CropDoc seeks to exploit existing research on Potato disease identification and outbreak management in the domain of precision agriculture, agriculture digitisation & decision management support. It will harness cutting-edge technologies (i.e. IoT, mobile devices, crowd sourced data, big data analytics and cloud computing). It will build a decision support system that generates insight from multiple data collected from remote sensing above the fields and IoT ground sensing within the fields for monitoring & prediction of disease in real time. CropDoc will base its data service and analytics platform on open standards and will allow interoperability through open APIs. This will ensure an end-platform ecosystem can emerge that consumes the data & analytics service, allowing farmers to use their platform of choice, while allowing central authorities to identify and manage sector outbreaks. The initial focus will be on potato late blight disease, one of the most devastating crop diseases in China. In a typical blight pressure season crop protection chemicals cost the industry an estimated $10-20bn per annum. Late blight has been referred to as a 'community disease', due to its ability to spread rapidly from field to field under the right weather conditions. Asexual spores travel easily on the wind when the weather is cool and moist, and can rapidly infect neighbouring fields. As such, understanding the symptoms of the disease and what to do when it is detected are essential to preventing an outbreak from rapidly turning into an epidemic.

This project draws on research from a project called 'Language as Talisman' that explored how everyday language can be offer opportunities for creative expression. The team is composed of PI Pahl and poet Gloria Kiconco, based in Kampala, Uganda. Kiconco is a published poet and zine maker who has previously run zine workshops for women. Together with artist Charity Atukunda she will work with two organisations to create zine-making workshops. Each workshop will last for 4 days. There will be three workshops in total, two in partnership with the organisations and one in order to prepare for the exhibition. The resulting zines will be displayed in a travelling library, originating in Kampala and disseminated via the African Poetry Fund to a library in Mombasa, and poetry library networks in the UK via the newly created Manchester Poetry Library. The organisation, 'StrongMinds' argues on its website that depression is one of the most serious challenges facing African women. Women suffering from depression have very little support (https://strongminds.org/the-need/). Life is particularly hard for those on the margins and women and girls face challenges if they are considered 'outsiders' in any sense of the word. This project draws on the idea of the zine, as a form that can be adapted and autonomously used by individuals to express themselves. Zines can be about anything; in this project they will combine poetry and art to be formed in workshops with skilled facilitators Kiconco and Atukunda. Equipping women with life writing and expression skills is a key part of this project. Drawing Artvism's vision that women in particular need writing skills to equip them in life, the project will place creation and autonomy at the heart of its vision. Our vision is to do that in collaboration with these organisations dedicated to supporting women. The project team includes an evaluator, Lisa Damon, who has experience of working with refugee groups as a researcher, and is currently a doctoral student at the University of Makerere. Gloria Kiconco is the lead in Kampala. She is a published poet, who works closely with arts organisations to realise her zines, which are a mix of poetry and art. She has previously been part of the AHRC funded project on New Enhancements to Enhance Artists' Livelihood in East Africa (PI Andrew Burton). Charity Atukunda is a visual artist who worked with PI Pahl on the AHRC funded 'Belonging and Learning' project, which worked with young refugees in Kampala to create art that would directly speak to policy-makers. The team will be led by PI Pahl, drawing on her experience of co-production, and includes Co-Investigator Su Corcoran, who has developed strong links with organisations within Kampala through the 'Belonging and Learning' project, and researcher McMillan, a poet, and Kratz, who is working in the field of poetry libraries. The project will create a new travelling library of zines that speak to express the creativity of women through poetry and art.

Climate change over the last million years has seen rapid fluctuations between ice ages and warmer 'interglacials'. At the height of an ice age the sea level could be up to 120 metres lower than it is today; then, when the climate warmed, the sea would rise once more. Understanding the impact of these changes has direct relevance to understanding the possible ramifications of the current global warming trend. The impact of such changes was felt most strongly on islands. Many island features are linked with sea level - they become larger and closer to the mainland (maybe forming a landbridge) as sea level drops; the opposite happens when levels rise. We know from modern islands that the smaller they are, the fewer species they can support. Island species are also often unique to that island, and they are vulnerable to extinction. Consequently, island species form a 'front-line' of response to climate change. We will investigate the effects of climate change over the last million years on island elephants and deer in the Mediterranean. Their commonest evolutionary response was to become dwarfed - a phenomenon that came to prominence with the discovery of a fossil dwarfed human on the island of Flores in Indonesia. In some species, dwarfing was extreme (elephants on Sicily, for example, weighed 150 kg, compared to a mainland ancestor of 10,000 kg), and we will use this as a 'marker' for evolutionary change. Until now, no one has considered the evolution of dwarf mammals in the context of climate change, because there are few reliable dates to tell us when these species evolved. To answer these questions we will first conduct detailed examination and measurement of fossils of the dwarf deer and elephants preserved in museums. We already have similar data on mainland species, and the comparison will allow us to determine how many species of dwarfs there were, and their ancestry. Comparison of measurements will then allow us to calculate the percentage reduction in body size and weight, and more detailed features of the teeth and bones will reveal whether the dwarfs had become specially adapted to the island environments. Secondly, we will use cutting-edge techniques to determine the geological age of the dwarf species. We will employ four different methods of dating that between them will allow us to determine ages within a narrow range of error. These methods use tooth remains of the mammals, and shells and sediments from the deposits in which they were found, and also require measurements to be taken at the sites. To this end we will visit a number of key localities on Sicily, Malta, Crete and Cyprus where remains of dwarf elephants have been found, and conduct small excavations to produce fresh material for dating and for comparison with previously-excavated fossils. Thirdly, we will use existing knowledge about climate and sea-level changes over the past million years to plot maps of the changing size and shape of the islands and, in the case of Sicily and Malta, their possible connections to each other and to the mainland. Putting together these three strands, we will be able to determine how global changes impacted the evolution of the mammals. Did major climatic events trigger bursts of evolution on many islands? What was the speed of evolutionary change? Did the dwarf species endure for a long time, or did they soon become extinct, perhaps due to further climate change? Did the same thing happen repeatedly in a cyclic fashion? Was the degree of dwarfing influenced by island size, time of separation, or other factors such as available vegetation? The results of this project will provide a microcosm of the impact of global change on mammal evolution. It will also help explain a long-debated phenomenon - that of island dwarfing. It will, finally, refine methods and produce data of broader application, especially in the proposed dating of important geological sites around the Mediterranean.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Evidence from Britain and Ireland between 3500-2000 BC (the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic) makes this one of the most important periods in prehistory. During this time, we see spectacular Grooved Ware and Beaker pottery, metallurgy, carved mace heads, and use of some of Europe's most iconic sites such as Newgrange and Stonehenge. Recent ancient DNA data (suggesting almost complete population replacement at the end of the period) and dietary stable isotopes (indicating movement of people and animals over previously unsuspected distances) suggest that there is still much to learn. These new data challenge and reinvigorate older debates in terms of growing social hierarchies, ethnicity, religious organisation, and identity. However, these data have not been matched by developments in our chronologies; such fine-grained evidence requires equally sophisticated and specific chronologies in order to understand these changes. While previously prehistorians had to rely for their chronological structure on typologies of sites and things, we now have the ability to produce very precise, probabilistic, independent chronologies using Bayesian statistical analyses (e.g. Bronk Ramsey 2009; Bayliss 2009). Bayesian analysis has provided precise chronologies for individual sites (e.g. Whittle 2018) or activity at types of site (e.g 'Neolithic burials'; Whitehouse et al. 2014), which were previously understood at the scale of several centuries. It allows a coherent way to compare scientific chronologies, and applications to earlier Neolithic sites (e.g. Whittle et al. 2011) have had international significance in the ways archaeologists approach scientific dating as a whole. While we have had excellent examples of scientific chronologies for individual late Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites or things (see below), no attempt has been made to write a synthetic history of the dramatic changes of late 4th and 3rd millennia Ireland and Britain using accurate and detailed chronology. Moreover, 'simply' increasing chronological precision on its own is not enough. To fully achieve the potential of the Bayesian 'revolution' (cf. Bayliss 2009; Bronk Ramsey 2009; Griffiths 2017), we need both an independent chronological framework, and an approach to 'prehistory' that moves beyond ever more precise chronologies for sites or sequences. We need narratives that can synthesise and interpret evidence from across 'packages' that archaeologists recognise as significant - such as the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic - and use precisely defined time-scales as the basis for discussing changes in practices, things and places produced by people in historically-specific times. Chapman (2018) has recently called this the 'central challenge' in order to write 'a new kind of archaeology', while Whittle (2018, 248) argues that the 'pre- must come out of prehistory'. This project will do just that. We will build on previous approaches, producing site-specific chronological models for all evidence from Britain and Ireland from 3500-2000 BC, while generating a significant legacy of new data, in order to use time - expressed in centuries and decades - as the basis for our new narrative structure. We will make all data, analytical programs and outputs open access, meaning it will be possible to adapt and revise our chronologies in future research. This project's significance will therefore lie not just in our methods, or our routine chronological precision for 1500 years of Irish and British history, or our commitment to open access, but also in our new approaches to writing narratives of 'prehistory' in the future.