UK economic growth, security, and sustainability are in danger of being compromised due to insufficient infrastructure supply. This partly reflects a recognised skills shortage in Engineering and the Physical Sciences. The proposed EPSRC funded Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) aims to produce the next generation of engineers and scientists needed to meet the challenge of providing Sustainable Infrastructure Systems critical for maintaining UK competitiveness. The CDT will focus on Energy, Water, and Transport in the priority areas of National Infrastructure Systems, Sustainable Built Environment, and Water. Future Engineers and Scientists must have a wide range of transferable and technical skills and be able to collaborate at the interdisciplinary interface. Key attributes include leadership, the ability to communicate and work as a part of a large multidisciplinary network, and to think outside the box to develop creative and innovative solutions to novel problems. The CDT will be based on a cohort ethos to enhance educational efficiency by integrating best practices of traditional longitudinal top-down / bottom-up learning with innovative lateral knowledge exchange through peer-to-peer "coaching" and outreach. To inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists an outreach supply chain will link the focal student within his/her immediate cohort with: 1) previous and future cohorts; 2) other CDTs within and outside the University of Southampton; 3) industry; 4) academics; 5) the general public; and 6) Government. The programme will be composed of a first year of transferable and technical taught elements followed by 3 years of dedicated research with the opportunity to select further technical modules, and/or spend time in industry, and experience international training placements. Development of expertise will culminate in an individual project aligned to the relevant research area where the skills acquired are practiced. Cohort building and peer-to-peer learning will be on-going throughout the programme, with training in leadership, communication, and problem solving delivered through initiatives such as a team building residential course; a student-led seminar series and annual conference; a Group Design Project (national or international); and industry placement. The cohort will also mentor undergraduates and give outreach presentations to college students, school children, and other community groups. All activities are designed to facilitate the creation of a larger network. Students will be supported throughout the programme by their supervisory team, intensively at the start, through weekly tutorials during which a technical skills gap analysis will be conducted to inform future training needs. Benefitting from the £120M investment in the new Engineering Campus at the Boldrewood site the CDT will provide a high class education environment with access to state-of-the-art computer and experimental facilities, including large-scale research infrastructure, e.g. hydraulics laboratories with large flumes and wave tanks which are unparalleled in the UK. Students will benefit from the co-location of engineering, education, and research alongside industry users through this initiative. To provide cohort, training, inspiration and research legacies the CDT will deliver: 1) Sixty doctoral graduates in engineering and science with a broad understanding of the challenges faced by the Energy, Water, and Transport industries and the specialist technical skills needed to solve them. They will be ambitious research, engineering, industrial, and political leaders of the future with an ability to demonstrate creativity and innovation when working as part of teams. 2) A network of home-grown talent, comprising of several CDT cohorts, with a greater capability to solve the "Big Problems" than individuals, or small isolated clusters of expertise, typically generated through traditional training programmes.

The Arctic is changing rapidly. One of the clearest changes is a reduction in the extent and thickness of summer sea ice. The loss of ice is predicted to increase in the coming years as a consequence of climatic warming. There may be no summer sea ice in the Arctic by 2030. Critically, the ice acts as a shade to sunlight and as it retreats it exposes open water to illumination causing a rapid increase in the growth of marine plants (phytoplankton). These plants use up carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and are therefore an important component of Earth's climate system. Once formed, the phytoplankton become food for herbivorous zooplankton who are able to transport this source of carbon to deeper waters where it is excreted and buried in the sediments. This process, called the 'biological pump', transfers carbon from the atmosphere and locks it away. It is important that we understand the relationships between ice, phytoplankton, zooplankton and carbon and these relationships can be simulated in models of biogeochemical cycles. The critical link in this chain is the herbivorous zooplankton. They have a particular behaviour called 'diel vertical migration' (DVM) which is a prominent feature of many marine ecosystems. The animals move quickly tens to hundreds of meters vertically around dawn and dusk in migrations that comprise the most massive periodic shifts in biomass on Earth. The classical view is that DVM occurs as a trade off by individuals between food acquisition and predator avoidance. Zooplankton move upwards to feed at night into the nearsurface where primary production occurs. Here, under the cover of darkness, the risk from visual predators is minimised. This upward/downward migration redistributes carbon fixed by photosynthesis near the surface to deeper waters, and may remove larger quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere than would otherwise be the case, reducing the rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere. Studying zooplankton in the Arctic year round is difficult because of access and ice cover. One successful technique for recording DVM behaviour uses an instrument called an acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP). Many ADCPs have been deployed in the Arctic over the last decade to measure currents but the acoustic signals also record zooplankton migrations. Usually these data are only analysed to understand the ocean currents within the localised region where the instrument was deployed. We are at a critical time in Arctic research where we must take a wider, 'pan-Arctic' view of marine processes. We propose to work with international groups to collate, process and archive the ADCP data, creating a unique resource for studying DVM. The regular, rhythmic behaviour means that we can use numerical techniques (circadian rhythm analysis) to quantify how strong and regular the migration behaviour is and relate this to the biological communities that are present, the level of illumination and the amount of sea ice cover. We will use this knowledge to improve models of how zooplankton transport carbon, through their faecal material, to depth. Understanding zooplankton DVM is important for many reasons. Quantifying DVM behaviour will allow us to improve our ability to predict how changes in sea ice might alter changes in the way carbon is captured and stored in the productive Arctic seas. It will give us a greater insight into how and why animals undertake such regular migrations and how the timing of these migrations is controlled. By relating the acoustic data with species data we will be able to understand the role of zooplankton in Arctic ecosystems and this is of particular importance if predictions on the effect of plankton-dependent fish species are to be made.

Controversy surrounds the actual impacts of Atlantic salmon farming on wild salmonid stocks, fed by the lack of direct evidence for or against many potential impacts, with uncertainty an increasing impediment to sustainable industry development and effective management of wild stocks. This applies to the potential impact of the introgression of farm genomes into locally adapted wild populations from breeding of farm escapes. Escapes do occur and are recognized as inevitable, but are a very small fraction of farm stocks and vary in numbers both locally and temporally. The majority of escapees are expected to die without breeding but some do remain in or ascend rivers and spawn. However, a detailed understanding of actual levels of interbreeding and introgression in most rivers is lacking which, along with an understanding of the adaptive differentiation of farm and wild salmon, is required to establish the actual impact of this potential interaction on the productivity and viability of wild populations. Detection and quantification of interbreeding and introgression requires diagnostic markers for farm and wild genomes. Genetic differentiation of farm and wild genomes can evolve through founder effects, selective breeding and domestication selection and is observed in respect of a variety of molecular markers. However, existing molecular markers are not fully diagnostic and regionally constrained in their usefulness. Unfortunately, marker panels screened for useful variation have been small and arbitrary such that they are unlikely to include the most informative loci and to be context specific, limiting their power and transferability. To properly address the issue of introgression molecular markers are required that are highly diagnostic across all farm and wild populations. These markers will be in genomic regions involved in domestication and controlling the expression of selected economic traits. What is known of the genomic architecture of domestication and most economic traits indicates their control is polygenic, making the targeting of specific gene regions in the search for markers difficult. In contrast, recent advances in genomics make possible genome scanning and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) which can provide a high resolution assessment of molecular differentiation between different individuals or populations across the genome. Different GWAS strategies can be employed but two are deemed optimal in the current context. Firstly, a GWAS will be carried out using a new Atlantic salmon SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) containing 930k nuclear SNPs, recently developed in collaboration with the salmon farming industry. This will be carried out on a broad base of representative farm and wild stocks. Secondly, GWAS will be carried out to identify temporally stable epigenetic DNA-methylation base changes induced by rearing fish in culture by comparing groups of single source wild fish reared in the wild and in culture. The study will deliver the first general understanding of domestication related molecular genetic differentiation between farmed and wild salmon and identify the best markers for identifying farm salmon in the wild and assessing genetic introgression of farm genes into wild populations. The work will deliver a more robust and generally applicable tool for determining the actual levels of escapes and introgression in wild salmon populations. Following field calibration and independent validation, the diagnostic methodology defined in the study is expected to provide the basis for generating the evidence needed to clarify the debate on levels of escapes and introgression and the long term impacts of introgression on population viability. This will help to define more clearly the path forward for the sustainable development of the salmon farming industry in the UK and elsewhere in the North Atlantic region and help to inform management priorities for wild Atlantic salmon stocks.

Understanding why females stop reproduction prior to the end of their lives is a key objective in the biological, medical and social sciences. In traditional human societies for example, women typically have their last child at 38 but may live for a further 20 years or so. This phenomenon is by no means restricted to humans and across many species of mammals, birds and fish, females may have a lifespan that extends far beyond their last birth. Why is this? Three possible reasons have been suggested: i) It could simply be a byproduct of females living for a long time; ii) it may benefit post-reproductive females by increasing the survival of their offspring and/or grand offspring or iii) old females may lose out to young females when competing for the food needed to support pregnancy and producing milk. In humans it seems that a combination of ii and iii have driven the evolution of menopause. Currently however, almost nothing is known about the forces that have shaped the post-reproductive lifespan in non-human animals that live in close-knit family groups. In this project we will test for the first time the current evolutionary theory for the post-reproductive lifespan in a non-human animal. Our study will focus on two populations of killer whales Orcinus orca that live off the coast of North America. Killer whales have the longest post-reproductive lifespan of all non-human animals; females stop reproducing in their 30s-40s but can survive into their 90s. We will use data collected over the last three decades during which time more than 600 whales have been recorded. We will use information about births and deaths to examine how social factors shape fertility and survival. In particular we will ask the following questions: (1) How do post-reproductive females benefit from a post-reproductive lifespan? (2) In what ways do older females provide support to their offspring / grand offspring? (3) Do older females lose out when competing with younger females for the food needed to reproduce? (4) Can the observed benefits (question 1) and the consequences of reproductive competition (question 3) explain the evolution of the long post-reproductive lifespan in killer whales? We will address questions 1 and 3 by using the long term data documenting births and deaths in both populations. We will use analysis techniques similar to those used by insurance companies to calculate life expectancy when deciding what premiums to charge people on their life insurance. In our analysis we will examine how survival is affected by the presence and behavior of post-reproductive females. We will address question 2 by using video and photographic records to examine social interactions between mothers and their offspring / grand offspring. We will test how important this relationship is for survival. Finally we will address question 4 by building a simulation model of the populations. We will use our observations from the whales to set the parameters in the model [e.g. the amount by which post-reproductive females increase the survival of their offspring]. The model will then simulate evolution, allowing us to examine if the effects we are seeing in the populations are sufficient to have driven the evolution of the long post-reproductive lifespan in killer whales. This programme of research promises to advance our understanding of how natural selection has shaped life history evolution in species that live in close-knit family groups. Our work will provide the first test of the current evolutionary theory for the evolution of menopause in non-human animals and the outputs of this work will provide an informative comparison for the evolution of human life history. More generally, our work will advance our understanding of the ageing process in social species and the interplay between an individual's social relationships and its life expectancy.

There is now a consensus that global climate is changing in response to increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. These gases have natural as well as man-made sources and sinks. For carbon dioxide the largest sink is the ocean, which absorbs between 30% and 50% of the CO2 generated by the burning of fossil fuel. The direction of the exchange of gases between atmosphere and ocean depends on the difference in gas concentration between the air and water, and on a number of physical processes that modify the rate of the exchange. The most important of these processes is turbulent mixing in both the air and water close to the surface. This increases with wind speed, but the relationship is complicated by other factors such as the waves state and the thermodynamic stability of the near-surface layers of both ocean and atmosphere. At high wind speeds wave breaking generates bubbles, mixing air down into the water column. The presence of bubbles increases the rate of gas exchange, but the detailed nature of the process is not fully understood and there is considerable disagreement about the exact form of the equations that describe the rate of gas transfer. This is largely a result of a lack of sufficiently detailed measurements. Wave breaking and bubbles are also closely linked to the formation of sea-spray aerosol particles - these are important as cloud condensation nuclei. Aerosols are generated by the bursting of bubbles at the sea surface. The rate of aerosol formation is often expressed as a function of whitecap fractions on the sea surface, but there is an uncertainty of about a factor of 10 in the production rate. This suggests that whitecap fraction alone does not control the production rate, but that factors such as the size and number of bubbles produced by breaking waves may vary with other factors such as size or steepness of the wave. This project is a UK contribution to a US research cruise that aims to examine the impact of wave breaking and bubble processes on air-sea gas exchange. We will measure whitecap fraction, wave state, wave breaking statistics, and bubble properties beneath breaking waves. Measurements will be made from an 11-m spar buoy equipped with wave wires to measure the local wave height at high spatial resolution, a bubble camera to measure large bubbles near the surface, and 2 acoustical resonators to measure smaller bubbles deeper below the surface. A separate Waverider buoy will also be deployed to make longer term and independent measurements of the wave spectra. On the ship we will make direct measurements of aerosol fluxes via the eddy covariance technique, along with those of heat, water vapour, CO2, and momentum. Our partners from NOAA and the University of Hawi'i will measure fluxes of several different gases: CO2, CO, and DMS. The joint measurements of gas fluxes, and whitecap and bubble properties will allow the influence of bubbles on the flux to be evaluated directly against a variety of existing parameterizations.