Tropical forests are globally recognised as biodiversity hotspots and environments that are crucial for climate regulation, landscape stability, and the carbon cycle. Local deforestation can have regional and global feedbacks and 20th-21st century human actions in tropical forests are seen as a key part of the ‘Anthropocene’ – or the anthropogenic domination of earth systems. It remains an open question, however, as to whether pre-industrial human impacts on these environments had similar earth systems effects. 15th to 18th century European colonial empires drew together long-separated Old and New World ecologies, with implications for species distributions, demography, and land management in the tropics. This followed millennia of indigenous activities with possible regional and global cumulative results. Yet, we have no concrete understanding of how pre-industrial impacts varied spatially and temporally, what they meant for local sustainability, and how they compare to modern human impacts. The PANTROPOCENE Project addresses these questions by taking the Spanish Empire as a frame of reference for using archaeological, historical, and palaeoenvironmental data to build ‘pan-tropical’ spatial characterisations of pre-colonial, colonial, and industrial land-use. Undertaking novel palaeoecological and landscape survey fieldwork in the Philippine Archipelago, the often-neglected centre of the Spanish East Indies, the project will bring new data together with existing records, notably from the Neotropics, to ensure full tropical coverage of the Spanish Empire. The results will be factored into climate, geomorphological, and atmospheric models to determine how changing pre-industrial technology, subsistence, and administration had regional and global feedbacks on occupied human environments, informing understandings of the pace and threat of contemporary land-use changes in the context of endemic Island Southeast Asian biodiversity and the tropics more broadly.

The Erasmus+ Project Strategic Partnership Hybrid educational and research training on the use of marine models in life science (DigitalMarine) deals with the marine biology training and specifically with the marine organisms. The consortium gathered around the project for three years is composed by Sorbonne Université (SU) – the coordinator, Stiftung Tierärztliche Hochschule Hannover (TiHo), Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn – Naples (SZN), Università del Salento – Lecce (USL), Université de Fribourg (UF) and the Australian National University (ANU).The project starts from two observations: 1/ Structuring training through research: the need to develop an academic training through research and in research in the field of marine organisms in life science. 2/ Pedagogical innovation: the need to elaborate new teaching and learning methods. Indeed, the marine organisms research in biology has led to numerous advances in the area of cancer, neuroscience, molecular and cellular biology, showing the value of a high-quality teaching about these organisms in the universities. Additionally, the instauration of new educational approaches, such as flipped classrooms and blended learning, needed to be reinforced in this field in the partner universities. For all these reasons mentioned above, we have developed an international partnership assembling a big number of teachers and scientific experts coming from European and extra-European universities.Thanks to the Erasmus+ financing, this partnership has created a platform of digital learning that explains the importance of marine organisms in the biology research. The use of each marine organism in the biology research is clarified to the students through digital contents such as short videos, interactive diagrams, recorded conferences, narrated slideshows, interviews with scientists who are not participating in the project. All in all, 71 videos have been published on this platform, which constitutes 8 hours and 30 minutes of watching.This platform is an Open Educational Ressource (OER). It is accessible to everyone, no user profile is needed. This platform allows every person who is interested in marine organisms, professionally or not, to discover this Erasmus+ project and to inform themselves about this scientific field and get some training in it. Students, which are enrolled in a Master program at one of the partner institutions, are now able to learn in an autonomous way thanks to the platform, which is used as a support for the practical course welcoming European students at a marine station during 15 days every year (Schmid Training Course, STC). This course took place three times in the frame of the project and 41 students in total participated in it. It is a blended course that combines a virtual learning through the platform and an in-person intensive practical course at a marine station with teachers and other students. This way, students are able to obtain the theoretical knowledge in an autonomous way before coming to the in-person class, where a priority is given to practical works and discussions with teachers and other students. The future editions of the STC, the next one being planned in 2022 in Roscoff, France will be in a fully blended training mode, using the project’s results.Finally, the consortium has also published a handbook of marine model organisms, which contains 500 pages and focuses on the same disciplinary field as the platform. Containing 24 chapter on 24 different marine organisms, this handbook is one of the most comprehensive ones on this thematic. It will soon be available in Open Access.In the long term, the project’s results fills the gap that existed in teaching and research on marine organisms in life science. They will allow the future generations of young biologists, as well as experimented biologists, to obtain key knowledge in this field, thus enabling them to make future discoveries and advances in cancer, neuroscience and molecular and cellular biology.