Our proposed collaborative partnership between leading coastal and sea-level scientists from the University of York in the UK and the University of São Paulo, the Federal University of Paraná, and the Federal University of Pará in Brazil seeks to reconstruct how sea levels have changed along the Brazilian coast over the last 200 years. This period is highly significant as it covers the critical time during which the natural processes that had been driving sea-level change gave way to the dominance of human activities. While estimates of global sea-level change during this time have been made before, they almost exclusively rely on data from the Northern Hemisphere. We will contribute to addressing this bias by reconstructing sea levels using two approaches involving sediments deposited in coastal wetlands and organisms that live attached to rocky shorelines, approaches in which the team are world leaders. Our partnership will facilitate exchange of knowledge and technical skills between the partners, enabling us to compare and integrate our differing approaches to past sea-level reconstruction. The development of new sea-level records will allow us to begin to collaboratively address major scientific questions concerning the timing of the transition from natural to anthropogenically elevated rates of sea-level rise and the evolution of the different contributions to global sea level.

Deforestation and marginalization of rural poor continues in Brazil and Bolivia despite investment in institutional change, forest regulation, improving land management practices and economic development. Previous approaches to equitable management of forest ecosystems in the Amazon tended to offer very narrow formalised solutions, lacked structure and coherence, were too insular and lacked broader international perspective and expertise. The proposed project will address these gaps by providing a holistic and inter-disciplinary approach to understanding the links between the causes, mechanisms and the effects of deforestation on poverty at the agricultural frontier in three case study areas in Bolivia and Brazil. The problem of making the benefits of forest ecosystems available equitably to the disadvantaged people is one of the top priority policy issues identified in the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). However, environmental governance in the Amazon tends to lack engagement with forest dependent poor, so that some ecosystem management initiatives restrict poor people's access to resources and reduce their anti-poverty capabilities. The proposed project attempts to rectify this problem by giving the voice to the rural poor in the Amazon frontier, reconnecting them with the regional policy makers and linking them into broader research networks to develop Southern-led solutions to the problems of deforestation and poverty. Through the series of workshops, pilot studies and user-engagement events the proposed project exposes dynamism of deforestation and its effects on poverty in the frontier areas as well as suggests institutional changes necessary for equitable forest ecosystems management in the Amazon. It will attend to three key areas: 1. Understanding concerns over, experiences of and reactions to deforestation by the forest dependent poor The project will give voice to the forest dependent poor to articulate their concerns over forest degradation and deforestation and to incorporate their perspectives on poverty and poverty alleviation into the development of pathways to sustaining ecosystem services. 2. Developing holistic, interdisciplinary approaches to poverty alleviation through sustainable forestry The proposed project will address fragmentation of existing mechanisms governing ecosystem management and tackling poverty of the people affected by deforestation by bringing together forest dependent poor, policy-makers, governing bodies, and research institutions involved in rural development. It will evaluate existing policies reducing environmental vulnerability, address the lack of capacity and explore the potential for more effective inter-agency work to avoid policy conflicts and duplication of development efforts. 3. Developing international knowledge networks to facilitate equitable forest management Through a series of workshops and pilot studies the project will develop southern-led solutions to deforestation and the alleviation of poverty. It will enable knowledge transfer, research networking and cross-agency learning for the actors at local, national and international levels involved in sustainable forest management in the Amazon.

Safeguarding insect biodiversity has a global impact. Insects increase crop yields, help food production and economies, and are essential for ecosystem functioning. Scientific research and expertise must, therefore, ensure we not only understand what is causing global insect biodiversity changes but also enable us to mitigate the further consequences for nature and people. Tropical forests are an ideal setting to investigate the occurrence, drivers and consequences of insect biodiversity loss because they are home to much of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity - including the majority of all known species, and provide many ecosystem services upon which humanity relies. Despite the growing number of academic studies and media headlines drawing attention to 'collapses in insect biodiversity', the status of insect populations continues to attract insufficient research attention. This bias is evidenced by the fact that only c. 1% of all described insects have had their conservation status assessed by the IUCN compared with 72% of vertebrates. Our ability to inform better environmental decision-making and conservation policy-making is further limited by other three factors. First, the tropics have been mostly overlooked in previous large-scale and long-term assessments of insect biodiversity trends. Second, little is known about how the use of agricultural pesticides affects tropical insect populations in nearby forests. Finally, our knowledge of insect interaction networks within tropical forests is limited to a few assessments based on single locations or model taxa. As a result, we continue to miss a broader picture of the nature and scale of changes in tropical insects' diversity and populations, the factors driving these changes, and the further consequences for forest function and stability. To redress these gaps in our understanding, my research aims to: 1) investigate the occurrence, scale and causes of changes in tropical insect biodiversity; 2) quantify the impacts of agricultural pesticides and heavy metals on insect populations; 3) determine the cascade effects of insect loss for their interactions with other biological groups; and 4) promote biodiversity conservation through forecasting how distinct scenarios of climate change and land-use intensification will affect tropical insects to inform the decision-making. To achieve this, I will establish the first pantropical insect monitoring programme with standardized methods in Amazonian, African and Asian forests. This information will be combined with state-of-the-art ecotoxicology, metabarcoding, remote sensing and ecological modelling techniques to assess disturbance-driven impacts on insect communities and populations, changes in interaction networks with other taxonomic groups, and the contamination by distinct pollutants. Moreover, I will integrate information generated through the fellowship with large-scale spatialized insect abundance data from the study regions to forecast the impacts of further climate and land-use changes on insect biodiversity. To achieve impact and inform practices and policies, I will engage with distinct stakeholders in the study regions. To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first pantropical study aiming to investigate spatiotemporal changes in multiple insect groups surveyed with standardized methods in tropical forests. In doing so, my research will help us to understand the causes and mitigate the consequences of changes in tropical insect biodiversity; and generate data that will inform policy-making and biodiversity conservation strategies in the hyperdiverse tropics.

A healthy water environment is essential to life. Freshwater ecosystems occupy less than 1% of the Earth's surface, make up only 0.01% of all water, yet host ca. 10% of all known species. They also deliver vital ecosystem services, such as climate regulation and the provision of food, fuel, fibre, and water resources. Besides sustaining a disproportionately high share of global biodiversity, freshwater ecosystems are far more imperilled than terrestrial or marine realms nonetheless remain largely overlooked. This is critical in tropical regions, which are under intensive pressure from land use change, one of the main drivers of global biodiversity loss. In the Amazon, the world's largest and most biodiverse river basin, knowledge on the impacts of anthropogenic activities is largely insufficient. Spreading across nine South American countries, the Amazon is of local and global relevance for the provisioning of myriad ecosystem services that are vital for human well-being. For instance, it is responsible for rainfall generation across South America, global climate regulation, and for 1/5 of the world's freshwater that reaches the oceans. However, much of the Amazon region is now severely threatened - it holds much of the land that could be available for agricultural expansion, which is being facilitated by new strains of crops, climatic change, and infrastructure development such as new and improved roads. As Brazil holds more than 60% of the Amazon, representing 50% of its territory, it has a large responsibility in its management and conservation. One of the most poorly studied elements of the Amazonian freshwater ecosystems is how stream biodiversity is affected by human activities in agriculture landscapes. Small streams are the most extensive and widespread freshwater ecosystem in the basin, connect terrestrial and aquatic systems, host an outstanding biodiversity, support local livelihoods, accumulate multiple impacts that occur in their catchments, and have cascading effects on larger rivers. Therefore, the future of the Amazon river basin is dependent on the integrity of headwater streams. The main objective of my proposal is to further our understanding of the consequences of human impacts on tropical headwater streams, propose solutions to promote their conservation, and influence conservation and land use policy and practice in the Amazon. I will achieve this in four integrated work packages (WP). WP1 includes collecting multispecies (fish and aquatic invertebrates) data from multiple streams in the Brazilian Amazon, building on a large-scale survey I led in 2010 that resulted in important publications (e.g. Science, Journal of Applied Ecology). This repeated assessment will be the first comprehensive evaluation of temporal changes in tropical stream biodiversity in agriculture landscapes. In WP2, I will explore the potential of cutting-edge approaches such as environmental DNA (eDNA) and the quantification of pesticides as valuable tools to advancing our understanding of human pressures in tropical streams. In WP3 I will develop an ambitious and pioneering field experiment on stream fragmentation to better understand the impacts of roads (i.e. culverts and associated infrastructure), one of the most neglected drivers of stream degradation. This will be the first field manipulative experiment to measure the impacts of stream fragmentation by roads in the tropics. In WP4, I will promote transformational change in the Amazon by integrating the information from previous WPs to estimate the extent of stream degradation across the Amazon River basin, develop mechanisms to promote sustainable stream management, and inform policy. I expect to substantially contribute to the science and practice of stream conservation by bringing about a step-change in our understanding in the tropics and linking these findings to urgent policy and management challenges in the Brazilian Amazon.

This research partnership will build and strengthen scientific collaboration between UK and Brazilian researchers. Our team will work together to develop new, innovative research in order to reduce the vulnerability of Amazonian cities to extreme climatic events, such as floods and droughts. We hope that this research enables decision-makers in Brazil to identify those cities that need humanitarian assistance most during climate emergencies, and also build long-term resilience (capacity to absorb these shocks) to floods and droughts. Our team members come from various academic disciplines, including statistics, health science, economics, environmental social science, and spatial modelling. We will use secondary data sources to examine how adaptive capacity, local institutions and natural hazard exposure (the occurrence of droughts and floods) influence the negative impacts of these climate events on the well-being of people living in Amazonian cities. We are also interested in how extreme climatic events may influence food prices in these cities, which has implications for the affordability of food for the poorest city-dwellers. Our network also involves local citizens, and we will work with a range of community members in our focal cities in order to make sure that are research is locally-relevant and useful. Finally, we are investing significant effort in improving career opportunities for Amazonian scientists, and will achieve this through UK-Brazil researcher exchange, and workshops to train Masters and PhD students in the UK and Brazil.