knowledge and importantly identify key gaps in understanding. The INTEGRATE Network will have a specific purpose of developing international research, and maintaining international links for the continued sharing and exchange of data, research and knowledge.

There is growing evidence that extreme events such as heatwaves, rather than increases in average temperatures, will have the most immediate and harmful effects on plants and animals as the climate changes. This is particularly true for species-rich tropical ecosystems, where recent heatwaves have already caused severe population crashes for some species. Most studies investigating the impact of extreme climatic events on biodiversity focus on individual species in isolation. However, natural communities are complex, interacting networks of species, linked by competition, mutualism, predation and parasitism. We therefore need to understand what happens when whole communities of interacting species are subjected to a heatwave or other extreme climatic event, and how these effects change depending on the duration and intensity of the event. How resilient will the surviving populations and species be in the longer term, when faced with further extremes? The answer is likely to depend on both ecological responses (changes in the abundance and interactions of different species depending on their ecological tolerances), and evolutionary processes (the evolution of novel tolerances through natural selection). To understand fully how and why ecological communities are altered by extreme events, we need to carry out experiments simulating extreme conditions and follow the consequences over multiple generations. In most contexts such experiments would be practically or ethically impossible. However, we can design experiments that do exactly this by focusing on a special study system: food webs of Drosophila fruit flies and the parasitic wasps that consume them. At our study site in the rainforests of tropical Queensland, Australia, these flies and wasps form discrete ecological communities within individual rotting fruits. They have short generation times, allowing us to observe community responses to climate extremes in real time. Australian tropical rainforests are a high-diversity ecosystem that is threatened by climate change, and we expect rainforest insects to be particularly vulnerable because they are already operating close to the upper limits of their thermal tolerances: modest further increases in temperatures could make populations and communities unviable. These characteristics make our study system ideal for understanding the resilience of ecological systems to extreme climatic events. In our experiments, we will use heating cables in the rainforest to simulate heatwave conditions that are expected to affect Australian rainforests in the coming decades. We will then investigate the ecologically and evolutionary responses of individual species and the food web of interactions among them to further perturbations. By challenging communities that have previously been subjected to heat waves with further heat waves, we will be able to test under what conditions climatic extremes make communities more or less resilient to future shocks and understand the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that underpin community resilience.

Ecological communities are complex, interacting networks of species, linked by competition, mutualism, predation and parasitism. In the 'Origin of Species', Charles Darwin famously wrote of 'an entangled bank', comprising a bewildering richness of species and an even more complex web of connections among them. Fundamentally, ecologists and evolutionary biologists seek to unravel this complexity, by establishing why species occur where they do, why they replace each other under certain conditions, and how the species interactions that make up ecosystems will change as environments change. As the climate warms and extreme events become more frequent, existing connections between species are changing in strength, or being severed completely; and new connections are forming as species change in abundance and shift their distributions (e.g. colonising cooler habitats, while becoming locally extinct in warmer habitats). Biologists use information about the range of temperatures where species currently occur to predict where species will occur in a future, warmer world. However, better predictions about the consequences of climate change will be possible if we can also take into account changing interactions between species, as well as the potential for species to evolve to cope with new conditions. We urgently need to test how whole food webs of interacting species are structured by biological processes (e.g. competition and predation) and by temperature, and how these ecological networks will respond to climate change. It is also important to test the extent to which current adaptive divergence across species' geographical ranges will increase their resilience to future climate change. To achieve this, our project will exploit a unique model system (Drosophila fruit-flies and parasitic wasps that are associated with them, called parasitoids) in a high-diversity ecosystem threatened by climate change (Australian tropical rainforests). With this system we will use field observations, field transplant experiments and mathematical models to test: (i) what determines species' local distributions and food web structure; (ii) the responses of natural and simulated networks of interacting species to simulated climate change; and (iii) the underlying mechanisms driving these changes, including the effects of genetic variation among populations within species and the potential for rapid evolutionary adaptation to warmer temperatures. The outcome will be a better and more predictive understanding of how climate change will affect the biotic interactions that characterise biodiversity and underpin the functions and services of natural ecosystems.