In The Netherlands “the land of water” the ecological quality of ponds, ditches, wetlands and lakes is severely degraded due to escalating and interacting anthropogenic pressures including pollutants and climate change. SEFAP unites leading Dutch freshwater experimentalists, infrastructures and data scientists to provide a step forward in collaborative science and inland water ecology. By conducting experiments in SMART-enabled replicated mini-lake ecosystems, SEFAP will enable the future of our waters to be experimentally created and tested. In combination, the technical innovation and community-building of Dutch aquatic experimentalists will strengthen the ability to predict and mitigate undesirable futures in aquatic ecosystems.

Photosynthesis is presently the main process fuelling life on Earth, and considered the virtually sole source of primary production in most ecosystems. However, 3.8 billion years ago, early life derived its energy mainly from chemosynthesis, a process still fuelling life in the deep sea and other sunlight-deprived systems. Here, we hypothesize that, in addition to photosynthesis, chemosynthetic primary production is a major, but overlooked, secondary pathway fuelling shallow sea food webs. We propose to begin to test this paradigm-challenging idea in six temperate to tropical seagrass ecosystems around the world.

Solar systems are implemented at increasingly large scale to meet demands for sustainable energy, including placing them on inland waters. SPARKLES unites scientists and stakeholders across domains (energy, ecology, society) to develop nature-positive solutions for floating solar for humans and nature. By putting nature front and center we look for integrative solutions that solve multiple problems in the living environment, rather than creating trade-offs between humans and nature.

Over millennia, peatlands have accumulated vast amounts of organic carbon (C) and are more important as C sinks than any other terrestrial ecosystem. Consequentially, peatlands are amongst the world’s best lines of defence against climate change. The rapidly changing climate is, however, affecting the C-sink function of peatlands. Peatland carbon dynamics pivot primarily around the key processes –production and decomposition– that are modulated by above- and belowground biotic communities. Recently, the importance of tight links between plant and soil biotic communities on ecosystem processes has become unambiguously clear. Analogous to the idea that species richness is an important driver for ecosystem processes and its resilience against climate change, yet less well understood, strong and diverse plant-soil biotic linkages may underlie the robustness of the ecosystem functions to enviro-climatic perturbations. In peatland ecosystems – the world’s densest C stores – the role of plant-soil biotic interactions in C dynamics, remains elusive. Furthermore, climate change can disrupt plant-soil biotic interactions and cause a rewiring, even erosion, in these links, with unknown consequences for future important ecosystem processes such as C cycling. Using an established enviro-climatic gradient across Europe, we will investigate how plant-soil biotic interactions affect peatland C dynamics. Specifically, we identify site-specific core plant-soil biotic networks and assess how apparent rewiring in plant-soil biotic interactions play out on C dynamics. We will use this newly gained knowledge on plant-soil biotic interactions to assess whether plant-soil biotic network structure, notably the diversity in multitrophic linkages, affects the stability of the peatland C-sink function to enviro-climatic change. Capitalising on this information, we will develop an unprecedented conceptual framework that uses plant-soil biotic networks to predict the future functioning and stability of the peatland natural capital – notably carbon sequestration. Outcomes of this work will thus enhance our mechanistic understanding of the effect of enviro-climatic change on the interactions between plant and soil biota that underlie C dynamics, which will form the basis for accurate site-specific predictive models on the future C-sink function of peatlands worldwide.