Insect pollinators have undergone declines across the world, a result of factors including intensive agriculture, habitat loss, climate change and invasive species. This represents a major concern in Latin America (LATAM) where it threatens economically important crops and wider biodiversity. The impact of these losses in LATAM remains poorly understood, undermining the capacity to develop policies vital to mitigate pollinator losses and support both agricultural production and wider ecosystem health. A new, coherent evidence base is required, that considers impacts on individual species, their distributions and populations, the landscapes they persist in and their unique capacities to deliver pollination to different crops. Without this it will not be possible to develop the applied experimental and modelling solutions policy makers need to deliver sustainable farming economies. This proposal builds on Newton Phase 1 project SURPASS, an international collaboration between 37 participants, that identified knowledge gaps, issues, and research areas that prioritise conservation and sustainable use of LATAM pollinators. The SURPASS2 goal is to deliver evidence for the creation of resilient pollination services for sustainable economic growth, improved human health and wellbeing as well as positive environmental and agricultural outcomes. This will be addressed by five main objectives, co-designed with academics and stakeholders that establish interconnected work packages that build capacity to manage pollination services and provide tangible outcomes. Our goals will be delivered through 4 work packages: WP1) Monitoring populations and understanding their distributions: before any effective solution can be developed to manage LATAM pollinators it is crucial that we understand the current distribution of species and develop and trial approaches for long term monitoring. Only by understanding where pollinators can be found can we develop applied solutions to manage them. We will design a standardised framework to assess the status and trends of pollinator populations through existing and new monitoring schemes, including citizen science. WP2) How does the environment in which pollinators live affect them, and how does this affect capacity to provide crop pollination: Land use change and land management represent fundamental factors affecting pollinator populations. We will undertake detailed landscape scale experiments across LATAM focusing on production of economically significant crops to understand how landscape management affects pollinators and the pollination services they supply. This will provide data for models and help growers, land managers and policy makers to optimise pollination to sustainably increase crop yields and quality. We will also quantify how invasive species of pollinators impact on wild and native insect pollinators and plants. WP3) Understanding national scale deficits in pollination for key crops identifying areas where pollination services are at high risk. Using cutting edge satellite imagery we will map nationally the occurrence of key insect pollinated crops. We will link this data to the distribution of insect pollinator communities to assess if these populations provide adequate pollination, as well as modelling how resilient these communities are to species losses. As each species of insect pollinator is unique their loss can have potentially huge consequences for agricultural production. WP4) Develop a national scale predictive framework to support policy goals of maximising benefits for agricultural productivity provided by pollination. This will integrate results from WP1-3 to model pollinator communities to develop effective strategies for decision making processes for different stakeholders that benefit from insect pollination. This will provide the framework to work with stakeholders to produce a roadmap for maximising pollination services and long term monitoring in LATAM.

Global warming, associated with the burning of fossil fuels, is changing the world's climate, and with this, it is altering the water cycle. Future climate projections suggest hydrological extremes (floods and droughts) will become more frequent and severe - further heightening the already substantial impacts they cause to lives and livelihoods, as well as infrastructure and economies. To adapt to future changes in water availability, we need projections of future flood and drought occurrence. Numerical simulation models are used to provide such scenarios, but they are very complex and highly uncertain. To better understand and constrain these model-based projections, we need to quantify emerging trends in the water cycle. This requires long records of past hydrological observations. River flows (the volume of water flowing in rivers) are especially useful because river flows integrate climate processes over the large areas covered by drainage basins. River flows are also, in practice, one way in which climate change will most impact society and the environment: through devastating floods at one end of the spectrum to droughts at the other, causing water shortages for public supply, industry, irrigation and wildlife. Across the world, there have been many studies of long-term trends in river flow. Despite this past research, however, our confidence in observed trends remains very low - even in the major state-of-the-art IPCC reports, which have typically been cautious in their reporting of floods and droughts. The key reason is that most rivers are heavily modified by human disturbances (e.g. dams, large removals of water for irrigation, domestic or industrial consumption). These disturbances can obscure the 'signal' of climate change - that is, trends in many rivers may bear no relation to global warming and may in fact be opposing the climate trend, due to human modifications such as dam construction. To detect climate-driven trends we need to analyse river basins that are relatively undisturbed by such human impacts. Recognizing this, some countries have declared 'Reference Hydrometric Networks' (RHNs) of locations where river flows are measured, and where human impacts are absent or minimal. However, to date there have been no efforts to integrate these globally. This is a problem for global assessments like the IPCC, as countries use different methods to assess trends, which limits comparison. Members of our consortium have previously pioneered a first trans-Atlantic study in this field. With the ROBIN initiative, we are now advancing a truly worldwide effort to bring together a global RHN. As well as the network of river basins, ROBIN is the network of researchers and institutions sharing expertise. The network includes leading experts from Brazil, Chile, Malawi, South Africa, India, Thailand, New Zealand and Australia, augmenting our existing network across Europe and North America. Crucially, these new countries span a broad range of different climates and the partners also bring specific expertise (for example, unique knowledge of global datasets that can support ROBIN, or specialist analysis of 'ephemeral' rivers that often run dry). ROBIN will engage other countries to expand over the lifetime of the project and set out a pathway to a sustainable legacy for the network going into the future. In this regard, crucially, ROBIN is supported by international organisations (UNESCO, WMO and the IPCC) who will ensure sustainability following the two-year project. ROBIN will also deliver the first truly global scale analysis of trends in river flows using undisturbed catchments. This will be a novel, high impact analysis in its own right, but will also showcase the potential of the network. Taken together, these activities will help realise the vision of ROBIN that future IPCC assessments will make more confident appraisals of climate change impacts on the water cycle, including floods and droughts.

The Palestinian liberation struggle has long been a standard-bearer for anti-colonial movements around the world. Rarely, however, have scholars investigated the historical process by which Palestinians embedded their cause within other struggles in the global south. The Palestinian Americas is the first project to document in detail how Palestinians forged such ties in a specific geographical context: that of Latin America in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Rather than assume Third World solidarities to have been produced across discrete national or regional blocs operating under Cold War logics, the project focuses on the revolutionary activism of diasporic Palestinians, emphasising forms of south-south migration and connectivity that bypassed European and North American channels. Since the early 20th century, Latin America has been home to the largest number of Palestinians in the world outside the Middle East (around 1 million), with particularly high concentrations in Central America and Chile. While these communities have long been known for their success as business entrepreneurs, significant numbers joined Latin American revolutionary movements from the 1950s onwards. Against a backdrop of rising Third World solidarity, this new generation of activists came into increasing contact with the nascent Palestinian liberation struggle as they sought to link their local activism to a global picture of anti-imperial resistance. Yet they also had to contend with hostility among fellow Palestinians in Latin America who often viewed involvement in left-wing activism as a threat to their economic interests. The project explores the complexity and specificity of these diasporic spaces, providing new insight on the struggles involved in forming south-south solidarities in the mid-20th century. From indigenous demands for land reform in El Salvador, to student movements in Chile, to the Sandinista uprising in Nicaragua, Palestinian revolutionaries in Latin America were embedded within distinctly local socio-political contexts. At the same time, their activism frequently forced them into clandestine lifestyles as they escaped persecution and sought to build new ties of solidarity. Using carefully chosen case studies, the research probes this interplay between movement, localised space and revolutionary activism through a combination of ethnographic and documentary sources, reconstructing the networks of kin and ideology that sustained diasporic Palestinians in their precarious journeys across disparate locations. The research is geared towards 3 main outputs. Firstly, an article in a leading journal of global history will look at Santiago de Chile as a hub for Palestinian revolutionary activists from across Latin America and the Middle East in order to make a broader intervention in how global historians can explore south-south solidarities in the era of Third World revolution. Secondly, an international conference and resulting special issue will establish a new, collective research agenda looking at the Arab diaspora's historic engagement with the Palestinian struggle. Thirdly, the project will digitise materials held in Chile, El Salvador and France to produce 3 new collections and 2 digital stories in the Planet Bethlehem Archive, an online resource that documents the diasporic heritage of Bethlehem - the town that produced the majority of Palestinian migration to the Americas. The project will make these outputs useful to key stakeholders beyond the academic sector through a consultative engagement programme that sees the PI partnering with archives and cultural organisations in Latin America, as well as a group of diasporic Palestinian writers and artists, to shape collectively a series of public events, educational materials and media publications. The PI will also draft a book aimed at a general readership which tells the story of Latin America's entanglement with the Palestinian struggle in the 20th century.

Landslides are a major source of fatalities and damage related with strong earthquakes, particularly in mountain areas. Forecasting the distribution and impact of landslides induced by earthquakes is one of the greatest challenges in the earth sciences. The behavior of slopes during seismic excitation is exceptionally complex, being dependent upon geological, geomorphological, geotechnical and seismological factors. This project aims to identify the main characteristics of landslide occurrence during strong earthquakes in Chile, improving the understanding of their mechanics, spatial distribution and controlling factors, obtaining quantifiable inputs for the development of a methodology for earthquake-induced landslide hazard assessment. This will be achieved through compiling and analyzing inventories for two Chilean earthquakes (Aysén 2007 and Maule 2010) to be compared with foreign landslide inventories; running a laboratory testing scheme in UK for better understanding of the mechanical causes of seismic slope failure; and applying those results on the development of a method for assessing the seismic stability of slopes in Chile. The new methodology will be verified in the Santiago region, which presents the highest population of the country and where an active fault has been recently discovered (San Ramón Fault). The outputs will include scientific publications, advanced human resource training as well as a new technique of hazard assessment applicable to urban/territorial planning and natural disaster prevention strategies in the country.

We live in the "Era of Mathematics" (UKRI, 2018), in which mathematics research has deep and widespread impact. Medical imaging is enhanced using the theory of inverse problems. Predicting sewage contamination in waterways after storms requires solving complicated systems of hydrodynamic equations. Machine learning tools are revolutionising data-intensive computing and, handled with proper mathematical care, have vast potential benefits for science and society. These are examples of the ongoing explosion in mathematical innovation driving, and being driven by, the analysis and modelling of data running through every aspect of life. Cutting-edge research now sits at the interface of data science and mathematical modelling. Methods and fields such as compressed sensing, stochastic optimisation, neural networks, Bayesian hierarchical models - to name but a few - have become interwoven and contributed to the delivery of a new domain of research. We refer to this research interface as "statistical applied mathematics". Established in 2014, the Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistical Applied Mathematics at Bath (SAMBa, samba.ac.uk) delivers leading research and training in this space. In the development of this bid, we have consulted widely with academic, industrial, and governmental partners, who consistently report a large and widening gap between demand and supply for highly skilled graduates. Our vision is to create a new generation of statistical applied mathematicians ready to lead high-impact, data-driven, mathematically-robust research in academia and industry. We will nurture a vibrant culture of cohort learning, enabling internationally-leading training in modern mathematical data science. A particularly important research focus will be the synthesis of data-driven methods with robust mathematical modelling frameworks. Tomorrow's industrial mathematicians and statisticians must understand when machine learning tools are (and are not) appropriate to use and be able to conduct the underpinning research to improve these tools by integrating scientific domain knowledge. This research challenge is informed by deep partnerships with a range of industry and government bodies. Our long-term partners such as BT, Syngenta, Novartis, the NHS, and the Environment Agency co-create our vision and our training. They are emphatic that we must address the urgent need for mathematical data science talent in this key strategic area for the UK economy. Many of our students will work directly on industry challenges during their PhD either in their core research or with internships. Our unique Integrative Think Tanks are the key mechanism for exploring new research ideas with industry. These are week-long events where SAMBa students, leading academics, and partners work together on industrial and societal problems. SAMBa graduates will be able to develop and apply new ideas and methods to harness the power of data to tackle challenges affecting society, the economy, and the environment. Our students will move into academia, providing sustainability to the UK's capacity in this field, as well as industry and government, providing impact through societal benefits and driving economic growth. Many alumni now hold permanent positions at leading UK universities and senior positions in a range of businesses. The CDT will be embedded within the University of Bath's Department of Mathematical Sciences, where 98% of the research is world leading or internationally excellent (REF2021). The CDT is supported by 58 academics in maths, with similar numbers of co-supervisors from industry and other departments. The centre will be co-delivered with 22 industry and government partners. A vital international perspective is provided by a worldwide network of 11 academic institutions sharing our scientific vision.