The brown macroalgal genus Sargassum, the namesake of the Sargasso Sea, also known as the "golden floating rainforest of the Atlantic Ocean", is an essential habitat and refuge for many organisms including endemic species. However, the holopelagic Sargassum species [S. fluitans and S. natans], which have historically been geographically constrained to the open waters of the Sargasso Sea and Gulf of Mexico, have recently begun forming massive accumulations in the Tropical part of the Atlantic Ocean resulting in unprecedented strandings impacting three continents: the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, Mexico, Caribbean-island nations, northern Brazil and western Africa. There is uncertainty regarding the sources and sinks of Sargassum, and this proposal aims to address the following related key questions: (1) How are Sargassum subpopulations carried and distributed by ocean currents?; (2) How genetically and physiologically variable are the Sargassum species in the Tropical Atlantic Ocean and how does this impact Sargassum bloom dynamics?; (3) Can we combine geomarkers and biomarkers to infer the recent history of Sargassum species’ composition, distribution, and abundance from the sedimentary record?; (4) Are the accumulations of the last decade the result of environmental changes or a natural range expansion of Sargassum spp.?; and, (5) What is the basin-scale connectivity of Sargassum and how has it changed over the last decades? Our international, transcontinental consortium includes interdisciplinary work packages that combine biological modelling, physical oceanography, shipboard and field-oriented physiological experiments combined with laboratory approaches, and a poly-phasic marker approach on current and past Sargassum populations.

LANDMARK is a pan-European multi-actor consortium of leading academic and applied research institutes, chambers of agriculture and policy makers that will develop a coherent framework for soil management aimed at sustainable food production across Europe. The LANDMARK proposal builds on the concept that soils are a finite resource that provides a range of ecosystem services known as “soil functions”. Functions relating to agriculture include: primary productivity, water regulation & purification, carbon-sequestration & regulation, habitat for biodiversity and nutrient provision & cycling. Trade-offs between these functions may occur: for example, management aimed at maximising primary production may inadvertently affect the ‘water purification’ or ‘habitat’ functions. This has led to conflicting management recommendations and policy initiatives. There is now an urgent need to develop a coherent scientific and practical framework for the sustainable management of soils. LANDMARK will uniquely respond to the breadth of this challenge by delivering (through multi-actor development): 1. LOCAL SCALE: A toolkit for farmers with cost-effective, practical measures for sustainable (and context specific) soil management. 2. REGIONAL SCALE - A blueprint for a soil monitoring scheme, using harmonised indicators: this will facilitate the assessment of soil functions for different soil types and land-uses for all major EU climatic zones. 3. EU SCALE – An assessment of EU policy instruments for incentivising sustainable land management. There have been many individual research initiatives that either address the management & assessment of individual soil functions, or address multiple soil functions, but only at local scales. LANDMARK will build on these existing R&D initiatives: the consortium partners bring together a wide range of significant national and EU datasets, with the ambition of developing an interdisciplinary scientific framework for sustainable soil management.

Transitions to “low-carbon” development paths (i.e., to development paths with limited greenhouse gases emissions) are unlikely to be achievable solely via technological solutions: behavior, notably consumption patterns, will also have to evolve. However, an assumption implicit in most GHG emissions scenarios is that as income per capita converge across countries, households consumption patterns will converge as well, leading to potentially very high demand for energy, very high demand for natural resources and very high emissions. ECOPA precisely aims at examining how flexible the link between income per capita and consumption patterns is; and at drawing implications of these findings for future emissions scenarios. To do so, ECOPA maps and compares consumption patterns, and their evolution, in France, an “old” industrialized economy, and Brazil, a rapidly emerging economy. In both countries, a combination of econometric analysis of consumption data, household surveys and in-depth studies of representative goods and services is used to (i) map consumption patterns across income groups, and (ii) explore the determinants of their changes over time. Strong emphasis is put on obtaining consistent monetary and physical flows. This is necessary to analyze the energy and emissions implications of consumption patterns, but this constitutes a significant theoretical and empirical stumbling block. Finally, on the basis of the retrospective analysis, scenarios of how household consumption patterns in the two countries might evolve are built and their implications for energy and GHG emissions are computed.

The objective of the SargAlert project is to significantly improve the forecasts of the strandings of the invasive algal species Sargassum in the tropical Atlantic Ocean, in the Caribbean Sea and on the Brazilian coast. The synergy between satellite data / ocean transport modeling / in-situ measurements will be used for that purpose. SargAlert will provide alert bulletins to end-users such as territorial authority, tourism, fishers. The challenges that will be addressed by SargAlert are as follows: - detection and monitoring of at different time (hour to daily) and spatial (20 m to 5 km) scales using a multi-sensor satellite data analysis (Low Earth and GEOstationary orbits), - improvement of Sargassum stranding forecasts by combining physical transport models with artificial intelligence approaches, - validation of satellite data products and forecast models using in-situ measurements, - production of alert bulletins to address societal issues. The innovative developments of the project will enable an integrative approach of the Sargassum stranding issues: synergy between satellite data, understanding of Sargassum spatio-temporal distribution, transport forecast. Improvements of ocean modeling of dynamics will benefit societal authorities to better respond to the risks induced by the more frequent and intense Sargassum blooms in the Atlantic Ocean. The operational Sargassum forecast center will thus have all required inputs to provide reliable forecasts in near real time. This federative and interdisciplinary project includes complementary partners from academic laboratories, including a human science team (AEM, IRISA, LATMOS, LC2S, LIS, Marbec, MIO, UFPE/UFRPE), from an operational forecast center (Météo-France) and from a national satellite data center (AERIS/ICARE).