Climate change will intensify current urban problems like flooding, water quality, high temperatures and air pollution. In China, where cities are expanding rapidly, and Europe, there are opportunities to better manage the greenspace (parks, trees, woodland) and bluespace (rivers, lakes) to provide multiple benefits to people. This project uses the idea of 'Sponge Cities' where nature-based solutions' soak up high rainfall, reduce water and air pollution, high temperatures and noise, and improve recreation and health opportunities. We will work with businesses to design and finance innovative solutions in Chinese and European cities, which can be followed around the world.

Disease and contaminants both pose major risks to wildlife and Man. This is well recognised and there are a variety of surveillance schemes in the UK that monitor wildlife for occurrence and severity of diseases and/or contaminants. These schemes complement rather than duplicate each other but share many operational procedures and so can face similar challenges. The information gathered from each surveillance scheme is communicated to a wide spectrum of end users. The various surveillance schemes are run by different government agencies and laboratories, research centres, institutes and Universities. The funders of the schemes are an equally diverse range of government departments, agencies and industry. A key difficulty caused by this myriad of researchers and funding organisations is that it hampers communication between schemes. The schemes only have opportunistic and ad hoc mechanisms to exchange knowledge or develop common best practices that would facilitate sharing of samples and data. Such cooperation can also be hampered by differences between funders in the priorities that they wish surveillance schemes to address. Furthermore, because each scheme reports its findings largely in isolation, it is difficult for end users to obtain an overview of common or widespread threats. The main aim of this project is to establish a Wildlife Disease & Contaminant Monitoring & Surveillance (WILDCOMS) network. This will provide a partnership between nine current UK contaminant and disease surveillance schemes. The network will foster and facilitate knowledge exchange, harmonisation towards best practice, collaboration and sharing of resources. It will also enhance and widen communication with and between end-users, and in particular will provide end-users with an holistic overview of environmental disease and contaminant risk. This should make identification of emerging hazards and risks easier and quicker to spot, and provide the more integrated scientific evidence base needed to formulate better and timely policy and regulation. The specific objectives, delivered in four work packages, will be: (i) to establish and develop the network through regular partners meetings (ii) to use the network to maximise communication of integrated surveillance information to a wide range of end-users through an annual Stakeholder Forum and through collation of findings from all schemes into web-based quarterly bulletins (iii) development towards harmonised operational procedures (sample collection, measurement, data recording and sample archiving) that will facilitate sharing and collaboration between schemes and eliminate duplication of effort (iv) to develop a sustainable model for WILDCOMS and extend its scope to a European scale through linkage with key European partners and networks WILDCOMS will thus facilitate sharing of skills, expertise, knowledge, samples and data, thereby maximising the use of available resources. This will result in better value for money overall and foster development of new initiatives. The benefits the network will deliver can be summarised as: (a) ntegrated surveillance leading to an improved scientific evidence base with which regulators and policy makers can assess threats to wild vertebrates and human health (b) better long term management, sharing and dissemination of samples, best practice and data (c) a recognised forum that will facilitate discussion and collaboration between surveillance schemes and different end-users and stakeholders (d) an enhanced UK research base by increasing knowledge through scientific publications and greater awareness of activities and specimen archives (e) benefits for industrial end users including potential for averting costs by preventing problems (f) benefits to quality of life to the through improved risk assessment

Climate change is already affecting the Earth's ecosystems. While most people think of increasing average temperatures when they think about climate change, recent years have shown us that even in the UK flooding and droughts are becoming more common, their effects devastating for many animals and plants. However, while the aboveground effects of these extreme weather events can clearly be seen, the carnage belowground remains hidden from our eyes. The soil is inhabited by millions of tiny creatures: a handful of soil can contain billions of bacterial cells, from tens of thousands of bacterial species, as well as hundreds of fungal species. The biomass of the microorganisms that live in the soil can even outweigh the biomass of the much larger animals that live on it! But these creatures are not immune to the consequences of drought and flooding. Especially bacteria don't cope very well with drought: they have semi-permeable cell walls and drought causes their cells to shrivel and die. After rewetting, they swell up and explode. Fungi, which perform many of the same functions as bacteria in the soil, are better able to cope with extreme drought than bacteria: they have stronger cell walls and are slower-growing than bacteria, which makes them more likely to resist stresses like drought. Flooding, in contrast, causes low oxygen conditions in the soil, which might be more favourable for bacteria, which are aquatic organisms, than for fungi. However, bacterial and fungal populations themselves consist of thousands of species, and these species might differ in their response to drought and flooding. But, we have very little idea of how bacterial and fungal populations are affected by these extreme weather events. Although soil bacteria and fungi are hidden beneath our feet, they perform functions that are crucial for the functioning of the Earth's ecosystems: they decompose organic matter, thereby releasing nutrients for plant growth. These are the processes that support all ecosystems on land, including the agricultural systems that produce our food. However, when bacterial and fungal populations are affected by extreme weather events, so will the processes that they perform, and these changes in processes can in turn affect aboveground plants and animals. So, these unseen organisms have the potential to make the consequences of extreme weather events that we can see with our eyes even worse. However, at present, we don't know how we can predict how changes in bacterial and fungal populations will result in a change in the processes that they perform. In this project, we will investigate how bacterial and fungal populations that live in the soil are affected by extreme weather events, and we aim to identify the traits that are responsible for this. For example, some groups of bacteria can form spores and thus survive a wide range of stresses, but there might be many other traits that can allow bacteria and fungi to cope with extreme weather events. We will use a unique experiment in which we subject soils from different climates across Europe not just to drought and flooding, but also to heatwave and freezing, and we will combine this with state-of-the-art DNA sequencing and bioinformatics to quantify bacterial and fungal response and to infer the traits responsible for this. In addition, we will measure how the processes that these organisms perform change with these extreme weather events. This work will result in fundamental knowledge on soil bacterial and fungal response to extreme weather events, and in a framework that allows us to predict how soils and their functioning will respond to extreme weather events. This knowledge is of the highest importance for adapting the Earth's ecosystems to climate change.

This proposal is to prove the concept and develop a high throughput methodology for screening virus infections and immunities in wild plant and insect communities. We propose to obtain small RNA profiles of the plant and insect communities from the Wytham Wood, Oxfordshire, by using Solexa high throughput sequencing. The anti-virus small interfering (avsi)RNAs that are produced by the host gene silencing systems against the virus RNAs will be screened for viral origins. We anticipate the detection of the avsiRNAs against the known prevalent viruses at the site and will use these viruses as positive controls to optimize conditions of sample preparation, sequencing, and bioinformatics. We also expect to discover the prevalence of previously unconfirmed and unknown viruses, and we plan to validate these newly detected infections by using the conventional methods (e.g., RTPCR, cloning and sequencing, Northern Blotting, etc.) to determine the sensitivity and accuracy of the high throughput methodology. To enable the conventional method assessment, we plan to label samples for each sampled species by using sequence tags. The sampling regime is designed for achieving a sensitivity of shotgun detection of 5% infection rate for plant populations. The tagged samples will be pooled together for high throughput sequencing runs to achieve cost effectiveness. The resulting sequences will be sorted back to their original sample identities and analyzed. Results will be validated by using the conventional methods with the sorted specific samples. Mass post-sequencing analyses will also be performed without sorting the samples to their original identities. Results from the specific analyses and mass analyses will be compared. The mass analyses without the requirement of sorting samples are designed for testing a capacity of genetic random sampling from an ecosystem without restriction of sampling regimes. The technology will offer a broad range of applications from large scale random sampling in natural conditions during the environment change, to defined survey in agricultural and the other managed conditions.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at www.rcuk.ac.uk/StudentshipTerminology. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.