The significance of soil microbial diversity has received little attention. The reason is that the molecular methods to identify soil microbes were new, awkward to use and expensive. However, molecular tools have evolved and are now affordable. Also, nowadays, bioinformatics software is much easier to use than ten years ago. The proposed project pioneers the use of molecular biology tools to protect and conserve the soil microbiome. The ecosystems studied in the project cover a climatic gradient from boreal to subtropical (Brazil). The project narrows critical knowledge gaps on the role of the soil microbiome (Theme1) and estimates costs and benefits of conservation through ecosystem services (Theme 2). The project provides stakeholders with an evaluation of the importance of the soil microbiome in a conservation ecology setting. We will use tools from molecular biology and biogeochemistry to analyse the soil microbial community and its function. Tools include tools to understand the phylogenetic diversity of the soil community and tools to measure functional genes. The phylogenetic and structural analyses are then used to determine the role of the soil microbiome in the provisioning of critical ecosystem services. These were soil carbon sequestration, conservation value, soil aggregate stability and yield of commercially valuable fungi. The project uses novel methods to measure the abundance of a broad array of functional genes; it tries to match long term field data with soil microbiome data to detect red-listed species from soil DNA. Also, the work on soil aggregate stability and the microbiome is genuinely innovative. After the project, stakeholders in the case study regions will have information on the role of the soil microbiome for conservation. In addition, they will understand how different soil-based ecosystem services interact. As a result, they will be able to exploit tradeoffs and synergies between the ecosystem services. The project involves active engagement with local stakeholder groups and will actively disseminate its result via social media networks.

Wind as a clean and renewable alternative to fossil fuels has become an increasingly important contributor to the energy portfolio of both Europe and Brazil. At almost every stage in wind energy exploitation ranging from wind turbine design, wind resource assessment to wind farm layout and operations, the application of HPC is a must. The goal of HPCWE is to address the key open challenges in applying HPC on wind energy, including efficient use of HPC resources in wind turbine simulations, accurate integration of meso- and micro-scale simulations, and optimization. The HPCWE consortium consists of 13 partners representing the top academic institutes, HPC centres and industries in Europe and Brazil. By exploring collaborations between Europe and Brazil, this consortium will develop novel algorithms, implement them in state-of-the-art codes and test the codes in academic and industrial cases to benefit the wind energy industry and research in both Europe and Brazil.

TRUSTparency starts from the assumption that what scientists need to trust is that the Mertonian process of organised scepticism can operate, allowing scientific knowledge to self-correct efficiently. By extending this assumption we argue that scientists and all other research stakeholders should be open to adopt innovative interventions, to the extent that they can trust that these are developed, deployed, assessed, and corrected transparently and collaboratively. TRUSTparency’s core guiding principle clearly reflects the above argument, specifically by advocating for a maximally informed, context-sensitive, collaborative, democratic, and transparent approach to facilitating the development of interventions that enhance reproducibility by Research Performing Organisations, Research Funding Organisations, learned societies, and publishers. These types of institutions will be empowered to develop their own policy guidelines in the form of a Reproducibility Promotion Plan (RPP), which will be a sequence of concrete steps to transfer the practices that promote reproducibility to their everyday work and to monitor their effectiveness with mechanisms customised to their specific needs. The co-development activities of the project will be based, with the concerted engagement of the project’s Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB), which is composed, among others, of 10 national Reproducibility Networks (RNs). The SAB will actively participate in the three-stage co-development plan of the project’s interventions: (a) development, (b) pilot testing by 9 institutions, and (c) validation-finalisation. The project's co-creation activities will be applied in tandem with a wide and structured discussion facilitated by the highly innovative comCensus platform. From day one, TRUSTparency will establish a Reproducibility Community and invite all stakeholders with stakes in fostering reproducibility to join through an open call distributed via the professional networks.

There has been an increased interest in science and engineering education due to: (1) the shortage of professionals required in scientific and technical areas; (2) the considerable low ratio of students opting for science- and engineering-related degrees, when entering higher education; and (3) the number of dropouts exhibited in the initial years of undergraduate studies. All stakeholders have devoted a great deal of attention and concern to this problem, considering the high number of reports published about and initiatives taken in recent years. In sum, the solutions have been dealing with: raising the society awareness for such a problem (1); increasing the interest for STEM among youngsters (1 and 2); and, promoting new teaching and learning methodologies, especially student-centred ones involving the use of ICT-tools, for coping with a new generation of digital natives (3).This project targets the broad area of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and, within it, the subject of circuit theory and practice. It aims to define, develop and evaluate a set of educational modules comprising hands-on, virtual, and remote experiments, the later supported by a remote lab named Virtual Instruments Systems In Reality (VISIR). The nature of each experiment (hands-on, virtual, real-remote) has an impact on the students’ perception of circuits’ behaviour, being therefore mandatory to understand how these different learning objects can be arranged together in order to scaffold their understanding and increase their laboratory-based skills. This is the concern of the underpinning teaching and learning methodology, favouring in particular the students’ autonomy for discovering how circuits work, through an enquiry-based approach.VISIR+ brings together the power of the best remote lab for experiments with electrical and electronics circuits and the long history of collaboration among the consortium partners from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Portugal Spain, and Sweden.

Population growth, increased prosperity and rapid urbanization are bringing global demand for natural resources to a point increasingly beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity. Together with climate change, those pressures are causing significant environmental degradation in many parts of the planet. Latin America is particularly vulnerable. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) constitute urgent calls and drivers for higher education to be part of future generations of engaged citizens aware of their role in creating fair and healthy societies.The Change the Climate project addresses three main needs: environmental management at all levels of higher education activities, integration of environmental management with sustainability strategies and institutional quality management, and customized strategies for sustainability in education. The project’s main goal is to increase Latin-American University’s contribution to Sustainable Development, through the implementation of environmental systematic practices and quality processes in alignment with the UN SDGs, improving the management and operations of higher education institutions. The project will deliver tools and guides for environmental impact analysis and SDGs mapping in campus operations and educational activities. An environmental management system will be implemented in each partner university decreasing their environmental impact; sustainability awareness will be assessed thoughout the academic communities; strategies for sustainability in higher education will be developed for curricula improvement; and a common open online course on sustainability will be created in English, Spanish and Portuguese.The project’s impact will reach stakeholders beyond the project partnership at local, regional and national levels contributing to behavioural change for sustainable futures.