This proposal systematically addresses the development, provision, and integration of services, across the European Research Infrastructures (RIs) landscape, that the scientific community can use to investigate the effects on health and the environment that artificial materials (including plastics, micro-, nano-, and biotechnological materials) can have. Exposure to such materials may occur as a result of their intended use (e.g., food packaging) or at the end of their lifecycle (e.g. plastic wear). These services, which are relevant to several areas of important societal and economic impact, are expected to span multiple scales and disciplines, including high-quality metrology, structural biology, microbiology, and ecotoxicology. The main output of this proposal will be a thorough overview of extant service offer by European RIs with respect to questions from state-of-the-art of scientific research in the aforementioned domains. FHERITALE will identify common strategies for the coordination and optimization of services at different RIs geared towards increasing the accessibility of relevant technologies. In parallel, it will identifty those service and technology gaps that are hampering high-impact research and preventing a timely assessment of the repercussions of new materials on health and the environment. These gaps constitute high-priority areas for future development. FHERITALE will design a coordination framework for the RIs to drive these key technological developments. The technological focus of this application includes emerging areas of research for which international interest is rapidly growing. The interdisciplinary nature of the cluster of identified technologies will connect health, food, and environment research, constituting one of the first examples of practical application of the “One Health” approach. This coordination effort will also serve as a fertile ground for further interdisciplinary research among RIs from the H&F and other domains.

Terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystems are being challenged by global changes, and threats to agricultural and forestry ecosystems represent some of the most serious environmental and socio-economic menaces that the planet and humanity are facing. Climate change (CG) is widely recognised as one of the most impactful global changes, and since it goes hand-by-hand with biodiversity and services loss in terrestrial ecosystems, they should be tackled together. Microbes constitute the life support system of the biosphere, but they are its most overlooked fraction and are not considered in the context of CG. The overall understanding of the impact of CG on the assembly and functions of microbiomes is still very limited. How the complex microbes-plants-soil interactions and its consequences on plant performance and productivity are impacted by CG is still largely unknown. Additional knowledge also needs to be obtained on the overall ecosystem functioning, and to what extent microbiomes may mitigate stress conditions due to CG. The project MICROBES-4-CLIMATE will provide a wider community of users/researchers, irrespective of location, efficient access to a cluster of complementary world-class Research Infrastructures and their integrated, advanced services along with training and scientific and/or technical support, to address such need. An excellence-driven programme of Transnational Access, which is at the core of the project, will enable users to conduct curiosity-driven research addressing terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystems, in light of the abovementioned multidimensional and still poorly understood microbiomes-plants-soil-environment interactions, and its roles in CG responses, resilience, and mitigation. This will foster the advancement of frontier knowledge and also pave the way to applied research on harnessing plant-microbiome interactions to improve the climate resiliency of plants/crops and to enable e.g., precision, sustainable and resilient agriculture.

Europe urgently needs to find pathways towards agroecological transition of agroecosystems in support to food security, climate change resilience, biodiversity and soil carbon stocks restoration. In PHENET, the European Research Infrastructures (RI) on plant phenotyping (EMPHASIS), ecosystems experimentation (AnaEE), long-term observation (eLTER) and data management and bioinformatics (ELIXIR) will join their forces to co-develop, with a diversity of innovative companies, new tools and methods - meant to contribute to new RI services - for the identification of future-proofed combinations of species, genotypes and management practices in front of the most likely climatic scenarios across Europe. Ambitioning to go beyond current highly instrumented but often spatially and temporally limited RI installations, PHENET derived services will allow wide access to enlarged sources of in-situ phenotypic and environmental data thanks to (i) new AI-based multi (agroecology-related) traits multi-sensors devices (ii) to unleashed access to high resolution Earth Observation data connected to ground based data, (iii) FAIR data support for connection with (iv) new generation of predictive modeling solutions encompassing AI and digital twins. Developments will be challenged by and implemented in a series of eight Use Cases covering a large range of agroecosystems but also of ecosystems to demonstrate portability of solutions. Several of these Use Cases will mobilize on-farm data. A large effort will be devoted to training RI staff and beyond through a sustained collection of training material fed by experts. Outreaching activities will aim at enlarging the range of RI users. PHENET will not only strengthen RI but will also have major impact on the development of innovative companies on phenotyping, envirotyping and precision agriculture as well as on the emergence of climate smart crop varieties and innovative practices fitted to climate change and agroecological transition.

The overarching objectives of AQUASERV are to bring together, enhance, integrate and customise RI capacities (including facilities, instruments and expertise) and through the provision of transnational access (on-site or remote) and/or virtual access, to significantly further scientific advance and promote and facilitate the implementation of European Common Fisheries Policy, the Farm to Fork Strategy, the Sustainable Blue Economy and the European Green Deal. AQUASERV will achieve these objectives by offering scientists from academia and business remote and on-site transnational (TA) and virtual (VA) access to an advanced set of European research infrastructures and its nodes related to research and management of marine and freshwater biological resources, food and biotechnology. These include the European Marine Biological Resource Centre ERIC (EMBRC), the Analysis and Experimentation on Ecosystems ERIC, The Aquaculture for Excellence for Aquaculture in Fish (Aquaexcel), and the Infrastructure for Promoting Metrology in Food and Nutrition (METROFOOD), as well as the International Council for Exploration of the Sea, both a service provider and stakeholder. It also includes the Research Infrastructure for Science and Innovation Policy Studies (RISIS) to bring contributions from the social sciences and to bring results nearer to policy makers ensuring societal impact. To enhance, integrate and customise RI capacities, collaboration between partners and new pipelines to meet the objectives of the project will be developed during the first 3 years and will make available to users. To ensure these capacities will not be lost, a sustainability work package involving stakeholders will address the project legacy. To maximize impact, AQUASERV will build a communication network among the partnership and develop a dissemination and outreach programme. Furthermore, an advanced training programme will be developed to capture future users and will be updated during the p

The ERICs (European Research Infrastructure Consortia), under the umbrella of the ERIC Forum, represent one of the leading science policy voices in Europe and play a key role in structuring the research infrastructure landscape. Following the successful set-up and implementation of the ERIC Forum (2019-2022), further efforts are needed to consolidate its achievements and expand the coordination and monitoring of the ERICs. This project aims to structure the cooperation between ERICs, support the implementation of the ERIC Regulation and ERICs services, and consolidate the integration of the ERICs in the European Research Area by deepening the ERIC Forum’s contribution to research policies. To reach its objectives, the project relies on a multi-disciplinary consortium involving all identified ERICs, both multi- and single-sited, and representing the five science clusters of the ERICs. The project is structured in four thematic pillars: 1) Monitoring and Reporting, 2) Reinforcing European research infrastructure policy and international cooperation; 3) Implementing the ERIC Regulation, strengthening capacities and identifying possible shared resources; 4) Coordinating the project, ERIC Forum Executive Board secretariat and communication. The activities carried out within the project will ensure the implementation of specific results on three key target groups: the ERICs and ERICs-to-be, in order to increase their knowledge and propose solutions for key aspects of the ERIC Regulation implementation; the policy-makers and stakeholders by setting-up and managing the new ERIC Forum monitoring and reporting platform, thus ensuring an easy access to updated and consolidated data and information about the ERICs, as well a further strengthened role in the European science policy; and finally the users, as the project will investigate the sustainability and open access of its services, as well as address the challenges related to the commercial aspects of service provision.