Increasingly challenging global and environmental requirements have resulted in agricultural systems coming under increasing pressure to enhance their resilience capabilities in order to respond to the abrupt changes in resource quality, quantity and availability, especially during unexpected environmental circumstances, such as uncertain weather, pests and diseases, volatile market conditions and commodity prices. Therefore, integrated solutions are necessary to support the whole food agricultural life-cycle value chain. Solutions necessarily must consider the products’ cycle, as well as each of the value chain stages. Thus, managing risks and the uncertain availability of information will lead farmers to take advantage of these managerial, technical and social based-solutions. This implies the need for innovative technology-based knowledge management system to capture the agricultural information, at a variety of regional locations, in terms of collecting, storing, processing, and disseminating information about uncertain environmental conditions that affect agricultural decision-making production systems. Hence, from the genetic design of the seed, till their planting and harvest processes, RUCAPS provides knowledge of the full agricultural life-cycle based-decision making process to realise the key impacts of every stage of the agriculture-related processes. Therefore, RUCAPS implies the development of a high impact research project in order to integrate real-life based agriculture requirements, alternative land management scenarios, unexpected weather and environmental conditions as well as supporting innovation in the development of agriculture production systems, operations, logistics and supply chain management and the impact of these systems and processes over the end-users and customers. This is to be conceived through the integration of standard and customised solutions for facilitating the collaborative engagement within the agriculture value chain.

Terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystems are being challenged by global changes, and threats to agricultural and forestry ecosystems represent some of the most serious environmental and socio-economic menaces that the planet and humanity are facing. Climate change (CG) is widely recognised as one of the most impactful global changes, and since it goes hand-by-hand with biodiversity and services loss in terrestrial ecosystems, they should be tackled together. Microbes constitute the life support system of the biosphere, but they are its most overlooked fraction and are not considered in the context of CG. The overall understanding of the impact of CG on the assembly and functions of microbiomes is still very limited. How the complex microbes-plants-soil interactions and its consequences on plant performance and productivity are impacted by CG is still largely unknown. Additional knowledge also needs to be obtained on the overall ecosystem functioning, and to what extent microbiomes may mitigate stress conditions due to CG. The project MICROBES-4-CLIMATE will provide a wider community of users/researchers, irrespective of location, efficient access to a cluster of complementary world-class Research Infrastructures and their integrated, advanced services along with training and scientific and/or technical support, to address such need. An excellence-driven programme of Transnational Access, which is at the core of the project, will enable users to conduct curiosity-driven research addressing terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystems, in light of the abovementioned multidimensional and still poorly understood microbiomes-plants-soil-environment interactions, and its roles in CG responses, resilience, and mitigation. This will foster the advancement of frontier knowledge and also pave the way to applied research on harnessing plant-microbiome interactions to improve the climate resiliency of plants/crops and to enable e.g., precision, sustainable and resilient agriculture.

EPPN2020 will provide European public and private scientific sectors with access to a wide range of state-of-the-art plant phenotyping facilities, techniques and methods. It will aid the community in progressing towards excellence across the whole phenotyping pipeline, involving sensors and imaging techniques, data analysis in relation to environmental conditions, data organization and storage, data interpretation in a biological context and meta-analyses of experiments. It builds upon the starting community project EPPN and will coordinate its activities with the ESFRI infrastructure EMPHASIS and with national programs. EPPN2020 involves: - Access to 31 key installations (15 infrastructures), chosen for excellence and avoidance of redundancy, with capacity of hundreds of genotypes and dedicated to innovative non-invasive measurement of traits at different levels of plant organization. - Three Joint Research Activities. JRA1 develops novel techniques and methods for environmental and plant measurements, in particular for assessing the spatial variability of environmental conditions in each platform. JRA2 develops tools for statistical analysis of phenotyping experiments across platforms and scales of plant organization. JRA3 develops a European Phenomic Information System, based on novel information technologies and standardization strategies. - Networking Activities. NA1 organises access and selection of projects, NA2 establishes cooperation and increases integration between facilities both within and outside EPPN2020. EPPN2020 (i) extends the infrastructure offered to the community; (ii) develops synergies between infrastructures and cross fertilization between disciplines, via common experiments in JRAs; (iii) builds a European information system to manage the information generated by installations, with an open data strategy; (iv) provides training at all career levels; (v) is closely linked with industry, both SMEs providing technology and breeding companies