Impactful knowledge generation and utilisation, aiming at addressing environmental and sustainability challenges, requires meaningful interaction between scientists, stakeholders, policymakers and society. This study identifies key success factors and challenges at the science-policy-practice interaction, drawing on document analysis, interviews, and workshops involving experts, policymakers, and funders of environmental and sustainability research and innovation across 14 European countries. Experiences from current practices highlight the highly variable contexts for interaction and communication throughout Europe, a diverse range of tools and approaches, and differing levels of available resources. Siloed structures and the need to engage various societal sectors and levels of governance remain significant challenges. The development and employment of expertise in communication, interaction and knowledge co-creation, capable to orchestrate this variability, is essential. Greater recognition of the diverse dimensions of inclusive participation is proposed to ensure that environmental and sustainability research and innovation, aimed at societal transformation, leaves no one behind. © 2026 Lyytimäki J et al.
The responses of populations and communities to environmental change, including eutrophication, biodiversity loss, and invasive species, are in large part determined by the network and strength of interactions among species, such as one species consuming another. Strong interactions between species lead effects to propagate strongly through a community, similar to the spread of ripples caused by a pebble thrown into a pond. Weak interactions, in contrast, cause slower and dampened spread of effects across the populations in a community. We must know and measure the strength of these interactions among species if we are to predict the ecological consequences of environmental change. There is, however, lack of clarity about the best ways to measure interactions. Our primary aim is to make a comparison of methods for quantifying interactions and predicting community dynamics. Laboratory based microbial ecosystems are ideal for this research, due to their fast dynamics and their ease of manipulation. Interactions estimated in these model ecosystems will be used in dynamical models, which will make predictions about the effects of two novel perturbations: extinction and eutrophication. Comparison of the actual outcome of the perturbations with the model predictions, both at the level of individual species, and the whole community, will provide urgently required answers about how to measure interactions in order to predict community dynamics in changing environments. The research will also contribute to the methodology for measuring interactions in microbial communities. Finally, it will provide a young scientist with a challenging and productive research project, involving training in a range of ecological research methods.