RICOCHET addresses both basic/fundamental scientific questions and their societal applications. The financing instrument (PRCE: Research projects collaborative – Enterprise) supporting the project RICOCHET should allow us to develop and strengthen collaborations between the academic research and the socio-economic worlds. RICOCHET addresses the management of coastal territories that are highly exposed to CC related hazards because of their geographical position, between land and ocean. Along this particular domain, hazards come from coastal erosion and submersion as well as from flooding, flash floods, and landslides. More specifically, due to global/local environmental and societal changes, the project also considers environments issues requiring population relocation. RICOCHET involves both territory/risk managers working on societal needs and scientists, for improving the understanding of coastal dynamics from a global point of view. For this purpose, coastal areas sensitive to cliff recession and to continental flooding but also to demographic pressures are analysed. The project has 3 main objectives: 1) Understanding the present-day Land/Sea continuum dynamics (beach/cliff/hinterland) and assessment of the sedimentary balance along-shore and from continental; 2) Definition of multi-sectorial impact induced by GC (climate, environmental and social/economic changes), e.g., impacts of the increase of storms frequency and SLR on the cliff-beach system functioning. 3) Supporting the stakeholders and politics in their apprehension and questioning about the impacts of GC on coastal territories to provide them with tools to adopt sustainable coastal management strategies. Highly based on interactions of continental and coastal processes, our approach will consist in developing an integrated risk assessment (multi-hazard and multi-risk analysis). Results will provide risk communication tools, and decision/management tools for the risk management of seashore cliffs environments. Project is remarkable in 2 respects. Firstly, the originality and the particularity of the project consist in the choice of a specific type of coast (coastal cliffs and slopes subjected to fast retreat). Indeed, these territories require more than other type of coast, to consider the interactions of continental and marine processes. Secondly, the project will consider the cascade effects and chains of impacts for a global risk assessment. Because, these processes affect several sectors (agricultural areas, industrial structures, individual houses and tourism infrastructures…), an economic analysis will be conducted to analyse acceptable and sustainable management strategies for a better management and risk prevention in coastal areas. Methodological and technological innovations of RICOCHET come from the use and development of novel methods to monitor the coastal dynamics (physical processes and planning) and tools to evaluate and manage impacts. These are complementary aspects which should provide multi-temporal, multi-scale, and multi-sensor data for a better risk management. A multi-sectoral economic analysis, as well as territorial development proposals will provide the transfer of the scientific advances towards the public services to enhance the adopted strategies for the risk reduction/adjustment. This knowledge transfer will also be effective by the delivery of a diagnostic tool that could be directly integrated in the State services systems. This tool will be designed in order to be exploitable to other regions affected by these concerns. Valorisation of the results will also be done following these 2 axes: academic valorisation through publications (International Refereed Journals with high impact factors) and communications in congress, and technical and industrial valorisation, thanks to the knowledge transfer that will allow the enterprises to be more active on new markets and new products related to decision support systems and guidelines.

Artisanal and traditional fermented foods constitute a significant part of the Mediterranean diet and represent a gastronomical heritage that needs to be preserved and protected. The manufacture and sensorial properties of such products, in contrast to industrial scale fermented foods, relies on complex and poorly defined microbial consortia activities. In this context, the microbiota plays a central role in product-manufacturing. Indeed, the broad microbial diversity together with the use of minimally-processed raw materials and traditional know-how is largely responsible for fermented products attributed sensory complexity and beneficial health properties. However, it can also be responsible quality and shelf-life variability. While maintaining high microbial diversity is necessary to avoid product standardisation, better knowledge about this diversity together with desirable and autochthonous strain selection as well as improved microbial resource management could clearly help local producers to manufacture high quality hygienic fermented products with longer shelf-life. Concerning hygiene and safety, this is particularly important for southern Mediterranean countries where cold chain ruptures regularly occur. The concept of the proposed ProMedFoods project is to directly work with SMEs and SME associations to provide new solutions to better control fermentation processes and more efficiently manage their microbial resources. This project will directly transfer tools to SMEs to increase their technological level, competitiveness and possibly contribute to increase their income by reducing spoilage and improving fermented food quality and shelf-life. The overall aims of this project will be to conduct an ethnobiological study of selected artisanal Mediterranean fermented products (cheeses, fermented butter, table olives and fermented sausages) and describe their complete production process (know-how) based on surveys and on-site observations in close collaboration with local producers (WP1). Then, microbial diversity and sanitary quality of well-defined local fermented products will be determined using culture-dependent and culture-independent (metabarcoding and metagenomic) strategies (WP2). Culture-dependent methods will be used to create and preserve a large working collection of microorganisms in CBR strain collections. After beneficial and dominant strain characterization and selection, primarily based on their safety assessment (WP3), the goal will be to help local producers improving overall product quality and safety by better microbial resource management and microbial fermentation technology (use of defined starters or ripening cultures and on-site pilot scale fermentations) (WP3 and WP4). To efficiently carry out the project goals, we have gathered local fermented food producers from each partner’s country and 7 highly specialized multidisciplinary research teams in food microbiology from 2 non-EU (Algeria, INATAA and Tunisia, ENSAT) and 4 EU countries (France, INRA and UBO, Greece, DEMETER, Italy, DISAFA and Spain, IPLA).

Insect pests can damage agricultural crops, consume and/or damage harvested food, in addition to diseases transition to humans and animals. Chemical insecticides and pesticides can affect human health directly or indirectly by disrupting ecological systems (air, rivers, lakes, oceans, streams, wetlands, forests and fields). At national and European levels, there is no regulation on the presence of pesticides in the air as it is the case for other pollutants typically. Since the early 1900s, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) bacterium group has received great attention, alternative to chemical products, for its use as an insect pest control agent, due to the parasporal inclusion production. The morphology of these inclusions may vary among Bt strains as bipyramidal, cuboidal, amorphous, spherical and irregular crystal morphologies can be observed. Previously it was believed to be important to end up with high spore counts. It was later shown that the spore count can give a good estimate of the growth of Bt in fermentation, but it does not always reflect the fermentation yield in terms of insecticide production since the amount of crystal protein, the main active compound, per bacterial cell can vary. Evaluation of these Bt products can be performed classically using several types of analysis ranging from bioassays to diverse biochemical methods. The main disadvantages of these methods are their expensiveness and their time-consuming character. Hence, an alternative physical method based on light scattering has been developed in order to quantify inclusion body formation and growth in recombinant cells. We recently showed that polarized speckle imaging method can be used to distinguish between Bt spherical crystal size and concentration within different fermentation products. In this project, we intend to extend our optical characterization, towards a real-time monitoring of the chemical fermentation reaction. Instead of embedding crystals into agarose gel to get rid of the Brownian motion, aqueous suspensions of crystals and/or spores will be studied; the reference Bt strains (HD1 and HD133) as well as isolated strains from Lebanese and Tunisian soil samples will be used. This project paves the way for potentially using laser polarized speckle at an industrial scale as a low-cost and non-invasive technique in order to characterize crystal geometry and to evaluate the yield of crystal production within fermentation. To achieve the objectives, the project gathers together experts in physics, chemistry and biology from three Mediterranean countries: France (UBO), Lebanon (USJ) and Tunisia (CBS).