The ESPA Framework is designed to help the world's poor to improve their lives through the benefits they can derive from ecosystem services. We know from previous studies, that many vital Ecosystem Services (ES) are taken for granted and degraded. People responsible for making decisions and forming policy tend to ignore the value of ecosystem services for the world's poor. As a result, the costs and benefits of the use and management of ecosystems are not shared equitably, with the poor capturing few benefits whilst being most vulnerable to environmental degradation. ESPA's Political Economy theme seeks to implement high quality research to provide the evidence and tools required to ensure that knowledge about ES are integrated into more equitable policy and decision making. In order to deliver this we need to develop ways to influence human behaviour and so to ensure that the poor can capture benefits from ES and where necessary to establish more effective institutions and markets. These are the challenges that the ESPA Framework project will address. The concept of active management of ecosystems for poverty alleviation is in its infancy. Traditional approaches to assessing the role of people in ecosystems have focused on economics (mostly neo-classical) as the foundation for decision making processes. We propose that a shift is required away from purely economic based approaches towards a new paradigm that describe complex socio-ecological systems that account for traditions, culture, non-monetary goals and a host of other factors that underlying human behaviour. This way of looking at ecosystem services for poverty alleviation also recognises that the role of the individual is strongly influenced by the institutional and political context within which people operate. The project will highlight the factors and interrelationships that influence human well-being and then progress to build a conceptual framework that can be applied by future ESPA projects. This work will be grounded both in theory (of complex socio-ecological systems) and in practical reality through a series of case studies in three of the ESPA regions (Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Amazonia). The project brings together leading experts from the UK and the ESPA regions to form a truly interdisciplinary team. Regional projects will conduct systematic reviews of evidence linking ES and poverty alleviation. The earlier ESPA regional Situation Analyses will be used as a starting point for this process. The regional teams will identify local stakeholders (including communities, government and the private sector) who will work with the project to assess the relevance of the framework within their local contexts. Forest ecosystems will be used to evaluate and development the framework within each region. The project will facilitate a process of South-South learning benefiting from the very high level of expertise and experience that the developing country partners will contribute. This will lead to the production of a comparative analysis of the political economy of ecosystem services for poverty alleviation, based on a review of the current literature. This will help to inform the development of the framework, as well as providing an extremely valuable resource for other projects, policy makers and practitioners. The opportunity to bring together the developing country partners will contribute to build the international ESPA community of practice, further enhancing the opportunities for researchers from the global south to participate in the wider ESPA programme. The development of this approach at the start of the main ESPA programme will help kick-start a range of activities across ESPA's themes and regions. Our framework will be made available to all ESPA projects.

Viscoelasticity, which is the presence of both elasticity and viscosity, is increasingly realised to be an important feature of many common liquids in today's world (e.g. blood, shampoo, paints, DNA suspensions etc). However, due to the complexity of the mathematical models currently used to describe them, viscoelastic fluids remain poorly understand despite a wealth of interesting properties (e.g. it has been known for over 70 years that only a minute amount of elasticity is enough to at least halve the viscous drag on a surface exerted by a turbulent flow). In particular, it has only relatively recently been realised that there are possibly three forms of turbulence which can occur: (classical) Newtonian turbulence (NT) which exists in the absence of elasticity, Elastic turbulence (ET) which exists in the absence of inertia, and a third, apparently intermediate, form of turbulence called Elasto-inertial turbulence (EIT) which requires a balance of inertia and elasticity to exist. This proposal is directed at trying to identify the dynamical origins of EIT by building upon a recently discovered instability of unidirectional viscoelastic flows. Finite-amplitude states already found by us to emerge from this instability resemble what is seen in EIT suggesting that they are proxy which can be used to understand the underlying physics of EIT as well as mapped out to see when EIT exists in parameter space. Outstanding questions to be also addressed include trying to establish connections between these states and both ET and NT. Establishing connections here would help untangle whether there really are 3 distinct types of turbulence or more different limits of the same turbulence. Ultimately, the proposed work will improve our understanding of what type of viscoelastic flow (laminar, turbulent or something else in between) will be realised at a given set of parameters which will help engineers design industrial processes or design products.

Context Mountain ecosystems are found on every continent, and create one of the most dynamic biomes on earth. They are globally significant in that 50% of the of the planet's drinking water comes from mountain ecosystems, 1.2 billion people live within the vicinity of mountains, 24% of the earth's terrestrial landmass is in mountain regions, and mountain ecosystems are attractive landscapes that provide opportunities for rejuvenation, recreation, and cultural services. Not only do we gain these direct benefits from mountainous landscapes, but they are also highly biodiverse ecosystems, with many species found only in the high alpine environment. These biological refuges for rare species are threatened by climate and land-use change, and there are growing observations that mountain summits especially are losing these rare plant species. Despite our knowledge on the biodiversity above-ground, we have scare knowledge on the biodiversity, and indeed the activity, of organisms that live below-ground, in the soil. It is these organisms that maintain nutrients, cycle carbon into soil organic matter, and underpin the sustainability of mountainous regions worldwide, yet threats to these organisms are poorly reconciled. There is therefore an urgent need to understand the nature of below-ground life in alpine environments, and how these organisms may respond to rapid changes in climate, and shifts in land-use. Aims and objectives To address this knowledge gap of functional ecology and sensitivity in the global alpine, we will form a new global network of alpine specialists from around the world, to lead a 'global fingerprint' of the activity of soil organisms in alpine regions. We will cut across all the major alpine regions of the world, and carry out analysis of the size and activity of the microbes that live in soil. We will then focus on key locations, to simulate climate extremes, which may threaten these ecosystems, and then measure the impact on soil organisms. Specifically, we will ask: 1. What do we know about the global alpine from the perspective of functional ecology? a. We will use gathered expertise from the network to probe deeply into the literature and expert knowledge to make a scientific synthesis of our current understanding of this global biome 2. How will alpine soils respond to extreme climate events? a. We will collect samples from different alpine environments and simulate drought and extreme rainfall events, and measure the impact on soil biology 3. How can we design an experiment that will be globally relevant at exploring climate impacts on alpine ecosystems? a. We will use output from our global synthesis, plus data from our extreme events experiment, to guide the design of our future experiments addressing key questions. Potential applications and benefits. We will use this network to generate new data, giving us insight for the first time on the activity of alpine soil organisms. This information will allow us to understand threats to these ecosystems, ultimately to establish long-term experiments that allow us to see how these ecosystems respond to changes in climate and land-use. Only by working together, can we use our expertise and existing networks to tackle this new and urgent challenge, giving us vital understanding of how best to safeguard these valuable ecosystems so that they continue to provide a harbour for plant and animal biodiversity, and provide us with food, water, timber and a place to live. These data will benefit the scientific community through new knowledge generation, but will also underpin a holistic understanding of the alpine that will contribute to sustainable management. We will also, through our outreach activities, engage with people around to explore functional soil ecology, and initiate a discussion on the threats to our mountains through the 'my mountains matter' platform.

Many cells grow only at their ends / a mode of cell development that requires delivery of new membrane and assembly of new cell wall at a single point of the cell surface. This polarised form of development is common to nerve cells, pollen tubes and many other eukaryotic cell types, most notably fungal hyphae. Tip growing hyphae also have to be steered towards nutrients, oxygen, appropriate mating partners or other cells, and away from toxic compounds and around inpenetratable objects. Therefore tip growth has to be coupled to the ability to orient the tip. We know that the cytoskeleton and several important protein complexes located at the cell tip are required to organise the cell in such a way that secretory vesicles, which carry membrane and proteins for growth, are delivered to and fuse with the apical plasma membrane. We do not know how the cytoskeleton and these protein complexes are regulated to enable the growing hyphal tip to be steered and to respond to environmental cues. This research programme rests on the foundation of our recent observations that have shown that the ability of a hypha to turn requires a supply of calcium ions in the growth medium and several calcium channel proteins. These insights are embodied in our hypothesis that the molecular machinery required for hyphal orientation is regulated by local uptake of calcium ions at the hyphal apex. In our experiments we use hyphal orientation responses of the human pathogenic fungus Candida albicans as our model system. This is because we can genetically manipulate this organism to create mutations and protein-tagged strains that can be used to address our hypothesis, and because hyphal tropisms are likely to be important in the pathogenic life style of this fungus. We have also collected a wide range of mutants and strains for this project from colleagues who are investigating the tip growth process, but have not considered tip orientation as a separate phenomenon. We have developed two tractable assays that allow us to observe and quantify hyphal orientation responses. Firstly, we can measure how many hypha become deflected to a new axis of growth as the encounter a ridge underlying the cell (contact guidance or thigmotropism). Secondly we can override all endogenous and exogenous guidance cues by placing hyphae in an electrical field and observing them reorienting towards the cathodic pole (galvanotropism). So far our findings show that calcium ions are vital for both tropic responses suggesting that the steering machinery is the same, even for different tropisms. We will test the hypothesis that hyphal orientation is regulated by calcium ions in several ways. [i] We will localise the calcium channel complex proteins in the hyphae using fluorescently labelled YFP and CFP- fusions and observe the cellular localisation of proteins in this complex and other tip-growth related protein complexes (polarisome, exocyst, Cdc42 and Arp2/3 complexes) as hyphae undergo thigmotropic and galvanotropic alignments. [ii] We will determine whether calcium ions that originate from cellular stores are also important in supporting tropic orientations. [iii] We will characterise calcium-ion dependent processes that could translate calcium signals into tropic growth responses. [iv] Finally, we will determine the significance of tropic growth for the ability of C. albicans hyphae to invade host tissues.