It has been made clear by examples such as Ash Dieback, that our trees face a serious threat from new diseases and pests. As trees are everywhere and are well-loved parts of our landscape, an important part of our economy and an essential part of our biodiversity, their loss has serious consequences. However, dealing with each new threat as it comes along is difficult, expensive and potentially futile as threats can evolve so much faster than their tree hosts. Also, tree health is not just about a single pest or disease, but about growing trees in the right place, about keeping population sizes up, about ensuring seedlings get a chance to grow and about allowing forests to change as the environment changes. So, in order to find a sustainable long-term strategy for keeping our trees healthy, we need to consider the range of real and potential threats that trees face and try to deal with these together. At the same time, we need to ask what is possible for changing the way we grow trees: how do we use trees now, what do we want from our trees in the future, and how much change are we willing to accept? By finding a middle ground, that brings together the best biological knowledge with a clear understanding of the possible ways to adapt, we can give our trees the best possible chance of withstanding new threats. The most important part of finding a way to do this is bringing together many different groups of people, and different types of knowledge. A lot is known about many of our trees already, but usually this knowledge comes from unlinked, independent studies and rarely do results from one study tell us something about another, even for the same tree species. Much better coordination is needed. To show how this can be done, we aim to use the example of Scots pine, an important native tree species. For Scots pine, we know of several serious threats that are either here or are likely to reach the UK soon. The remaining native Scots pine forests are small and fragmented, but we know that they are adapted to their local environments: so pine trees from one part of the country grow differently than those from another. There are large plantations of Scots pine in many parts of the UK - there is ten times as much planted as remains in the native forests - and these are often at much higher densities than are found in nature, and often alongside plantations of pines from other parts of the world. There is also a strong cultural attachment to the species; in many places pinewoods are being replanted and it is often used as a garden or amenity tree. Our project aims to measure how variable and adaptable are the threats to Scots pine, to test how much variation there is in the tree species in resistance to these threats, and to find ways to get people involved in making healthier pine forests. By doing this we also aim to show how the same thing can be done for any other tree species, and to put in place the tools for getting it done. We will focus on three important threats to Scots pine - Dothistroma needle blight, the pinetree Lappet moth and pine pitch canker. We will bring together a group of scientists - specialists in ecology, tree genetics, forest pathology, plant biochemistry, fungal ecology and evolution and social science - who will work together on the same, carefully chosen pine trees. This work will tell us how much the UK Scots pine population varies and how much it can change from generation to generation; how populations of the threats grow and change; and what can be done to make the pine forests we have more resilient. We will bring in lessons from crop agriculture, where similar problems have been faced for generations, and adapt these for trees and forests, that have much longer lifespans. Finally, by talking to people who work with and use trees, and the general public, we will find ways to use this information to make things change on the ground.

Aonachadh (un-ach-A) is gaelic for coming together, for two faces of a mountain that meet to form a uniting ridge. Building on and expanding an existing network of over 280+ organisations, we will bring together a wide range of stakeholders interested in investable biodiversity uplift projects. We will develop methods for creating standardised, accessible, and verifiable data, metrics and tools for voluntary biodiversity markets, and co-create research questions and a programme of work that can lead to a common framework for data gathering and business models and community engagement methods acceptable to supply-side projects as well as demand side investors. Research activity will enable us to come together in workshops and working groups to collaboratively co-create research questions, and then share, discuss and learn from lessons emerging from biodiversity uplift pilot projects engaging with voluntary markets in Scotland. Our research network - of established and emerging projects, financiers and policy makers - will contribute to NERC's Nature Positive Future programme from the unique context of Scotland, which is experiencing unprecedented increases in land values alongside a land reform agenda that seeks to deliver benefits from biodiversity markets for local communities. Scotland's place-based approach to ecosystem market development provides a unique opportunity to understand interactions between biodiversity, finance and society and what this means for environmental and economic resilience. Recent and ongoing work from the core team, and established connections with UK stakeholders and channel partners Ecosystems Knowledge Network and the Green Finance Institute, means we can initiate a quick start for more results and impact.

The northeast region of Brazil is relatively dry compared to the rest of the country, with unusually irregular rainfall patterns and associated frequent droughts. The soils there tend to be relatively fertile and so, despite crop failures sometimes occurring in drier years, the area is reasonably densely populated with about 15% of Brazil's population living there; but under what are generally impoverished conditions. This has led to extreme land-use pressures on the natural vegetation and widespread degradation of remaining lands. As in other parts of the world with similar soils and climate, the natural vegetation of the area is a form of deciduous scrub, known locally as Caatinga. Probably because Caatinga typically lacks the complexity and grandeur of moist tropical forests, this vegetation type has been to a large extent neglected to date both in terms of conservation programmes and scientific enquiry. This neglect has serious consequences given the enormous destruction of the Caatinga, which exceeds that of the neighbouring biomes of Amazonia and the Cerrado. Because of their potential importance in future warmer and drier climates in Brazil, conservation of the plant species of the Caatinga, which are adapted to high temperatures and seasonally erratic rainfall, is vital. Designed as an integrated research program involving both Brazilian and UK researchers 'Nordeste' will attempt to redress this neglect: 1. Through the establishment of a permanent plot network similar to that existing in moist tropical forests, allowing measurements of Caatinga canopy structure and dynamics and both their short- and long-term responses to climate change to be evaluated for the first time. 2. With the aid of new DNA barcoding measurements designed to better quantify the biodiversity of the region. 3. Through a comprehensive analysis of the biogeochemistry of natural and disturbed ecosystems to develop an understanding of how nutrient cycling processes vary in response to variations in soils and climate and human activity 4. Via a series of detailed structural, physiological measurements across the wide range of different Caatinga sub-types found in the region. These will be made both above- and below-ground and in natural and degraded ecosystems of the region. A special emphasis will be placed on measurements designed to help us understand why it is that under certain circumstances it is that very high biomass stands of Caatinga occur despite the very low rainfall. 5. Glasshouse experiments comparing water stress responses of seedlings native to moist forest, savanna and caatinga will also be undertaken in order to try and understand what specific metabolic adaptions are involved in plant adaptions to frequent and/or erratic conditions of extreme soil water deficit. 6. Via an integrated modelling program to provide new parameterisations of surface fluxes for semi-aid ecosystems in general and to provide new insights into variations in woody plant shoot: root allocation patterns in response to variation in precipitation regime. To achieve these aims, the project has been designed as a series of six inter-related field-based workpackages, with a seventh workpackage focussed on modelling of species distributions, ecosystem fluxes and developing a mechanistic understanding of caatinga vegetation functional responses to both variations in climate and soil properties. Designed with a view to also producing a series of well-defined products to assist both policy makers and local communities to better manage this unique resource - for example, online guides to ecologically dominant and economically useful plants, the study will serve to provide a valuable first step towards a better understanding of Caatinga vegetation and its responses to anthropogenic and land-use change pressures.

The science of naming, classifying and identifying species, known as taxonomy, is absolutely fundamental to building scientific research programmes on biodiversity. Without knowing what an organism is and being able to refer to it unambiguously, scientists would be unable to make the scientific progress required in food security, medical research and resilience to climate change. However, as we develop more knowledge the science of taxonomy becomes increasingly complex. Between 1753 and 2016, the number of known plant species has risen from 6,000 to 390,000, an average increase of nearly 1,500 species each year. Over 2,000 new species were discovered in 2015. The number of specimens held globally in herbaria has also increased. There are now over 3,000 herbaria around the world holding nearly 400 million specimens. Any taxonomist working now therefore has an immense and expensive task of gathering information about the species that they are studying, involving travel to various herbaria or the risk of damage or loss to specimens if they are sent on loan. With about 10-20% of flowering plant species still to be described, it is estimated that about half of these have already been collected and are held in herbaria around the world. Herbarium collections are vital to taxonomy and biodiversity research so we need to find solutions to making the information more widely accessible in order to speed up the research process given the scale of the challenges we are facing. In many cases, a high resolution digital image of the specimen with electronic collection data attached will enable researchers to carry out much of the basic work. By digitising the herbarium collections we can provide these resources to taxonomists in every part of the world. However, digitisation is only one step of the process. We also need to create an environment where taxonomic researchers can bring all the digital resources together with the physical specimens, using tools and equipment to make working with massive amounts of complex information easy and intuitive. This kind of workstation is most famously seen in television programmes such as CSI, but we need to be implementing the technology and data management in our institutes if we are going to have a chance to produce the taxonomic basis for global biodiversity in time to help its survival.

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