Soils and wastes contaminated with heavy metals are prone to create major problems because of their toxicity and their management is generally expensive. But this drawback can be turn into advantage if these solid matrices contain compounds of industrial interest. However, metal concentrations are generally too low for conventional mining and metallurgical recovery. Hence, new extraction and processing technologies must be developed to ensure production of strategic metals, while preserving soil functions, and improving soil and waste quality by decreasing their toxicity. These processes would provide a range of economic, social and environmental values from materials and lands of initial low value. AGROMINE is the conception of agro-metallurgical production chains based on the culture of hyperaccumulator plants on contaminated matrices (soils, wastes) or naturally rich in metals (ultramafic soils) to produce high value metal compounds. These chains are developed for nickel (Ni) and cobalt (Co), metals of high strategic importance. They are based on a previous work devoted to the synthesis process of ammonium and nickel sulfate double salt hexahydrate (ANSH) from the biomass of Alyssum murale. They combine agromining (or phytomining) and hydrometallurgy. • Agromining is an alternative treatment for contaminated soils and wastes, and an application of phytotechnologies to exploit secondary resources. On soils naturally rich in metals it generates incomes for farmers or managers and metal removal improves soil (or matrix) quality. Here the main innovation is the production of hyperaccumulator plants on constructed agrosystems. • Hydrometallurgy produces metals with a niche strategy, seeking forms of Ni and Co of strong industrial interest. Focus is put here on Ni and Co carboxylates, which is completely innovative, but attention will still be given on Ni and Co salts for surface treatment. The AGROMINE project involves 4 research teams of Nancy (LRGP and CRPG, LIEC, LSE of Labex Ressources 21) and two SMEs (Soléo Services and Microhumus), which have a long collaboration history. It also has strong connections with joint activities between Labex Ressources 21 and ERAMET, a major French nickel mining company. ERAMET has expressed its interest for the project by providing a support letter. The consortium maintains regular contacts with the main international actors of phytomining: Albania (UAT), Québec (INRS-ETE), China (SYSU), Australia (CMLR-UQ) and the United States (USDA). Work is organized in 1 management task and 5 scientific tasks, including: 1. Characterization of matrices, including soils, sediments and sludge: new agrosystems containing metal contaminated matrices will be designed, characterized and prepared to grow hyperaccumulators; 2. Selection of hyperaccumulators and control of metal bioavailability to identify the best Ni and/or Co hyperaccumulators for each environmental condition and metal recovery; 3. Implementation of agromining at platform scale with constructed agrosystems; 4. Hydrometallurgy for metal recovery from biomass and production of high-value compounds, based on our experience on the patented synthesis of a Ni salt (ANSH), and focus on the preparation of Co salts and Ni and Co carboxylates; 5. Life Cycle Assessment and economic evaluation of the agromining chain as well as its transfer to the end-users. AGROMINE is intended to produce economic and social value from low value material and land. It is not planned to supplant conventional mining technologies. Contrary to popular belief, our field data have shown that this process makes profit: agromining on 4 000 ha producing 200 kg Ni ha-1 converted in ANSH would give an economic benefit of c.a. € 6.15 million per year. The results obtained in AGROMINE would be of great importance for the two SMEs and for the ECONICK start-up, which is currently in an incubating process in Nancy.

Pressures on ecosystems have reached such an unprecedented rate that many ecosystems have been irreversibly damaged and that many animal populations have declined since the 1950s. Although human pressures on ecosystems have been identified, the mechanisms of biodiversity decline (i.e. relative importance of each pressure in the decline, temporality of events…) are poorly known. One reason is the lack of long-term data on population monitoring to study the impact of human pressures from past to present on animal populations and communities. REPAST proposes to use a retrospective multidisciplinary approach to study the impact of environmental pressures on the decline of bats through the study of guano cores collected in bat roosts. In caves or buildings, bat droppings (guano) fall to the ground and accumulate chronologically until reaching substantial thickness over time, and constitute historical archives containing temporally situated information about bat populations, environmental context, and human pressures. REPAST will test the general hypothesis that one or several stressors (habitat and climate changes, exposure to pollutants) will be associated to temporal variations of biological responses (pathogen prevalence, shift in diet, genetic diversity, bat richness). On 10 cores already sampled in bat colonies located in Burgundy Franche-Comté region, a robust chronology based on proxies used for paleoecological studies (14C, 137Cs, 210Pb concentrations) will be performed. The feasibility study done within the last 2 years shows that the cores date back from at least the 1950s, one being much older. Temporal variations of some anthropogenic pressures will also be reconstructed. Pollens will be studied on the cores to reconstruct the foraging areas (habitat) characteristics. The concentrations of some pollutants (~20 metals, 17 persistent organic pollutants including DDT and PCBs, and neonicotinoids) will be measured along the cores. Climate changes will be studied using meteorological data from 76 stations active since the 1940s across the region. Guano cores will also provide biological descriptors of bat colonies, which will be related to human pressures indices. The richness and composition of bat colonies, their diet using a metabarcoding approach, their exposure to eukaryotic pathogens, and their genetic diversity (using guano and Museum specimens already collected) will be reconstructed over time. Finally, historical archives and current counts from NGOs working in bat conservation will allow reconstructing the pattern of demographic trends and extinction risk of bat species since the 1940s. As the various anthropogenic pressures may act directly or indirectly on the biological responses, the complex set of variables measured in REPAST will be analysed using the structural equation modelling (SEM) framework. SEM’s causal diagrams will be constructed, based on explicit causal assumptions/hypotheses related to the mechanisms supposed to be involved between one or several pressures to one or several biological responses. The nature and the pattern of associations (what stressor(s) is(are) linked to what response(s) and how (from long and continuous associations to sudden shifts)) will improve our understanding of the mechanism(s) of bat decline. NGOs and stakeholders of bat roosts will be fully involved in the project and have already took part in the sampling process and share their data (e.g. bat counts). Apart from the classical scientific exploitation of the results (international meetings and articles), the large public will also be informed and invited to participate (e.g. in indicating colonies with guano accumulation unknown from NGOs) through a specific website and conferences. REPAST will allow gaining insights in the understanding of the mechanisms underlying the decline and the temporality of bat decline (and resilience) and, as some of the stressors still occur, may allow to predict and prevent new declines.

The Notre-Dame de Paris (NDP) wooden oak frame is one of the greatest masterpieces of Gothic carpentry in France. It was constructed during the High Middle Ages (HMA) between the 11th and 13th centuries, at a time of profound environmental and societal changes – climate optimum, strong demographic and economic growth – which created significant pressure on available forest resources, one of the key economic drivers of medieval societies. The destruction of the NDP wood framework in the fire of 15 April 2019 left thousands of charred and fragmented oak wood pieces. Analyzing this "forest" means to almost go back in time, by rebuilding the forests of past centuries and restoring this heritage for the public. The CASIMODO project aims to understand the impact of climatic and anthropogenic factors on the evolution of the HMA forest–wood socio-ecosystem: forest, raw wood material management, and manufactured end products in the Île-de-France and Paris Basin. The project proposes three lines of research to address society’s adaptive response to the availability of wood resources during the HMA. The first purpose is to define the climatic and the socio-economical context of Paris. In order to identify the potential technical adaptations of the medieval society, the second objective is to study the timber and destroyed framework from an archaeological point of view in order to characterize the construction supply methods of the building site. The third purpose consists of characterizing the forest stands exploited in the 11th–13th c., their management, and the possible silvicultural systems used for the production of adequate timber. The overall goal of CASIMODO is to provide crucial information and enable a fuller understanding of the evolution of an economic area under climatic, societal and demographic pressure, through the wood life cycle. We propose to develop an integrated approach by combining history, archaeology and bioarchaeology. Trees record variations in environmental variables, with each annual growth ring containing a means of dating, and a set of anatomical and chemical markers indicators providing information of the woodland structure, the geographical origin of the wood, and past climate. This information will be compared with contemporaneous wood data from secular and religious medieval frames from Northern France, Southern Belgium and Western Germany. Complementary proxies, such as textual archives and paleoenvironmental/bioarchaeological data of medieval archaeological sites in the Île-de-France and Paris Basin will also be integrated. By echoing the context of the current ecological threat, this project addresses recurring problems in human–nature relations and is in line with the theme of societies facing environmental change. Improved documentation of temporal and spatial variability in past global climates is needed to better anticipate the possible impacts of future climate change. CASIMODO can provide indirect clues on the extent of deforestation or even natural disasters and linked epidemics such as the plague. In addition, radiocarbone dating is a central tool of modern science (biology, ecology, geology, history, archaeology.); however, it is still hampered by the imprecision of dates obtained for certain periods. Progress in this direction will, therefore, be a major step forward for very large section of the scientific community

CHIPMuNCS is a frontier research project at the interface between nanomagnetism, spintronics, and nonlinear dynamics. It is motivated by the premise that the rich behaviour of nonlinear systems, in particular chaos, can be leveraged for alternative paradigms for computing and information processing. The primary objective is to establish the utility and feasibility of the nanocontact vortex oscillator, a nanoscale spintronic device, as a universal building block for chaos-based information processing by demonstrating three technological functionalities: random number generation, secure communications, and nonlinear computing. The underlying idea is that the complexity required for computation and possible cognitive functions can be generated within a single system, without the need of a complex array of interconnected subsystems. The project addresses the pressing challenges raised by the current information revolution, with the exponential growth of digital data, spurred by the internet, the ubiquity of “smartphones”, and unprecedented scientific advances in data-intensive fields from genetics to social networks. Identifying useful patterns amongst such vast oceans of bits is a timely and formidable challenge for current technologies. The project builds upon the recent discovery by consortium members of novel commensurate and chaotic phases in the nanocontact vortex oscillator. The oscillator is based on the self-sustained gyration of a magnetic vortex around a nanocontact, where additional periodic reversals of the vortex core can induce a chaotic state. While some features of this kind of spin-torque nano-oscillator have been well-studied, there remains many open questions, both fundamental and applied in nature, such as the role of thermal noise, the conditions for core reversal, and the complexity of the dynamics from the point of view of information theory. For example, the utility of the chaotic vortex oscillator as an entropy source is an open problem that is important for random number generation. The scientific objectives of CHIPMuNCS will be met by addressing three important questions related to spin-transfer— induced magnetic vortex dynamics on the nanoscale, namely the nature of the chaotic state, how it can be controlled through external forcing, delayed feedback, and mutual synchronisation, and how these features can be exploiting for information processing applications. This will be achieved by combining: • High-performance vortex oscillators by using advanced materials like Heusler alloys and multi-terminal device geometries; • High performance and robust simulation tools and time series analysis methods; • State-of-the-art experiments involving high-frequency electrical characterisation in order to quantify the chaotic vortex dynamics in device geometries. By bringing controllable chaotic devices to the nanoscale, the project will stimulate a paradigm shift toward alternative information processing schemes using nanomagnetism and spintronics.

The aim of this multidisciplinary project is to study the roughly one hundred ground-floor latrines in the city of Ostia, one of the main cities of the Roman Empire, port and image of Rome, as well as the fifty or so downpipes considered to be evacuations of upper storey latrines. Their study will allow us to understand, through archaeology, all aspects of their architecture. The archaeometric analysis of the samples taken from the stercoral concretions formed at the bottom of the pipes will provide a reliable picture of the sanitary state of the population, but also of its diet and environment. This project is in the continuity of the researches performed on the ancient latrines, which have been revived for the last 20 years. The paleoparasitological analyses, by revealing the presence of digestive parasites, will offer the possibility of discussing the effectiveness of the hygiene measures, implemented by such structures, on the parasitic infections circulating within the population. Palaeomicrobiological analyses will track bacterial and viral pathogens. The filling of latrines will allow the study of the spectra of animal and plant species consumed in different parts of the city as well as their natural environment. The project associates 7 partners with complementary and multidisciplinary skills under the direction of A. Bouet: Ecole française de Rome (E. Bukowiecki), Parco archeologico d'Ostia antica (C. Tempesta), Ausonius (A. Bouet), Laboratoire Chrono-environnement de Besançon (M. Le Bailly), PACEA (O. Dutour), ISYEB (T. Wirth) as well as CReAAH of Rennes (B. Ephrem). Palynology will be performed as service provided by the ARPA Laboratory (J. Argant). This innovative approach carried out on the whole of the Ostia latrines will be a first at the level of a Roman city of the imperial period in the western Mediterranean.