The LEAD2 project is built on the results of the LEAD project, but with significant new & innovative contributions. The rational for setting up the LEAD2 project is two-fold: 1)need for deeper & broader innovative capacity building on university governance and academic leadership among Chinese and European HEIs, 2)the lack of Knowledge Base and Referencing tool for academic leaders. Therefore, the LEAD2 has four main objectives: 1)customise innovative specialized & targeted blended training for academic leaders, 2)deepen the understanding of university governance and academic leadership (AL) in diverse contexts through comparative studies, 3)create an online Knowledge Base and Referencing Tool for academic leaders, 4)establish an EU-China Center on AL. The key results will include 1) customised blended training (MOOCs & F2F workshop series) targeted for young, middle-level and top-level academic leaders; 2)research reports and publications that significantly contribute to the understanding of university governance and AL in China and the EU; 3)created online Knowledge Base and Quick Referencing tool for (potential) academic leaders; 4)a sustainable EU-China Center on AL. The project will have significant impact in further strengthening the EU-China cooperation in university governance, supporting the modernisation and internationalisation of HEIs and fostering innovative capacities of Chinese and European universities. It will also further contribute to the EU-China High Level People-to-People Dialogue (HPPD), especially the EU-China cooperation in higher education. The key stakeholders include university academic leaders at different levels including potential academic leaders, Chinese and European HEIs, and relevant policy makers.The Consortium is a strong and unique partnership with 6 European and 6 Chinese universities, which ensures a complementarity of expertise and also regional relevance of capacity building in different parts of China & the EU.

Stalagmites and other carbonates deposited in caves provide a potentially powerful record of past climate. Stalagmites have a wider geographical dispersion than lakes or ice cores and provide an ideal terrestrial complement to marine sediment cores. Stalagmites have additional advantages in that they can be very accurately and precisely dated, and that they suffer no sedimentary mixing so can provide very high resolution geochemical records. These advantages have led to a burgeoning interest in reconstruction of climate from stalagmites in the last decade - a trend that looks set to continue. There is, however, a big problem with such stalagmite paleoclimate research. This is that we cannot yet reliably turn geochemical measurements in stalagmites into quantitative information about the past climate. In some locations, stable-isotope data provides qualitative information about change, but we desperately need to develop better understanding of these and other geochemical proxies so we can reliably use them to reconstruct the past. The work proposed here will provide understanding of stalagmite paleoclimate proxies through a series of laboratory experiments mimicking the cave environment in which stalagmites grow. We have built a laboratory apparatus that allows super-saturated waters with high CO2 contents to drop onto glass-plates in closely controlled conditions and to degas to form calcite in a manner identical to that seen in the cave environment. We have demonstrated the success of this apparatus and used it to assess the role of temperature and drip-rate in controlling stalagmite geochemistry. Here we propose to replicate these experiments, and to go beyond them to also understand the role of variables such as pCO2, solution saturation, and humidity in controlling stalagmite geochemistry. We will characterize the samples grown in this way both for their chemistry and for their crystallographic features, and apply some simple models to develop a significantly better understanding of trace-metal and stable isotopes incorporation into stalagmites, under conditions of both thermodynamic equilibrium and kinetic fractionation. This work will have direct implications for the interpretation of existing and new stalagmite records, with perhaps the clearest reward coming in the interpretation of high-resolution climate records. We will also apply some new geochemical tools which have seen little previous application to the cave environment. The clumping of minor isotopes within molecules (such as the carbonate ion) has been shown to be temperature dependant, providing a potentially powerful paleothermometer in caves, but one that is unfortunately complicated by kinetic effects. Our laboratory samples will help, via a collaboration with Yale University, to understand the uses and pitfalls of this clumped-isotope paleothermometer. We will also measure some relatively unexplored isotope systems such as Ca, Li, Sr, and Mg isotopes to assess their use as paleoproxies. Finally, we will assess, by adding microbes to our experiments, the possibility that life plays a role in the precipitation and chemistry of stalagmites. Such cave carbonates are normally thought to grow inorganically, but very recent culturing and sequencing work has uncovered a diverse microbial assemblage on stalagmite surfaces, with some species known to have a role in carbonate precipitation in other environments. We will include microbial strains found in the natural cave environment in our experiments to assess the importance of life for growth of cave carbonates. In total, the outcome of these laboratory experiments will be a much improved understanding of the geochemistry of stalagmites, significantly advancing their usefulness as archives of past climate, and therefore providing new insights into the magnitude, timing, and processes of climate change on the continents.

Charles Darwin's great dilemma was why complex life in the form of fossil animals appear so abruptly in rocks around 520 million years ago (Ma), in what is widely known as the Cambrian explosion. During recent decades, exceptionally preserved animal fossils have been found throughout the Cambrian Period, which began 20 million years earlier, and arguably even through the entire, preceding Ediacaran Period, which directly followed the worldwide 'Snowball Earth' glaciations (~715 - 635 Ma). Most of these exceptional deposits were discovered in South China, which possesses the best preserved and dated geological record of the marine environment for this time. In this genuinely collaborative UK-China project, we propose to use the South China rock archives to construct a much higher resolution, four-dimensional (temporal-spatial) picture of the evolutionary history of the earliest animals and their environment. Towards this endeavour, our group combines complementary expertise on both the UK and Chinese research teams in: 1) geochronology - the dating of rocks; 2) geochemistry - for reconstructing nutrient and the coupled biogeochemical cycle (O and C); 3) phylogenomics - for making a genetically-based tree of life to compare with, and fill gaps in the fossil records; and finally 4) mathematical modelling, which will enable us to capture geological information, in such a way as to test key hypotheses about the effects of animal evolution on environmental stability. Our project aims to address three central scientific questions: 1) How did the coupled biogeochemical cycles of C, O, N, P and S change during these evolutionary radiations?; 2) Did environmental factors, such as oxygen levels, rather than biological drivers, such as the emergence of specific animal traits, determine the trajectory of evolutionary change?; and 3) Did the rise of animals increase the biosphere's resilience against perturbations? This last question has relevance to today's biosphere, as the modern Earth system and its stabilising feedbacks arose during this key interval. By studying it in more detail, and establishing temporal relationships and causality between key events, we can find out how the modern Earth system is structured, including which biological traits are key to its continued climatic and ecosystem stability. One further goal of this project is to strengthen existing and establish new, and genuinely meaningful collaborations between the UK and Chinese investigators. We will achieve this by working jointly in four research teams, by integrating all existing and new data into an international database, called the Geobiodiversity Database, sharing a joint modelling framework, and by providing collaborative training for the early career researchers involved in this project each year of the project.

It is hard not to have a fascination for the Permo-Triassic mass extinction (PTME). No other catastrophe in history of the world was so far-reaching and all encompassing. Even the death of the dinosaurs does not look quite as bad when compared with the PTME because, even though these terrestrial giants were wiped out, lots of other things survived, especially at the bottom of the ocean. In contrast, no environment, no habitat and no location was safe at the end of the Permian. Death struck in the deepest oceans, in the shallowest waters, and from the equator to the pole. Understanding what happened during the PTME, ~250 myrs ago, and how life recovered is the subject of a new NERC-funded research programme. Called Eco-PT, it is a major collaboration between British and Chinese scientists. The finger of blame for the PTME points to a giant volcanic region in Siberia. These erupted at the time of the extinction and belched out huge volumes of damaging gases. This included carbon dioxide which is thought to have caused dramatic greenhouse warming and lead to dangerously hot, oxygen-poor and acidified oceans - all bad consequences for marine life. What isn't understood is why conditions got so bad - there have been other giant volcanic eruptions that have not done anywhere near so much harm. The project will look at the extinctions on land and in the sea to examine when and how these two very different ecosystems collapsed. Did everything die at once or did the extinction on land precede that in the oceans or vice versa? China has the best rocks in the world for such a study and intense collecting of fossils will help answer these questions. Precise controls on the age will be achieved using new, ultra-high precision age dating involving uranium decay in volcanic minerals. It is also possible that there was feedback between the terrestrial and marine extinctions, for example plant dieback on land may have changed nutrient input into the oceans and so altered plankton populations that normal food webs were no longer sustainable. The potential causes will be investigated using the latest techniques. Thus, a new technique, involving analysis of molecules in fossil pollen will be used to asses the role of ozone loss. Other volcanic gases, such a sulphur dioxide may also have been involved in the terrestrial extinction and this role can now be investigated by examining trace concentration of sulphur compounds and their isotopes preserved in terrestrial rocks that formed at this time in China. State-of-the-art modelling approaches will also be used to better understand regional and global climate changes during and after the mass extinction and to reconstruct the style of ecosystem recovery. Climate modelling of different scenarios will enable these conditions to be better understand and will help us understand the nature of super-greenhouse worlds with greater clarity. The prolonged recovery from the PTME is also one of the most fascinating intervals of the world's history. Some groups bounce back quickly whereas others remained in the doldrums for millions of years. The recovery style varied greatly; some groups show an increase in diversity but not their disparity whereas others show an increase of both. What this meant for ecosystem stability and its resilience (ability to cope with further stresses) will be investigated using ecosystem modelling approaches that look at interaction between species and the interplay between form and function in terrestrial animals.

The rare earth elements (REE), and in particular neodymium and dysprosium, are essential for renewable energy devices such as wind turbines and the development of electric motors for transport. At present the REE are sourced from either low concentration weathered granitoid (ion adsorption clay) deposits, or from high concentration carbonatite-related deposits, especially the World's dominant REE mine in hard-rock, altered carbonatite at Bayan Obo, China. The one major mine operator outside of China is the Mount Weld weathered carbonatite, Australia. Weathered carbonatites such as Mount Weld are some of the world's richest REE deposits and several are subject to active exploration. As part of the NERC Global Partnerships Seedcorn fund project WREED, we have carried out preliminary investigations of weathering products on carbonatite hosted REE deposits. Three end member weathering products have been identified (1) carbonate mineral dissolution leaves behind primary REE minerals, forming residual deposits; (2) dissolution and reprecipitation of REE phosphates and fluorcarbonate minerals results in the formation of new hydrated REE-phosphate or -carbonate minerals producing supergene enrichment; and (3) the formation of clay and iron-manganese oxide caps (either from weathering of the deposit itself, or from soil transport from surrounding rocks) that may hold the REE adsorbed to mineral surfaces (c.f. the ion adsorption deposits). High grade, weathered carbonatite deposits typically consist of a range of soil and weathered horizons, that may be phosphate-rich due to dissolution and re-precipitation of apatite and monazite during the weathering process (Mount Weld, Australia), overlain by later sediments that may be REE enriched either by accumulation of residual minerals in lake sediments (Tomtor, Russia). The mineralogy of the ore zone is linked to, but distinct from, the unweathered carbonatite rock, and includes phosphates, crandallite-group minerals, carbonates and fluorcarbonates and oxides. In this study we will utilise bulk rock geochemistry, sequential leaching techniques, mineral chemistry and microbiology to investigate the processes producing different weathered REE deposit styles in carbonatites and their influence on the economic REE grade and environmental impact of deposits. Bulk rock geochemistry will be used to quantify element enrichments and depletions relative to bedrock, and to investigate the potential for ion adsorption style mineralisation in weathered carbonatites. Mineral chemical techniques will be used to investigate the timing of weathering, host minerals of the REE, potential beneficial or harmful changes in chemistry relative to primary minerals, and proxies for the environmental controls on weathering style. These data will be combined with existing records of surface morphology and weathering depth to produce overall genetic models linking climate, geomorphology and geochemistry that will allow prediction of the resource potential of the carbonatite weathered zone. The results will be communicated with industry and the public to raise awareness of the resource requirements of decarbonisation, and potential routes to increased extraction efficiency and reduced impact.