Iron and manganese are key nutrients for phytoplankton in the oceans. The growth of phytoplankton affects the uptake of atmospheric CO2 and thereby impacts our climate. The accelerated melting of ice sheets and glaciers due to climate change can lead to an enhanced availability of iron and manganese for the growth of phytoplankton in the ocean. This study investigates, by conducting fieldwork near Svalbard and East-Antarctica and by applying numerical models, how the release of iron and manganese from the coastal zones and oceanic uptake of CO2 changes when glaciers and ice sheets melt due to current climatic changes.

Seagrass meadows are key components of coastal zones, but are rapidly declining with losses often characterized by sudden collapse. Mounting evidence suggests that this unpredictable non-linear behavior results from strong internal feedbacks. Yet, despite these recent insights, both protection and restoration of seagrass meadows remain extremely difficult, suggesting that certain fundamental mechanisms may be overlooked. Indeed, in two recent studies, we report on the discovery of an ancient mutualistic detoxification feedback between seagrass and sulfide-consuming lucinid bivalves, and show how breakdown of this facultative mutualism can amplify seagrass degradation. Although this work suggests that this mutualism could be vital in mediating seagrass productivity and ecosystem stability, its generality and importance, as well as how its role may change due the global change, remain to be investigated. Here, we propose a worldwide crowdsourcing survey to correlatively determine if and how strongly various seagrass and lucinid species are associated across climate and sediment conditions. Next, we will test interaction strength for the most important temperate to tropical seagrass-lucinid associations under various temperature and sediment conditions (the most important factors affecting the mutualism) in laboratory experiments. Finally, the resilience of the seagrass-lucinid mutualism will be tested in a worldwide crowdsourcing field experiment in which we manipulate sulfide production and mutualism strength. With this unique combination of worldwide surveys and experiments, and detailed laboratory experiments, we aim to answer whether the seagrass-lucinid mutualism should be more solidly integrated into seagrass conservation practices to significantly improve restoration success and resilience to global change.

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Crop plants like tomato are constantly being improved by breeding to develop resistance to novel diseases and resilience to climate change. Crop wild relatives are a major source of novel genetic solutions to such problems, however their full exploitation is often hampered by the suppression of genetic material exchange between species during breeding. In this project, we will develop an AI-based system that optimizes traditional breeding strategies to expedite the combination of multiple advantageous traits.