Modern agriculture is expected to provide ever-increasing amounts of food and feed under uncertain climate scenarios and significant pressure from consumers and regulators for environmentally friendly solutions to combat abiotic and biotic stress associated yield losses. Biostimulants that can improve crop productivity in a sustainable way offer a plausible alternative to the heavily criticized synthetic agrochemicals. To achieve their full potential a science-based understanding of their beneficial effects and avenues for fine-tuning of their bioactivities are of utmost importance. The proposed project will bring together expertise in plant systems biology, chemical biology, as well as biostimulant preparation and characterization, to discover new and optimize existing biostimulants by tapping into innovative sources of natural compounds and integrative biology approaches for elucidating molecular mechanisms underlying stress priming. A global network of leading plant scientists in abiotic and biotic stress signaling from Europe, Africa, and South America, facilitated by an industrial partner specializing in biostimulants production and marketing, will channel their efforts to bring sustainable solutions for crop protection to the farmer. An extensive mobility program will facilitate optimal knowledge-sharing within the network, maximize the research outputs and ultimately lead to increasing the human capacity of the partners.

The UK government plans to increase woodland cover as part of its plans to store more carbon, to mitigate climate change. However, many of the UK's trees are threatened by climate change and a range of pests and diseases, which might limit their ability to contribute to carbon storage and the wide range of other benefits delivered by woodlands. We therefore need to make our woodlands resilient to these future threats. Resilience is the ability of a system, such as a woodland, to recover from a disturbance. One commonly proposed approach to increase the resilience of woods is to increase their tree diversity. Thus, spreading the risk amongst many different trees, as we don't know exactly how each tree species will respond to climate change, nor what threats from pests and diseases they may face decades into the future. However, woodland managers have different perceptions of diversity, and how management may best deliver it, and we know that different tree species will support the woodland ecosystem in different ways. Therefore, it is important to combine stakeholders' knowledge with ecological knowledge to identify which tree species and management approaches best deliver diversification that increases resilience. DiversiTree focuses on woods dominated by two conifer species, Scots Pine and Sitka Spruce, as in the year to March 2021 54% of all new woodland was coniferous. Scots Pine is the UK's only native conifer of economic significance. It is planted for timber production but is also the dominant species in the culturally iconic native Caledonian pinewoods. Scots Pine is at risk from the tree disease Dothistroma. Sitka Spruce is not native to Britain but is our most economically valuable tree species and is at risk from invasive bark beetles and climate change. This project addresses four knowledge gaps related to the diversification of woodlands: 1) How do stakeholders understand forest diversity, their diversification strategies, and their visions and ambitions for diverse future forests? 2) Are the microbes found on the leaves of trees more diverse in woodlands with mixed tree species and does this help trees to better defend themselves against diseases? 3) How may diversification of tree species within a wood allow the continued support of woodland biodiversity? 4) How do we implement and communicate management strategies to increase woodland resilience? To address these knowledge gaps, we work across disciplines bringing together ecologists, microbiologists, social scientists, and woodland managers. The Woodland Trust is embedded at the heart of our project to enable us to co-develop and check the feasibility of our results with practitioners. Results from interviews with woodland managers, focus groups and analyses of policy documents, will be used to improve knowledge of the options for woodland diversification, and both the enthusiasm for, and capacity to, implement diversification strategies. The microbes on leaves are important for plant health. Utilizing existing long-term experiments, we will examine the microbes on the leaves of Scots Pine grown in monocultures and in mixed woods. We will assess if the diversity of microbes on a leaf increases as the diversity of tree species increases, and whether this enables the trees to resist existing diseases. Surprising we don't have lists of which species use which trees. This information is required if we are to plant trees that will continue to support woodland biodiversity. We will collate data on the biodiversity hosted by Scots Pine and Sitka Spruce and assess which other tree species could also support the same biodiversity. Finally, we bring the results together to co-develop with practitioners, management strategies for diversification and case studies illustrating how the results can be implemented. The results will be shared via videos, podcasts, social media, and practitioner notes in addition to publications in the scientific literature.

To develop, test and validate revolutionary high intensity crop growing systems that will produce consistent, high quality products year round with a limited environmental footprint.

The goal of this project is to exploit ancient Northern European landraces and improve the ability of the important cereal, barley, to acquire and utilize nutrients from the soil more efficiently. Climate change pressures and degradation of arable lands are expected to increase the need to produce feed and food even in unfavorable environments, such as marginal soils with inherent nutrient limitations. Thus, it will be a major breeding focus to select traits associated with enhanced crop robustness in order to secure the future demand for plant products. In this context, recent work has demonstrated a superior capacity of Northern European barley landraces, adapted to marginal soils, to acquire and allocate essential micronutrients. This project aims to advance our knowledge of adaptive traits conferring nutrient use efficiency. This will be achieved by bridging disciplines of plant genetics and plant nutrition, not only by unravelling functions of individual genes, but also by capturing the compensatory adjustments at the transcriptome and molecular physiology levels, preserved in landraces but seemingly lost from modern elite cultivars. The overall scientific objective is to identify the genetic control of nutrient stress tolerance, and specifically to: (i) use exome capture sequencing to identify candidate genes involved in nutrient deficiency tolerance; (ii) study the transcriptional responses of these genes under nutrient stress and their dynamics with time after stress recovery; (iii) describe in detail the physiological responses contributing to improved nutrient stress tolerance of major cereal crops. The proposed project will deliver quantitative information and a predictive understanding of nutrient stress tolerance and will provide new breeding material. The findings will act as an exemplar for other major cereals to expand cultivation and stabilize yields in marginal previously unproductive land.