MULTAGRI will investigate how governance of agricultural landscapes can promote rural development by harnessing landscape and biological diversity as assets to promote the provisioning of public goods and sustainable intensification of agricultural production. We will do this by: * Determining empirically the spatial scale affecting a number of key farmland ecosystem services * Determining synergies and trade-offs between production of public goods and generation of supporting/regulating ecosystem services. * Valuing ecosystem services and public goods produced by European farms as a result of ecological intensification. * Modelling how payments for public goods and ecosystem services will affect regional agricultural development. * Assessing the multi-level governance system under which European farmers operate to understand how and why farmers choose to adopt specific management actions at farm and landscape scales. * Evaluating how European agricultural policies can contribute to more sustainable farming systems with payments for public goods and ecosystem services. * Disseminating project results effectively to both the scientific community and to stakeholders, particularly policy makers and farmers, but even the general public. To this end MULTAGRI coordinates scientific expertise across disciplinary divides and across European rural landscapes, to promote cross-disciplinary interaction among natural and social scientists and science-policy dialogue through mutual transdisciplinary interaction with stakeholders. The end product will be a synthesis: Governing rural land use and landscapes to support sustainable development.

The identification of new variability represents a major tool to face challenges to overcome global warming and improve farming system sustainability. Turnips and cabbages, which largely contribute to food production worldwide, are native of the Mediterranean basin. Wild forms and landraces grow under highly contrasted environments. Taking advantage of this distribution, the objective of BrasExplor is to collect, explore this wide genetic diversity of wild and locally cultivated forms, after discussions with farmers on cultural practices and traditional uses, in order to promote local varieties. Collects will be performed along the climatic gradient with a precise description of contrasted environmental conditions, edaphic and microbiome composition of the soil. From 100 populations of cabbages (Brassica oleracea) and 100 of turnips (B. rapa), we will sequence (Next Generation Sequencing) in bulk each population for genome-wide scans looking for associations between nucleotide polymorphism and environmental variables as well as soil composition in order to search for genetic determinants of adaptation to suboptimal conditions. These data will be confirmed under controlled conditions for water and temperature stress and in contrasted field conditions for different traits: seed germination, root architecture, flowering phenology, self-incompatibility, microbiota diversity, morphology. Genetic data will be also used to infer their population genetic structure and to understand the relationships between the wild and cultivated forms of each species, the impact of farming practices under environmental constraints. Results will allow development of core-collections for in situ/on-farm management strategies and ex situ conservation as well as for promotion of landraces and for first proposal of pre-breeding populations.

A collaborative interdisciplinary initiative is proposed to promote grain legume cultivation in Mediterranean countries. It includes biotechnologists, agronomists, plant breeders, crop physiologists, organic chemists and phytopathologists from Algeria, Egypt, France, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Spain and Tunisia with the aim to evaluate currently and previously grown grain legume varieties for characteristics of importance to sustainable agriculture and to apply novel tools to integrate genetic resistance with other control practises in a concerted manner. Priority is given to the combination of increased yield and resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, epidemiology and integrated management thus allowing for the production of leguminous crops of high value in crop rotations of low input and stable yields. The general objective of the work is to combine the application of marker-assisted selection and conventional breeding methods to develop enhanced grain legume genotypes with characteristics of importance to sustainable agriculture across Mediterranean. This will be achieved by: (i) Evaluation of current and historic chickpea, common bean, faba bean, lentil and pea germplasm for characteristics of importance to sustainable agriculture in order to define the desired phenotypes suitable for each Mediterranean area (ii) Development of new and reliable screening methods for the most relevant biotic and abiotic stresses in order to identify new sources of resistance and characterise the resistance mechanisms. The resulting germplasm will be of great interest in future breeding programmes (iii) Identification of new QTLs for yield and resistance/tolerance to stresses in pea. Studies on field stability of QTLs across diverse locations and genetic backgrounds will allow the development of specific markers for pyramiding and rapid screening. (iv) Identification of primary inoculum sources explaining the recurrence of the disease, and evaluation of new combinations of control methods (architectural features, cultural practices, resistance, etc) for the management of the major legume diseases. (v) Development of integrated management of the fungal diseases and broomrapes using fungal and plant metabolites.