BeeGuards aims to strengthen the resilience of the European beekeeping sector by providing sustainable management practices, novel breeding strategies and digital and forecasting tools that allow the sector to adapt to a changing environment. We focus on determining how abiotic factors such as management practices, climate change, nutrition and resource limitations drive emerging biotic stressors that threaten colony health and erode the resilience of European beekeeping. BeeGuards comprises multiple actors and adopts a multi-actor approach from inception which has led to an open and inclusive design of the work programme. As a community, we will perform European-wide field studies evaluating and validating innovative threshold-based management and breeding strategies for resilience, using hives equipped with technological measurement tools. Complementary detailed immunological, behavioural, microbiological, pathological, ecological investigations will elucidate the ways in which management and climate act on honey bees and other pollinators. In this way, BeeGuards will, for the first time, provide a truly holistic view of the mechanisms determining beekeeping resilience and implement nature-based, local solutions for adaption, including model-based advisory tools for stakeholders. Our open and participatory actions include development of a WikiBEEdia community website where we will share and promote the BeeGuards concepts and results, including a Quest for sustainable beekeeping practices. Ultimately, BeeGuards will show the way for a change of perspective that is needed to achieve resilient beekeeping. BeeGuards will mitigate the environmental impact of beekeeping in terms of impact on wild pollinators and of carbon footprint, protect pollinator biodiversity, ensure the future provision of pollination services and support the economic development and inclusiveness of beekeeping, preparing the European apicultural sector to meet the climate challenge.

In Argentina and Peru the livestock sector is important for the national economies as job provider in rural areas and major contributor to the GDP. Currently the sector is facing many challenges and limitations, but also big opportunities as the demand for products of animal origin is growing. These dynamics make the need for better trained livestock professionals, able to respond to needs and demands of all livestock sector stakeholders, apparent. Therefore the objective of EDULIVE is to strengthen the cooperation of Latin American universities with all relevant livestock sector stakeholders to ensure they offer demand-driven higher education and to increase their capacity in responding to the innovation needs of the sector.EDULIVE promotes the up-take of practical entrepreneurial experiences in higher education by developing mechanisms to formalize and improve cooperation between universities and other livestock sector actors taking selected sub-sectors as pilot cases (alpaca fiber and dairy in Peru, wool and sheep meat in Argentina). Using the knowledge triangle approach, diverse livestock sector actors, such as farmers´ associations, NGOs, private businesses, national research organizations and universities jointly develop cooperation mechanisms to make Animal Sciences curricula and research activities, more demand-driven and relevant. Graduates of improved curricula are better equipped to face future challenges and strengthen the competiveness of the livestock sector and contribute to economic development. Academic staff is provided with specific training and acts as multipliers in their home institutions. In addition, short-term visits of lecturers at European universities stimulate the exchange of teaching and research ideas across borders. EDULIVE fosters regional and cross-regional cooperation on capacity building in higher education between the EU, Argentina and Peru. Long-term sustainability is achieved through the participatory project design.