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LINKTOFUN (Linking tree and belowground biodiversity to forest Ecosystem function) beschäftigt sich mit der Beziehung zwischen Baum- und Mykorrhizenbiodiversität und der Funktion und Stabilität von Waldökosystemen. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt ist die Verbindung zwischen Biodiversität und der Kohlenstoffdynamik und -Speicherung im Boden. Untersuchungen sollen in Naturreservaten, auf einer neugegründeten Baumbiodiversitätsversuchsfläche in Tulln sowie in Mesokosmen durchgeführt werden. Das Projekt liefert einen wichtigen Beitrag zum Verständnis von dem Zusammenhang zwischen Biodiversität und Ökosystemleistungen von Wäldern.
The world-wide demand for primary plant products to be used for food, feed and fuel is increasing dramatically. The foreseen climate changes are expected to have a negative impact on plant productivity in addition. Future agriculture urgently needs new crop plant varieties with enhanced and sustainable productivity. To meet this challenge, CropLife focuses on leaf lifespan as a major determinant of plant productivity and aims to develop new breeding strategies for prolonging leaf photosynthesis and delaying senescence processes. The network focuses on barley and perennial ryegrass, which are excellent models for research and crop development in Europe. The CropLife primary objectives will be addressed in the four work packages. These are: the identification of key factors initiating senescence (1), and proteins regulating leaf lifespan (2), the elucidation of molecular mechanisms of senescence-associated protein degradation and nitrogen remobilization (3), and the analysis of lifespan and exploitation of genetic variation in lifespan in order to breed new varieties with increased productivity (4). CropLife provides cross-sector experience by integrating partners from the public and private sectors. The training programme includes state-of the-art local training activities and network-wide courses, summer schools and workshops. Young researchers will be trained in a range of cutting edge research skills, as well as in complementary skills that will enhance their career prospects. Further benefits will arise from secondments in partner laboratories and cross-sector visits to associated partners from the private sector. To guarantee training at the most advanced level, outstanding scientists in the field will be integrated as visiting researchers. Workshops and a final network conference will provide a platform for dissemination of the network s achievements which are expected to increase the competitiveness of European plant research and agriculture.
The CREC network brings together 9 network participants from the public sector in 3 different European countries (MS) and 5 countries with an S&T agreement with the EC. Combining the expertise of all papers will provide valuable, additional benefits: the European Research Area will bestregthened by coupling the scientific power of European organisations working internationally on empirical, theoretical, and applied aspects of wetland research.
The implementation of the new EU legislation concerning the registration, evaluation, authorization and restriction of chemicals (REACH) requires demonstration of the safe manufacture of chemicals and their safe use throughout the supply chain. REACH encourages development of new in vitro test methods and replacement of animal tests wherever possible by alternative methods. These goals are not achievable without well-trained personnel with a broad expertise and knowledge in both experimental and computational areas of environmental sciences. The requirements for such scientists, however, are not limited to the REACH implementation itself. Large companies and SMEs could be interested to employ such specialists to perform risk assessment and prioritization of molecules in the development stage. Therefore, the primary objective of this ITN (http://www.eco-itn.eu) is to contribute to the education of a new generation of scientists, environmental chemoinformaticans, who will receive advanced training in both environmental and computational methods. To achieve this goal the ITN will train the fellows using expertise and knowledge of its partners in various complementary computational and experimental areas of environmental sciences. The additional training will also be offered by means of Winter and Summer Schools and will include both theoretical and practical courses. The internships to the laboratories of associated partners will allow fellows to learn new methods and to broaden their knowledge in the field. A flexible system of Short Term Fellowships will offer additional targeted training to researchers originally not associated with the network. Given the potentially great business impact of evaluating more than 120,000 industrial chemicals in the European market within the next decade, the fellows of this network may have a significant economic dimension with regard to the hazard evaluation of chemicals in Europe.
Hydrocarbon pollution has been recognized to be a major environmental and human health problem that require accurate exposure assessment and remediation. Oil and oily products are extremely complex mixtures, containing hundreds (even thousands) of different compounds, among which polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are of greatest regulatory concern due to their potential toxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic properties. 2- and 3-ring PAHs are water soluble and can be transported over significant distances. Natural attenuation is a low-cost bioremediation option widely accepted for the clean-up of hydrocarbon polluted sites. Many efforts have been made to study and enhance aerobic biodegradation of hydrocarbons. However, anaerobic degradation of oily products is practically unknown, although in many environments, such as aquifers, marshes or intertidal zones oxigen is often a limiting factor. Some studies have proven the ability of microorganisms to degrade aromatic hydrocarbons in different conditions, but there is a significant gap of knowledge regarding in situ anaerobic biodegradation of these compounds (metabolism, key microorganisms involved, etc.). Stable isotope techniques (compound specific stable isotope analysis, CSIA, and stable isotope probing, SIP) are novel techniques which can help overcoming this situation, providing valuable information on biodegradation and coping suitably with linking biodegradation processes to microbial taxa. Despite their clear advantatges these techniques have seldom been applied to field studies. In the light of this situation, the main goals of this proposed project are to assess in situ biodegradation of PAHs under anaerobic environments in marine and fresh water systems, to describe microbial activities and to identify microbial key players. The project will be carried out in the Isotope Biogeochemistry Department at the UFZ (Leipzig), which provide outstanding facilities for the achievement of these objectives.
The CI-NERGY Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) aims to train young scientists to develop urban decision making and operational optimisation software tools to minimise non-renewable energy use in cities. The training will be carried out by a close collaboration of six of the best academic research centres and four leading industrial companies from the energy and software technology sector (Siemens, WienEnergie, EDF/EIFER, and IES). The research fellows will apply their results in two case study cities (Geneva and Vienna), which were chosen for their very ambitious sustainability goals. The CI-NERGY network will be a highly multi-disciplinary coordinated PhD programme on urban energy sustainability, covering the key challenges in cities related to a low carbon future. There is a gap in high level integrated training in the urban energy research field, which is due to the wide range of fragmented disciplines from building physics and energy supply technologies with electrical and thermal engineering up to software engineering and information technology. The CI-NERGY network wide training provided by excellent academic and industry partners from all areas of smart cities will close this gap. The impact of the network training activities will be highly noticeable for energy supply utilities, IT companies, policy makers, urban planners, researchers on sustainable urban energy systems and finally the inhabitants of cities themselves. All sectors mentioned will provide excellent career opportunities for the research fellows, who will gain excellent knowledge of the sectorial requirements by a structured secondment plan.
The strong temporal dynamics of the East African landscape and natural-resource distributions have always encouraged people to innovate and adapt to changing conditions. However, increasing population growth, changes in patterns of land tenure, industrialization, weak systems of governance, and global climate change have exacerbated previously localized environmental problems such as soil erosion, depletion of water catchments, loss of forests and grazing land, falling soil fertility and biodiversity. Novel approaches for resolving these challenges are thus urgently needed. Based on the premise that the past is key to understanding the present and planning for the future, this ITN will establish a leading European training network devoted to combining state-of-the-art research methods to tap into under-appreciated knowledge of how indigenous peoples have previously adapted to East Africa's intrinsically unstable climate and land/water resources. By bringing together ecologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, historians and agronomists the ITN will provide cross-disciplinary training to a new generation of researchers, enabling them to interpret data relating to past and present socio-cultural and ecological dynamics from across the environmental and social sciences and the humanities. Organized by researchers from seven European universities in partnership with Bayer East Africa and U&We, the ITN will co-operate closely with academic counterparts, private-sector stakeholders, NGOs and local communities in East Africa. It will highlight how detailed awareness of the complex history of human-environment interaction in East Africa is central to well-founded and ecologically sustainable resource management, thereby restore the important function of indigenous know-how crucial for devising development policies and climate-risk management for specific areas, and train a new generation of future ecosystem-service managers, policy makers and entrepreneurs.
Permafrost ecosystems in the high Northern latitudes are estimated to store about 1700 Petagram of carbon, which is roughly 50% of the total global belowground carbon, or about double the amount currently contained in the global atmosphere. Future climate projections indicate a strong warming potential for these regions over the next century, which may significantly alter the biogeochemical processes governing the carbon cycle, and thus holds the potential to partly destabilize and release these enormous existing carbon reservoirs. At the same time, the database on carbon exchange fluxes between surface and atmosphere is sparse compared to the size of the region, and significant gaps exist concerning e.g. the coverage of specific landscape units, or observations during the cold season. As a consequence, many processes within the permafrost carbon cycle remain poorly understood, leading to large uncertainties in climate model simulations for this region. To close existing gaps in both flux Arctic flux databases and process understanding, integrated monitoring and modeling tools are required that provide insight into feedback mechanisms between permafrost ecosystems and climate change. This project will establish year-round observation systems in the permafrost region that integrate over multiple spatiotemporal scales to capture carbon flux variability from local to continental levels. The obtained information will be used to identify causal links between environmental drivers and patterns in carbon fluxes based on an integrated framework of atmospheric transport modeling, multivariate statistics, geostatistical inversion and biogeochemical process modeling. The resulting insights into biogeochemical mechanisms will help to improve process representation in modeling frameworks, with the overarching objective to reduce uncertainties in climate projections.
The proposed European-US and South American network IMet will advance climate and (eco-) system change research at the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP), a region of recent rapid aerial warming. WAP glaciers tribute to global sea level rise, and functioning and services of coastal ecosystems are massively threatened by the fast regional warming. Data sets from recent interdisciplinary European-South American field work within ESF-IMCOAST (PolarCLIMATE April 2010-March 2013) and from the Jubany scientific core programme at King George Island (KGI) will be nected and cross-validated with southern stations on WAP: the US Palmer and the British Rothera station. Links with both stations and program leaders (Ducklow, CU, New York, US (formerly at MBL Woods Hole,US); and Meredith, NERC-BAS, Cambridge, UK) have been established in IMCOAST. IMet objectives are A) to develop predictive climate change and ecosystem models for the whole WAP coastal environment based on existing data sets and data exchange policies, B) transfer of knowledge between partner countries to enhance collaboration with high quality long-term measuring programs at all 3 stations, to fill present measuring gaps. This will solidify the basis for the prediction of climate change effects in the South. The proposed sortium sists of 16 institutional partners across 10 countries with 85 travelling scientists. Ten partners already collaborate successfully as EU and associated teams in ESF-IMCOAST, and IMet will be coordinated by the same PI (Abele, AWI). Whereas ESRs are seded mostly for longer training and collaboration periods, exchange of ERs will also foster joint teaching in the partner countries and collaboration in future science projects. The cept of IMet is to strengthen European engagement in Antarctic climate change research, as complementing approach to the major EU focus in the Arctic. It will sustain ongoing European Antarctic research in a future network with competent South American partners.
Es besteht ein dringender Bedarf an Entscheidungsunterstützung für Waldbewirtschafter die mit den Herausforderungen einer grenzüberschreitenden Waldbewirtschaftung konfrontiert sind. Das Projekt wird neue analytische Ansätze zur strukturierten Entscheidungsfindung analysieren, um Entscheidungsträger beim Erhalt der Biodiversität und der Erfüllung von Ökosystemdienstleistungen unter Klimawandel und begrenzten Ressourcen in Europa zu informieren. Das Projekt wird die Unterschiede europäischer Länder bei der Umsetzung von paneuropäischer Politik in Bezug auf die Waldbewirtschaftung auf der Basis einer Literaturrecherche zeigen. Bestehende Entscheidungsunterstützungssysteme (Decision-Support- Tools) zur Anpassung forstlicher Maßnahmen über politische Grenzen hinweg sollen kritisch analysiert werden. Die Analyse wird die Grundlagen für Workshops mit Entscheidungsträgern von ausgewählten grenzüberschreitenden Nationalparks liefern. Damit sollen Rahmenbedingungen und wichtige Leitlinien für eine räumliche Optimierung der Anpassungsmaßnahmen über Grenzen hinweg erarbeitet werden. Eine interaktive webbasierte Entscheidungshilfe soll die Planung und Entscheidungsfindung im Rahmen der Waldbewirtschaftung unter unterschiedlichen Klima- und Managementszenarien unterstützen. Die Projektergebnisse werden dazu dienen, das Wissen um die Bedeutung und Aufrechterhaltung von Ökosystem-Dienstleistungen über Grenzen hinweg in Europa zu verbessern.
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