The EU Biodiversity Strategy 2020 aims to establish green infrastructures and to restore at least 15% of degraded ecosystems until 2020. In this strategy, forests play a key role since they provide multiple ecosystem services. European policy has invested great efforts in afforestation of former farmlands but has largely neglected opportunities for passive landscape restoration and defragmentation by spontaneous forest establishment (SFE). Yet, SFE is common in many parts of Europe due to the widespread abandonment of agricultural land use in past decades. SFE typically leads to many small forest patches that are not or little managed. Together with existing semi-natural forests, these new forest patches form a network of habitats that can help maintain biodiversity and ecosystem services. Although SFE may contribute to the creation of multifunctional, diverse landscapes, it has so far received little attention from ecological and social science research. In fact, SFE is often regarded as a challenge rather than an opportunity for landscape management and conservation. SPONFOREST will examine the potential of SFE as a cost-effective and politically feasible tool for reinforcing perennial green infrastructures of self-sustaining forests in fragmented landscapes. In-depth ecological and sociological studies will advance the understanding of forest regeneration in the landscape context, analyse ecosystem services and disservices of new forest patches and assess their perception by stakeholders and the greater public. Five case studies in Mediterranean and temperate landscapes will use this approach to investigate SFE under various environmental and socio-political conditions. The ecological research in SPONFOREST will analyse SFE with a broad spectrum of complementary approaches including dendroecology, population genetics, functional ecology, remote sensing, and landscape analysis. State-of-the-art field and laboratory methods will be used to gather high-quality data that inform a mechanistic framework aimed at forecasting SFE as a function of tree biology and the landscape context. The social science research of SPONFOREST will combine standardized surveys and in-depth expert interviews with stakeholders and policy makers to elucidate the societal perception of these new forests, their current use and the ecosystem services they supply from a demand perspective, including governance options to regulate this supply. SPONFOREST will place great emphasis on a detailed synthesis of the insights gained from ecological and sociological research, and will actively involve policy makers and experts in the transdisciplinary evaluation of key findings in view of policy recommendations. The comprehensive but distinct key deliverables address the scientific community, policy makers, forest and landscape managers. SPONFOREST should thus contribute to strategies that optimize future forest governance and management at local to European scales.

Forests are a major reservoir of biodiversity and trees, as keystone organisms, directly impact the diversity and functioning of forest communities. Predicting the response of trees to ongoing global change (GC) is thus a critical scientific and societal issue. Along with phenotypic plasticity and migration, genetic adaptation is a central component of this response, particularly in trees whose high levels of diversity and long distance gene flow facilitates the spread of favorable genes. However, the existence of abundant genetic variation does not guarantee adaptation: if the climate and environmental changes are too quick, or genetic modifications are too slow, the population would go extinct before it can adapt to the new environmental challenges. Our hypothesis is that there is a critical level of genetic diversity for stress responses, which, together with the demographic impact of stress, predicts the likelihood of adaptation or extinction. The main goal of TipTree is to identify tipping points in the demographic and micro-evolutionary dynamics of tree populations, and to assess how human actions interfere in the adjustment between the rate of evolution and the velocity of GC. TipTree benefits from the BiodivERsA project LinkTree (2009-2012) which investigates the evolutionary response of key forest tree species to GC by analyzing the spatial variation of stress tolerance candidate genes along environmental gradients. But TipTree brings a new and critical dimension, that of time, by focusing on regeneration. In trees, regeneration (from fertilization to early plant recruitment) is a key period of the life cycle, when selection is expected to be very strong and has the potential to catalyze the rapid spread of evolutionary novelties in the next generation. The amount of genetic variation available in adults and how it is transmitted, selected and expressed in juveniles will condition the ecological properties of the whole ecosystem in the next decades to centuries, which remains a challenging short and non-equilibrium term of evolution for long-lived organisms. Specifically, our consortium will: 1) Screen the ecological and geographical margins of widespread keystone forest trees from different ecoregions (Temperate, Boreal, Mediterranean and Tropical) to identify where recent environmental changes have provoked shifts in allele frequencies at adaptive genes and to quantify these shifts by contrasting parent and offspring genetic and phenotypic compositions. We will address key environmental drivers: water stress, temperature regime, storm/fire frequency, pest outbreaks. Using natural and controlled (reciprocal transplants, common gardens) populations from existing Pan-European networks, we will generate large arrays of genomic polymorphisms using innovative genomic approaches, 2) Test the existence and evaluate the magnitude of tipping points for tree population dynamics at micro-evolutionary scales, by using a new generation of models coupling biophysics, population dynamics and quantitative genetics. We will feed these models with (i) climate change scenarios provided by IPCC, (ii) forest management scenarios established by our stakeholder group and (iii) our experimental results on adaptive genetic diversity. Micro-evolution of tree populations will be simulated at local and regional scales, and will provide forecasts of ecosystem services (carbon budget and water balance) and decision support for management.

With the shift towards a reduced reliance on external inputs in agriculture, identifying management options that enhance the provision of ecosystem services has become a critical issue. Pest control resulting from the activity of naturally present predators and parasitoids is frequently cited as an important service that could reduce pesticide use as targeted by the French 2018 Ecophyto governmental action. However, the link between management options, pest control level and ultimately crop yield is poorly understood. The PEERLESS project aims to identify alternative management strategies that enhance the crop protection service provided by functional biodiversity and ultimately to optimize agricultural systems, at local and landscape scales, for economic viability and sustainability. PEERLESS brings together six partners organisations with extensive expertise in agronomy, spatial ecology, ecology of interactions and public economy. The project combines: (i) an empirical assessment of naturally occurring crop protection from weed and insects pests in annual (wheat-oilseed rape rotations) and perennial (apple orchards) systems across a broad range of landscape and agronomic situations; (ii) ecological engineering with an assessment of alternative plant protection system to improve crop protection at the local scale; (iii) an in-depth study of the structure of trophic networks; and, (iv) population dynamics of key pests and their regulators in case study areas. These components will support the parametrisation of spatially-explicit, predictive models to (v) test the effect of landscape patterns of alternative local and landscape management strategies on pesticide use, pest control, crop yield and farmer income and (vi) identify landscape scale viable management strategies to control insect and weed pests.

The cold chain permits to process and commercialise in good conditions of quality and safety a wide range of foods. However the cold chain represents high energy consumption. OPTICOLD objective is to increase sustainability of the cold chain by optimising the compromise between energy consumption, safety, quality and shelf life for refrigerated processed foods. Cold chain is currently managed to respect target temperatures, determined by regulation and specifications agreed among stake-holders. OPTICOLD project proposes a new approach, aiming at a multi-criteria management of the cold chain, with a main role for minimisation of energy consumption. To meet this objective, OPTICOLD project will build a global model of the cold chain, by linking energy consumption with variables that determine food shelf life: its microbiological safety and its quality. This type of model does not exist at the moment for the whole cold chain. It will be established using the relations linking all these variables, energy consumption, safety and quality, to the temperatures of the cold chain. In particular cold in the food processing plant, for which scientific knowledge is lacking, but for which empirical professional knowledge indicates a high potential to save energy, will be studied in priority. A management of cold chain based in priority on energy consumption will permit to reduce energy consumption, but it may results in cold temperatures distribution more prone to deteriorate quality and safety (the variables determining shelf life). It is therefore necessary to develop multicriteria approaches to determine the margins of action on temperature distributions, or “acceptable variations for cold temperatures”, considering the requirements for quality and safety. This implies the most accurate prediction of safety and quality as a function of cold temperatures. A the moment, relations between food safety or quality and cold temperatures are described with important uncertainties, which imply important margins of safety on the temperature regimes of the cold chain, and therefore over-spending of energy. OPTICOLD will therefore integrate to the studies on energy consumption, researches on the physiology of cold adaptation in bacteria and researches in bio-physic on plant tissues destructuration, as the cause of non-microbiological spoilage of raw plant foods. In an optimised cold chain, the relation built in the project between energy cost and the shelf-life variables will permit to quantify the gain in energy consumption reduction with the consecutive loss in shelf-life, for all the steps of the chain. Then the steps for which the most important gain in energy consumption can be obtained for the least loss in shelf life will be identified. The approach of the OPTICOLD project will be developed on processed, refrigerated foods. Three food categories will be studies, to cover very different conditions to impart a generic dimension to the project: living food with a physiological activity which spoilage is mostly not microbiological (fresh cut salads), dead and raw food (fresh pastry dough), pasteurized chilled food (fresh pasteurized pasta). The possibilities to generalize the OPTICOLD approach developed on these three food categories to other types of foods will be studied.

The DIGAP project confronts a problem observed in the field not only by its project leader, but also by Malagasy partners and humanitarian actors: the difficulty of anticipating humanitarian crisis situations linked to droughts. DIGAP argues that a consideration of groundwater status is crucial to anticipating water scarcity-related humanitarian crises in semi-arid regions that are almost devoid of surface water. In fact for some years environmental markers have provided scientific evidence on the hydric situation (e.g. rainfall deficit, drop in piezometric levels). We seek to determine how we can better use water status and more specifically groundwater status, in anticipating humanitarian crises. First (WP1), we will develop an innovative methodology based on remote sensing and modeling to characterize groundwater dynamics at the regional scale in an area that lacks basic documentation. Second (WP2), we will quantify the associations among various environmental factors and food security, in addition to human health indicators through the use of a multi-level epidemiological modeling approach. We expect that our results will unravel the effects of environmental and anthropic factors in the development of drought-related humanitarian crises and thereby sustainably strengthen Madagascar's early warning system.