Despite its place as a global leader in agriculture, each year the Brazilian agricultural economy loses approximately $15 billion to insect crop pest outbreaks. Indeed, insects consume 10-20% of all global crops while growing or in storage. Current agricultural practices in Brazil rely heavily on widespread pesticide application, which has led to the evolution of pesticide resistance in several significant insect pests. Such practices undermine the sustainability of important crop pest control technologies, reduce associated economic returns, and exacerbate the risks to economic production and food security in Brazil. We propose a revolutionary approach to pest management that will enhance the sustainability and long-term resilience of crop production, providing the benefit of managing insect pests more predictably. Our solution comes from evolutionary science and the particular features of host-pathogen interactions. Insecticide resistance evolution occurs when a single control agent is applied over a broad area, then consistent evolutionary pressures drive rare resistance genes to spread rapidly through the pest population. To prevent these sweeps of resistant alleles, we are investigating how multiple fungal pathogen strains can be used in a spatial matrix across agricultural landscapes, so that selection for resistance varies in different locations, preventing a uniform evolutionary response. On their own, multiple pathogen strains may not be sufficient because of cross resistance: genes making pests resistant to one fungal strain could also confer resistance to others. However, in host-pathogen systems, the optimum genotype to defend against one pathogen is often highly sensitive to the organism's environment. Simultaneous manipulation of an environmental landscape variable (the type of crop grown by farmers) will substantially decrease the consistency of selection: we predict this will prevent resistance evolution. In order to achieve real-world effectiveness of this pest control system, an integrated team of Brazilian and UK researchers will work together to establish the long-term prospects of our new solution. The aims are to: 1. Examine whether genetic variation for insect susceptibility to multiple fungal biopesticides under heterogeneous agricultural landscapes is stable, and assess how it responds to selection in the long-term. This will allow us to anticipate and avoid selection for resistance to multiple strains, and ensure the long-term sustainability of our pesticide resistance management system. 2. Investigate the suitability of fungal biopesticides for industrial scale production and field application in Brazil, which will facilitate product development for future industrial investment. We will also provide farmers and the crop protection industry with solutions for crop protection technology deployment, including improved delivery systems, higher pest control consistency and enhanced performance under field conditions. 3. Identify the barriers to uptake of our new pest control technologies and research methods to encourage farmer behavioural change. This research will provide economic and social science data to underpin advice for policy recommendations regarding incentive schemes, publicity campaigns and marketing strategies, thereby promoting uptake of these sustainable pest management practices.

The project builds upon a previous collaboration between plant physiologists Martin Parry (RRes), Eric Ober (NIAB) and Solange Andrade (Embrapa Cerrados). New UK and Brazilian partners will ensure a multidisciplinary, innovative approach. Anthony Hall (Liverpool) brings expertise in genomic studies and Ian Dodd (Lancaster) in drought physiology. The project will develop phenotyping tools and enhance breeding outputs at Embrapa. Rothamsted Research (RRes) has extensive field, glasshouse and controlled environment facilities, and state-of-the-art core and specialist facilities, including the farm operation, metabolomics and bio-imaging laboratories, cereal transformation and virus-induced gene silencing technologies. A large array of wheat germplasm used in current experimentation includes panels of commercial cultivars and double haploid mapping populations, and a wheat TILLING population is also available. Martin Parry and Elizabete Carmo-Silva are working towards improving wheat carbon assimilation to increase grain yield. The Centre for Genomics Research (CGR), University of Liverpool, is a major collaborative academic service centre that enables access to the latest advances in DNA sequencing and array technologies, data analyses and interpretation. Within CGR, the Plant genomics group, led by Anthony Hall, includes five post-doctoral researchers working on wheat genomics and cybra-infrastructure for plant genomics. NIAB is a pioneering research and advisory organisation. Work at NIAB is guided by industry needs and farmer focussed, with strong knowledge-exchange programmes. Expertise is in breeding and genetics, farming systems development, crop physiology, agronomy, and variety evaluation. NIAB is well-equipped with machinery for field experiments and laboratories for a wide spectrum of analytical measurements. NIAB's 'Innovation Farm' is used to communicate selected findings to the farming community. The Lancaster Environmental Centre's (LEC) offers extensive, state-of-the-art research laboratories, 15 glasshouses and 10 walk-in controlled environment rooms. Specific plant physiological equipment includes a whole-plant water use phenotyping platform and gas-exchange chamber, whole-plant pressure vessels for xylem sap collection and high throughout radioimmunossay and photoacoustic laser spectroscopy for phytohormone analysis. A field site with rainout shelters is available via a collaborative relationship with nearby Myerscough College. Embrapa Cerrados is located at Planaltina, Distrito Federal (DF), centre of Brazil. The unit has an experimental area of 2130 hectares, including 700 hectares of permanent ecological reserves. Facilities include laboratories, greenhouses, nurseries and seed processing unit. The Embrapa Cerrados team involved in this BBSRC-Embrapa project has expertise in Breeding (Julio Albrecht), Plant Physiology (Solange Andrade), Soil Science (João Santos Jr.), Microbiology (Fabio Reis Jr.) and Water Resources (Lineu Rodrigues). The group's research aims to select high yielding wheat cultivars in Savanah areas. Embrapa Trigo is located in Passo Fundo, Rio Grande do Sul (RS), south of Brazil. The unit has researchers in various areas of expertise, with a particular focus on wheat breeding. The unit has a total area of 426 hectares, of which 284 hectares are used as experimental fields. Jorge Chagas (Co-I) and Marcio Silva (Co-I) will contribute their expertise in crop science and plant breeding, respectively. The project will be closely aligned with activities under the UK-Brazil partnership for Yield Stability and Protection in a Changing Climate (PYSP), partly funded by a Newton-fund joint centre award and jointly coordinated by RRes and Embrapa. PYSP will ensure minimal duplication and maximum engagement between groups in Brazil and UK, and provide a central focus for all RRes/Embrapa activities, strengthening links across projects and ensuring greater impact and joint research synergy.

Tropical forests hold more species of plant and animal than any other kind of terrestrial environment, and store large amounts of greenhouse gases in their trees and soils. Yet most of us are aware that they are also highly threatened by human activities, with media attention often focussing on deforestation - when forests are replaced with alternative land-uses, such as agriculture and cattle ranching. However, forests are also being modified in other ways, when trees are felled for the commercial extraction of timber, or when forest burn in abnormally dry years. These events are known as forest degradation, and affect a larger area of land than deforestation alone. The widespread nature of forest degradation means it is very important to understand whether these human-modified forests are performing similar roles as intact primary forests. How much carbon and nitrogen do they hold, and are these nutrients cycled between the leaves and the forest floor at similar rates as in primary forests? Can these ecosystem processes by predicted by characteristics of the vegetation itself (such as leaf shape and format, and the rate it carries out photosynthesis). And crucially, what are the implications of these changes for the future of these forests - are they able to resist additional modification? This project will answer these questions in two separate Brazilian biomes, the Atlantic Forests of Sao Paulo and the Amazon forests near the city of Santarem. The data we collect in two years of fieldwork will be used to improve our understanding of forest functioning, and can help develop computer simulations of forests. These simulations can then be used to examine how forests may respond to changes in climate, or other human impacts such as logging or fire. These forests are also crucial for biodiversity conservation, as many rare and endemic species are only found in landscapes where forests have already been heavily modified by humans. It is important to assess to what extent they help conserve these species, and what factors could be managed to improve their conservation value. Tropical forests hold a bewildering number of species, and so many of these species are yet to be described. It is therefore important to focus on groups of species which are well known, making birds and plants are two ideal species groups. The detailed work on forest functioning will take place in a limited number of forest plots, as we are limited by the many precise measures that need to be taken over time. In contrast, biodiversity is much quicker to sample, allowing us to examine much larger areas of around one million hectares in the Amazon and in the Atlantic Forest. As well as examining biodiversity in these landscapes, this project will also assess changes in species traits, which are characteristics that link species to the many tasks they perform in nature. By doing so, we will be able to examine the extent to which human-modified forests are losing key ecosystem processes, such as pollination from long-beaked hummingbirds, or the ability of trees to assimilate and store large quantities of carbon. This will provide us with a much better idea of how the many different kinds of human activity are affecting biodiversity, which is important if we are to design landscapes that help protect the many species of conservation concern. For too long, important scientific knowledge has remained locked away in learned journals, and has failed to inform and influence policies. We are determined not to let this happen with our research, as we believe it will produce important insights that can help us preserve the ecological stability of tropical forests and the biodiversity they contain. To facilitate these impacts, we will make every effort to disseminate our findings. These activities include producing a series of short films for YouTube, linking with local schools, and writing policy briefs.

Fusarium head blight (FHB) and wheat blast (brusone) are two devastating diseases of wheat that cause major yield losses in Brazil. Both pathogens severely affect wheat heads with direct damage to the grain, both in terms of quality and yield. In the absence of resistant varieties, current disease control relies heavily on fungicides that are costly, non-sustainable for Brazil, and only partially effective. Brusone, caused by the fungus Magnaporthe oryzae, was first identified in southern Brazil in 1985 but has since spread into Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The disease can cause total yield loss of yield and in 2009 brusone cut Brazilian wheat production by up to 30%. Importantly, the susceptibility of Brazilian varieties to brusone precludes their cultivation in the Cerrado region, an unused potential of 5 million ha for expansion that would improve Brazilian self-sufficiency of this essential staple. Fusarium head blight, caused primarily by the fungus Fusarium graminearum, is a serious disease in both Brazil and the UK. In addition to the very significant yield and quality losses, a major concern with FHB is the contamination of grain with trichothecene mycotoxins such as deoxynivalenol (DON). Both the European Union and Brazil have imposed maximum permissible levels for DON in cereals and cereal products. In Brazil, severe FHB outbreaks have increased in frequency. In 2014 FHB was so severe that more than 60% of wheat yield was lost in the State of Rio Grande do Sul and in the western region in 2014 some farmers lost more than 80% to the combination of brusone + FHB. There is an urgent need to identify and characterise sources of resistance to both FHB and brusone and ensure that the introduction of genes to control one disease does not compromise resistance to the other. Moderate levels of resistance to brusone have been identified in Brazilian wheat but the genetic basis of this resistance is unclear. Resistance expressed in seedlings is not always expressed in adult plants making it essential that resistance is assessed in adult plants. Resistance to FHB is generally controlled by several genes of moderate/weak effect that are defined genetically as quantitative trait loci (QTL). Although Brazilian wheat varieties differ widely in their resistance to FHB with some being moderately resistant, no variety was found to possess the major Fhb1 resistance originating from Asian sources. Thus the genetic basis of the most FHB-resistant Brazilian cultivars is not known and suggests that they contain novel resistances that could be combined with those from elsewhere to breed very highly resistant wheat varieties. This project will use a range of cutting-edge approaches to identify the genetic basis of resistance to brusone and FHB disease. We will identify which parts of the genome contain genes that increase FHB and/or brusone resistance and determine whether increased resistance to one disease is associated with increased susceptibility to the other. We will also identify genes in wheat that reduce resistance to the two diseases. This will provide a complementary approach to increasing resistance to FHB and brusone in wheat. We will produce DNA markers to enable plant breeders to follow the presence of the beneficial genes in their breeding programmes and ensure that their varieties are highly resistant to both diseases. The results from this work will benefit plant breeders in Brazil and elsewhere across the world where these diseases are prevalent. This should lead to reduced risk of crop losses to growers and reduced risk to consumers from mycotoxins accumulating in grain. It will lead to a reduced reliance on fungicides to control these diseases which, in turn will benefit, growers and the environment.

In Brazil, maize is an important crop, providing a source of carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals in the diet. Many small farms in Brazil are run as a family business and provide subsistence for the family, and therefore economic prosperity and survival can depend entirely on the success of the maize harvest. Unfortunately, many insect pests attack maize plants, causing severe crop losses from insect damage. Although maize can be protected from pests by pesticides and even some alternative pest management tools eg pheromones that affect pest behaviour, most if not all of these options are unaffordable for smallholder farmers and there is no other management option available. It is vital that new strategies to defence vital maize crops are developed. Insect pests use their sense of smell to detect and locate suitable host plants for feeding and egg-laying. The odour of host plants comprises of attractive volatile compounds, but when pests start to damage the host plant, the odour changes as plants defend themselves and they become unattractive to the pests. A further development of this phenomenon is that the natural enemies of pests are 'tuned in' to the odour produced by plants when they are damaged by pests. These ecological interactions can be exploited in crop protection by using attractive odours to pull pests into traps, using repellent odours to push pests away from crop plants and attract natural enemies (predators and parasitic wasps) for control, or even using both sets of odours at the same time as part of a push-pull strategy. The use of synthetic attractive and repellent odours in pest management has been extensively explored, but for smallholder farmers, even this technology is unaffordable. A further development of the use of attractive and repellent odours is that they can be delivered by plants, with crop plants being selected or engineered to produce repellent odours and companion plants being selected to produce attractive odours. This companion cropping approach has been adopted with outstanding success in Africa for moth pest management on cereal crops, with more than 100,000 smallholder farms adopting it to date. One of the key reasons for success is that the approach fits with traditional mixed cropping systems used in smallholder farming. Experiments under controlled conditions using varieties of a plant called maize and a moth commonly known as Fall Armyworm (FAW) showed that certain varieties changed their odour more quickly and powerfully than others in response to FAW damage and became attractive to parasitic wasps. Furthermore, neighbouring undamaged maize plants that were exposed to the odour of FAW-damaged maize became more prepared (activated) to respond to FAW damage, should the pest start to spread away from damaged plants. If we can identify this response to FAW damage in maize varieties that are popular in maize-growing regions in Brazil, and identify companion plants that are more attractive to FAW than maize and can emit the defence activating odour when damaged by FAW, then we have an opportunity to develop a companion cropping approach for FAW management in maize crops in Brazil. We will screen, in the laboratory, maize varieties that are popular in maize-growing regions in Brazil with respect to their defence response to FAW damage and attractiveness to a natural enemy; screen in the field, maize varieties that have been identified as responding to FAW damage and attracting natural enemies, for enhanced presence of natural enemies and suppression of FAW populations; screen, in the laboratory, companion plants with respect to their attractiveness to FAW and ability to activate defence in neighbouring maize plants leading to natural enemy attraction; put combinations of identified maize lines and companion plants together in the field and screen for enhanced presence of natural enemies and suppression of FAW populations; show the new technology to smallholder farmers.