The goal of the project is to create an interdisciplinary Centre of excellence focused on advanced technologies for high quality, safe and sustainable regional food production. The aim of the Faculty of Agrobiology, Food and Natural resources (FAFNR) is to fill the gaps in food production "from field to fork" on the fertile and healthy soil. Contemporary, Faculty research and education activities cover almost the whole chain from agricultural primary production to food safety, but there is a substantial weakness in the chain, that is the absence of research team dealing with advanced food technologies. The second main objective is to enhance scientific excellence in the field of food technology, food processing, and more widely on food quality, safety, and nutrition by promoting scientific cooperation and integration. The third main objective of the project is to improve the accessibility of innovative technologies to regional stakeholders through cooperation with ERA Chair holder and his/her local and international contacts. The project will bring the main research outputs in the field of processing of agricultural products from local agri-food production, and food processing presented to the small producers. The aims will be achieved by attracting ERA Chair Holder with excellent research credentials and leadership competences, thus creating a research team with broad expertise and wide network for collaboration that will greatly improve the culture of research and research performance. ERA Chair holder will be a director of newly established Food Technology Centre and the position will be equal to heads of the faculty departments. In this position, the ERA Chair Holder will be a member of the Dean’s Board that co-decides on issues related to the operation and strategy of the Faculty. ERA Chair holder will analyse current PhD programmes and will advise on possible changes related to better fit to ERA and modern science in the field of food technology.

This proposal addresses the priorities of the Call by appointing an Era Chair Holder at the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague (CZU), Dr. Andrew M. Liebhold, a globally prominent scientist in the field of biological invasions. The proposal aims to establish HIVE: The Centre for Biological Invasions in Forests around the Chair, by hiring a team of excellent researchers and adopting an innovative work model of Socio-Ecological Synthesis Centres (SESC). This model has recently had much success in generating innovative high-impact research, yet there has been only a very limited uptake in Widening countries. Contrary to the traditional hierarchical system of research organisation, SESC research is organised around Working Groups (WG), which are formed of a diverse collection of researchers and innovators from mostly outside host institutions. Adopting this work model in HIVE will deliver a considerable increase in mobility level across disciplines and sectors and facilitate a new level of cooperation between researchers and innovators. Involving EU and national decision and policymakers, nature conservation and biosecurity experts in WG and fostering an active bi-directional interaction, will profoundly contribute to the knowledge-based economy and society and strengthen the human capital base in Widening countries. To maximise the efficiency and impact of HIVE, a system of institutional reforms will be adopted at CZU, involving administrative changes facilitating the work model of SESC, fostering HIVE’s sustainability in the post-EU funded period, and increasing FLD capacity to attract talent and contribute to reverting the progressive brain drain in Widening countries. Reforms will be adopted to increase the capacity to compete for prestigious research grants, ultimately contributing to HIVE`s sustainability. A dissemination and communication strategy is proposed to maximise the spill-over effect on CZU and WC.

Ecosystems provide many key services essential for our wellbeing. These services depend on the temporal stability of plant communities. In turn, stability depends on resistance, which is the capacity of plant communities to withstand exogenous perturbations, and on recovery from their impact. Extreme climatic events disrupt the stability of ecosystems, with unpredictable consequences on ecosystem services. As the intensity and frequency of climatic extremes is expected to rise, understanding how ecosystems respond to extremes is an extremely urgent task. Previous studies exploring the stability-climatic extremes relationship suffer from different limitations: i) lack of in-situ data on vegetation stability to conduct worldwide analyses; ii) scarce focus on the joint influence of taxonomic and functional diversity in affecting stability mechanisms under extreme climate. Moreover, few investigated if extremes cause critical transitions of ecosystem functions. This has prevented understanding of how different ecosystems react to climatic extremes. This project aims at addressing these limitations and improving our fragmented knowledge on the relationship between extremes and stability. Combining cutting-edge analytical tools with extensive, and novel, global databases of time-series of in-situ vegetation and climatic extremes data, the project will analyse the relationship between stability and climatic anomalies, and how it varies in different ecosystems. Results will provide worldwide predictions of ecosystem-specific resistance and recovery to climatic extremes, and new approaches for anticipating critical transitions of ecosystem functions. These outputs will be essential for i) guiding future policies aimed at reducing the impact of extremes on society; ii) mitigating economic loss due to extremes in crucial sectors such as agriculture and food production; iii) providing new methods for investigating how climatic extremes affect ecosystem services.

We face an unprecedented threat from global alteration of nature and biodiversity, but we still lack rigorous estimates of how fast, where, and at which scales biodiversity changes. Studies report fragmented and seemingly contradictory results, suffer from mismatches in biodiversity metrics, mismatches in temporal and spatial grains, and are constrained by huge data gaps. Moreover, local loss and gain of biodiversity is decoupled from changes in countries or continents, with opposing directions at different scales being plausible. A quantitative synthesis that connects all this, and bridges the gaps, is needed. The objective of BEAST is to map and interpolate temporal biodiversity change in Europe, the US, and the world, across continuous space, time, and their grains, from locations as small as 1 m, to countries and continents, over the last ca 40 years, for birds, plants, and butterflies. To do this we will combine data from local time series with high-quality gridded atlas data from countries and continents. We will use a new cross-scale model to interpolate biodiversity change jointly across space and time, and across the data gaps. We will test if temporal change of diversity, distributions, and turnover can be estimated from: (i) static patterns of diversity and distributions, (ii) from data lacking temporal replication, (iii) from space-for-time substitution of spatial vs temporal species turnover, (iii) from spaceborne remotely sensed spectral diversity and turnover. These methods will enable integration of heterogeneous and messy biodiversity data, and they will improve estimates of change in data-poor regions of the global South. BEAST will deliver the first integrative statistical model revealing, for the first time, how multiple facets of biodiversity change across scales. It will show which regions, habitats, and biomes undergo the most pronounced change, which is critical for informed large-scale conservation policy.

The proposed “Hop On” facility will contribute to accomplishing and enhancing several aspects of the AI4PEX project and, at the same time, develop new competencies and skills through joining this transnational, multi-disciplinary research initiative. The primary goal is to further improve the reliability of climate projections at global and regional scale, by enhancing their ability to represent extreme hydroclimatic phenomena that are not inherently captured in the model conceptualization. In particular, we aim at (i) adopting a model evaluation philosophy that seeks and identifies new system properties, such as compound extreme events, emerging from the interaction of its components, (ii) reducing uncertainties related to observational disagreement, (iii) improving the representation and understanding of recent trends in compound extreme evaporation/precipitation events, (iv) identifying hotspots of critical future change in the frequency, intensity, and duration of compound extreme evaporation/precipitation events across Europe and globally, and (v) investigating the ability of ESMs to generate extremely rare events with severe socioeconomic impacts, such as catastrophic floods. This approach is unique in its investigation of how new system properties emerge in model simulations by analysing compound extreme events, with a particular focus on the interactions between extreme evaporation and precipitation. The Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, located in Eastern Europe in the broader hot-spot region of the Danube River basin, will also contribute to maximizing the impact of AI4PEX by bringing new channels and tools for project dissemination and communication.