The encounter between Europe and the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries undoubtedly changed the world. Spain would establish control over most of the Americas, inaugurating the modern global system we live in today. The richness and resources to which the Spanish crown got access were beyond imagination, and establishing the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru would enable the creation of a previously unseen and unparalleled social, economic, and political network. This was only made possible through Charles I's mandate to establish the Spanish Fleets that, between 1520 and 1790, carried out all transatlantic voyages between Spain and the Americas. The Spanish Fleets transported not only gold, silver, and all the traditional riches found in these territories, but also enabled the exchange of all sorts of resources, including plants, animals, foods and most importantly, people and knowledge, both Indigenous and European. This would have unprecedented consequences ranging from population growth in Europe thanks to the introduction of new and highly resistant crops, to the acquisition of new resources and knowledge that would eventually impact the development of areas such as medicine, astronomy, chemistry, geography, history, and literature, among many others, in both sides of the Atlantic. The Spanish Fleets were overseen by the royal institution House of Trade (Casa de la Contratación). It recorded thousands of trips in an extensive document collection that provides invaluable information about the people that shaped these first global networks and the activities that would eventually mould the history of modern Latin America and the world. This project will create a step-change in the way historical archaeology collects evidence and analyses information while transforming our knowledge about the New Spain Fleets (NSF), one of the most important maritime institutions and infrastructures of early modern history. This will be accomplished by, firstly, making readily available an unprecedented collection with thousands of documents about the NSF in computer-readable format; and secondly, by transforming our knowledge about the Spanish colonial maritime trade through five cutting-edge historical case studies delving into key social, economic, and spatial aspects of the NSF. Making use of innovative computational methods based on artificial intelligence techniques, the NSF project will 1) create an unparalleled digital collection bringing together thousands of historical documents related to the NSF from two major archives; 2) carry out the semi and automated transcription of this collection, unlocking historical information in thousands of documents; 3) use automated annotation methods to identify, mine, and analyse meaningful information from these sources; 4) create an online platform that will facilitate to any scholar the exploration, query, and extraction of information from the New Spain Fleets documents; and 5) carry out, in five case studies, a series of historical analyses that will substantially advance our knowledge of the social, economic, and scientific revolutions facilitated by the New Spain Fleets. In doing so, the project will open the opportunity for researchers and the interested public to access information and records that have been only in the remit of specialists in the past. Furthermore, the case studies will explore a series of topics that are far from being comprehensively and completely understood, thus opening a variety of potential new research areas and studies at a scale that is impossible at the moment. These will include the early migration of Indigenous peoples to Europe, the social networks of people in the fleets, the trade routes and the economic impact of the goods transported, the unofficial Spanish slave trade, the commercialisation and study of American plants and animals, and the exchange of scientific ideas about health, disease, and medicine.

Past climate change did not simply occur as a sequence of alternating warm and cool periods. Some of the most important changes caused by naturally occurring climate cycles are related to alterations to the state of circulation in the ocean and atmosphere. A good example is the extreme cooling experienced by northwest Europe as a consequence of weakening in the Gulf Stream / North Atlantic Drift system that maintains Britains relatively mild climate. A crucial concern for understanding future, man-made climate change scenarios are the physical "rules" understanding these changes in circulation. This project aims to generate new understanding of the physical mechanism underlying changes in rainfall in the southern Mediterranean and North African regions. There is convincing evidence that large magnitude and geographically widespread increases in rainfall occurred throughout North Africa during particular periods of the Earths past. These are periods when the northern hemisphere is receiving a relatively high share of the total incoming solar energy. The additional rainfall caused formation of new lakes and rivers in regions that are now desert and changed the distribution of a range of plants and animals, including early humans. It is thought that the additional rainfall is being routed to North Africa via a northward movement of the African monsoon, but this change is difficult to simulate in climate models and does not seem to fit with all of the data. Other mechanisms therefore also need to be investigated. This project will test whether some of the rainfall involved in greening the Sahara was derived from storms coming in from the Atlantic, rather than the African monsoon. We will do this by measuring the properties of water trapped within a stalagmite during its formation. The stalagmite we will use came from the north coast of eastern Libya, and is perfectly positioned to receive and retain water from the Atlantic storm track. The water trapped in the stalagmite is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, both of which come in two common isotopes - 1-H or 2-H and 16-O or 18-O respectively. Mediterranean water is slightly more rich in 2-H and 18-O than Atlantic water. Combined with additional measurements of 16 / 18-O ratio made on the calcite of the stalagmite itself, we therefore expect to be able to differentiate between these two sources using a simple modelling approach. The suggestion that Atlantic moisture was supplied to North Africa as rainfall in storm events raises a further possibility for this stalagmite, which is positioned within a few kilometers of the coast. Seawater has a characteristic ratio of the two common isotopes of strontium (87 and 86) which is different to that of most freshwaters. As seawater is transported into the atmosphere as aerosols during storm events, it is highly likely that the Sr-isotope ratio in our stalagmite will be shifted towards marine values during periods with higher occurrence of major storms. We can therefore exploit this measurement as a "storm index" in support of the oxygen and hydrogen isotope work. Finally, we will build on our existing evidence that the time period we are investigating was more humid than today by measuring a suite of trace elements in the calcite of the stalagmite. Many elements respond to humidity in a variety of ways, with some only being available when a rich soil is in place (e.g. sulphur) and others being supplied in atmospheric dust during arid periods (e.g. iron). If the tests our work provides show that our understanding of this system is correct we and other international research groups can carry on working within our existing paradigms. If our test proves that rainfall events are occurring at different places at different times, then researchers can adjust their efforts to investigate more appropriate representations of the system and develop new paradigms for glacial-interglacial changes in major rainfall systems.

Current approaches to the tagging of music in online databases predominantly rely on music genre and artist name, with music tags being often ambiguous and inexact. Yet, the possibly most salient feature musical experiences is emotion. The few attempts so far undertaken to tag music for mood or emotion lack a scientific foundation in emotion research. The current project proposes to incorporate recent research on music-evoked emotion into the growing number of online musical databases and catalogues, notably the Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS) - a rating measure for describing emotional effects of music recently developed by our group. Specifically, the aim here is to develop the GEMS into an innovative conceptual and technical tool for tagging of online musical content for emotion. To this end, three studies are proposed. In study 1, we will examine whether the GEMS labels and their grouping holds up against a much wider range of musical genres than those that were originally used for its development. In Study 2, we will use advanced data reduction techniques to select the most recurrent and important labels for describing music-evoked emotion. In a third study we will examine the added benefit of the new GEMS compared to conventional approaches to the tagging of music. The anticipated impact of the findings is threefold. First, the research to be described next will advance our understanding of the nature and structure of emotions evoked by music. Developing a valid model of music-evoked emotion is crucial for meaningful research in the social and in the neurosciences. Second, music information organization and retrieval can benefit from a scientifically sound and parsimonious taxonomy for describing the emotional effects of music. Thus, searches for relevant online music databases need not be longer confined to genre or artist, but can also incorporate emotion as a key experiential dimension of music. Third, a valid tagging scheme for emotion can assist both researchers and professionals in the choice of music to induce specific emotions. For example, psychologists, behavioural economists, and neuroscientists often need to induce emotion in their experiments to understand how behaviour or performance is modulated by emotion. Music is an obvious choice for emotion induction in controlled settings because it is a universal language that lends itself to comparisons across cultures and because it is ethically unproblematic.

The Northern high latitudes are now experiencing some of the most rapid and severe climate change on Earth. Arctic warming, almost twice the rate as that of the rest of the world over the last 30 years. It is expected to accelerate, contributing to major bio-geophysical changes. Snow cover appears as a key indicator in such processes, and its dynamics need to be fully understood. Seasonally, it covers up to 50 million square kilometres affecting atmospheric circulation and climate from regional to global scales. Snow cover and glaciers are vital resources of fresh water in high latitude regions and many densely populated areas at mid and low latitudes. Accelerating shrinkage of seasonal snow pack and mountain glaciers due to global warming threatens water supply in particular in regions, where snow and glaciers are dominant sources of runoff. This is not only the case in high and mid latitudes, but snow and ice also provide headwaters to many major rivers of the world that supply water to populated areas in semi-arid and arid regions. Himalayan snow and glaciers, for example, feed many of Asia's great rivers, and snow and ice of the Andes/Rockies chain provide crucial water resources to many areas along the mountains. It is estimatede that over a billion people depend on for their water resources from snow melt. Fresh water is already a limited resource in many of these regions. Within the next decades the population growth will further impair the water availability. Even in Central Europe, glacier and snow melt has an important regulatory function for water supply. Climate change seriously threatens the abundance of these resources, calling for immediate action to improve the understanding of climatic effects on the water cycle. The European Space Agency has recognized the importance of reliable estimates of snow water equivalent (SWE, the amount water stored in snow) and snow depth, and is supporting a satellite mission that will use microwave radar imagery to measure these two important parameters. It will also measure the spatial extent, mass and type of snow (such as how 'dry' or 'wet' it is). The mission will provide a new type of high quality observations, which will be used to initialize, run and validate water, weather and climate models for prediction and environmental monitoring applications.It will use an innovative combination of images measured at frequencies 10GHz and 17GHz. The two-frequency combination is needed to sample a sufficient range of snow depth. One-way penetration depths are typically 4m at the higher frequency, which is sufficient to penetrate most natural dry snow cover, but the lower frequency with a typical penetration depth of 10m is needed for deeper snow in mountainous areas. To remove contamination to the signal by any from any returns coming from the ground underneath, so that we only measure the snow signal, we use the knowledge that the certain properties ('polarisation') of the returned signal will be different depending upon whether it reflected from the snow or ground. A programme of work is proposed here utilizing the UK's Ground-Based SAR (GB-SAR) System in a field measurement campaign to validate and develop the proposed two frequency combination for snow measurement prior to satellite mission. GB-SAR is a portable radar imaging system, which provides well-calibrated, high quality imagery. It will deployed at a test site in the Alps during the winter and measure the radar behaviour of snow for different depths, state, and environmental conditions. Complementary detailed measurements of snow properties and weather conditions will be made. Together, they provide the unique opportunity to carry out precise measurements in controlled conditions in which all system and environmental parameters are known, in order to obtain a better understanding of the relationships between them.

When glaciers retreat, their forefields present a unique opportunity to investigate the initial phases of soil formation and microbial succession. As the ice retreats leaving space for microbial and plant colonisation, some studies show evidence of an increase in a variety of microbial proxies, such as nitrogen fixation, microbial enzymatic activity and diversity, in relation to years of exposure until certain soil stability is reached. Surprisingly, very little is known regarding the genetic and functional diversity of microbes in Arctic habitats. The composition and the metabolic potential of the entire microbial population can be explored by isolating and characterising their genetic material recovered directly from the environment using a metagenomic approach. Each sample of a soil habitat analysed represents a snapshot of the complex mixture of different microbial types and some types will be much more abundant than others. For instance, we predict in this project that genes associated with phototrophic C and N fixation and aerobic C metabolism will be predominant at the initial stages of succession in soil after glacial retreat, while deeper soil samples will provide conditions for anaerobic C and N metabolism to develop, include the production and consumption methane, which is a very powerful greenhouse gas. The metagenomic approach can be further linked to rates of metabolism and geochemical characteristics of soils, many of those factors have strong feedbacks with each other. There have been few integrated studies which link microbial diversity to ecosystem function and the biogeochemical cycling of key elements (C, N, Fe). This proposal aims to employ such integrated approach to generate new and uniquely datasets of genetic and functional diversity of representative terrestrial Arctic habitats. The project will instigate a step jump in our understanding of metabolic pathways of terrestrial Arctic habitats to improve biogeochemical models and quantification of the full metabolic package during successional events in soils after glacial retreat. The forefields of 2 glaciers (one in Svalbard and one in Greenland, which represent one small polar system and one major ice sheet, respectively) will be chosen for this project because they provide a range of forefield habitats of different sizes, locations, vegetation and availability of water surrounding the system. Samples for the metagenomic analyses will be taken from representative soils representing different ages of exposure after glacial retreat. We aim to generate several orders of magnitude more primary sequence data than existing metagenome pipelines were originally designed to deal with. This sampling strategy will give us a high-resolution picture of the microbial genetic and metabolic diversity associated with key elements (e.g., C, N, Fe) of glacial forefield habitats, also allowing us to PREDICT changes in metabolic pathways and biogeochemical cycles in response to glacial retreat. The project will instigate a step jump in our understanding of the biodiversity of glacial Arctic terrestrial habitats and provide a database that may be used to interpret data recovered during future. This will ultimately give us valuable insights in relation to the potential for life in other icy planets and moons and during the so called Snowball Earth. Data generated in this proposal can be incorporated into models of carbon, nitrogen, iron and sulphur cycling.