WaterLANDS aims to enable an upscaling of the restoration of wetlands. Socio-economic factors, insufficient stakeholder engagement, lack of government commitment, lack of funding and inadequate exchange of knowledge of restoration methods have all been identified as barriers to successful restoration. Consequently, most restoration has been modest in scale, has occurred mainly where there is a single landowning or responsible organisation, and has often been undertaken principally for reasons of conservation. WaterLANDS will work to overcome these barriers. It includes both Action and Knowledge Sites, the former being the object of restoration upscaling, and the latter a source of best practice experience and knowledge. To provide for local support and sustainability, it will aim for the co-design of restoration with the on-going engagement of communities and stakeholders. It will investigate best practice in ecological restoration which meets both biodiversity and social objectives and for which restoration trajectories are specific to the physical and cultural context of the Action Sites. It will propose supportive governance structures appropriate to this process and to local and national circumstances. It will identify business models, economic incentives and international funding sources and tailor or direct these resources for each site. The project will pull this expertise and knowledge together in a co-creation work package. Process-indicators will be developed to enable on-going assessment of restoration success in terms of ecosystem services, socioeconomic embedding and financial sustainability, to ensure wide-scale restoration which catalyses scalability beyond the life of the WaterLANDS project.

REST COAST will demonstrate to what extent upscaled coastal restoration can provide a low-carbon adaptation, reducing risks and providing gains in biodiversity for vulnerable coastal ecosystems, such as wetlands or sea grass beds. By overcoming present technical, economic, governance and social barriers to restoration upscaling, REST COAST will develop the large-scale river-coast connectivity and increase the nearshore accommodation space for the resilient delivery of coastal ecosystem services (ESS). The selected ESS (risk reduction, environmental quality and fish provisioning) touch urgent coastal problems such as the erosion/flooding during recent storms or the accelerating coastal habitat degradation that seriously affects fisheries and aquaculture. By enhancing these ESS under present and future climates at 9 Pilots that represent the main EU regional seas (Baltic, Black, North, Atlantic and Mediterranean) we shall increase the commitment of citizens, stakeholders and policy makers for a long-term maintenance of restoration. Such commitment will go together with a transformation of governance and financial structures, supported by evidence-based results on restoration benefits for the welfare of coastal societies and assets. This transformation will build upon the results from hands-on restoration at the Pilots, steered by the multidisciplinary project advances. Combining new techniques, risk assessments, innovative financial/governance arrangements and homogeneous metrics for ESS and biodiversity, REST-COAST will develop a systemic approach to coastal restoration based on a scalable coastal adaptation plan. The plan will underpin a transformative change in governance and policies, proving the importance of the coastal dimension in the EU Green Deal for adaptation/mitigation under climate change. The proposed adaptation will facilitate replicating large scale restoration and introducing coastal ESS into national and international policies.

Emergent diseases of plants, a high proportion of which are caused by phytoviruses, are a significant burden on the food security and economic stability of societies. However, no studies have provided a comprehensive view of the geographical distribution of phytovirus diversity to date, including both the numbers or richness of virus species and the evenness of their distribution in any individual environment on Earth. Our capacity to detect phytoviruses in the early phases of emergence is strongly dependent on our ability to determine the frequencies and geographical distributions of both new introductions of virus and plant species to environments, and the new virus-host encounters that ensue within these environments. This gap in our knowledge undermines our understanding of virus adaptation and limits our capacity to derive truly general predictive models of phytovirus emergence. Recent viral metagenomics studies, which have leveraged methodological innovations to achieve the relatively unbiased sampling and sequencing of viral genomes within natural environments have paved the way towards the analyses of phytovirus biodiversity in these environments in sufficient detail to drive major advances in our understanding of the evolutionary processes that underlie the emergence of phytoviruses as agricultural pathogens. These studies have already revealed that uncultivated areas within agricultural settings are key-players in the ecology and evolution of agriculturally relevant phytoviruses. The two overarching hypotheses that we propose testing in this project will extend the findings of these pioneering virus biodiversity studies: - Plant community structure influences phytoviral community structure: We hypothesize that plant community species richness, composition, density and biomass are predictors of phytovirus species richness. - The rate of molecular evolution of viruses is slower in uncultivated areas than in cultivated areas: We hypothesize that land uses changes and cropping practices are likely to select for fast-growing, early-transmitted, and more virulent viruses. The PHYTOVIRUS project has three scientific and technological objectives that will aim at testing whether plant species richness influences phytovirus species richness in natural and cultivated areas (objective 1), studying experimentally the effect of plant communities on phytoviral species richness (objective 2), and searching for evolutionary fingerprints associated with emergence within phytovirus genomes (objective 3). The first work package (WP1) will yield a substantially expanded inventory of known phytoviruses and provide detailed comparative data on the species richness of plants and phytoviruses in several natural unmanaged ecosystems and managed agricultural systems. WP2 will experimentally test whether associations exist between the species richness of phytovirus and plant communities. Finally, WP3 will explore sequence data generated in WP1/2 to detect and characterise evolutionary footprints (evolutionary rates, recombination patterns and natural selection patterns) that are associated with emergence. Besides providing the first assessments of phytovirus species richness in selected environments, this project also aims at defining and demonstrating a standardized experimental approach to measure phytovirus species richness that could then be universally used at scales ranging from defined ecosystems through to entire continents. The project brings together research groups that are specialized in plant virology, viral metagenomics, plant ecology, and the computational analysis of virus evolution. This multidisciplinary consortium has the ability to implement a holistic research program that is without equivalent at the international levels with respect to its focus on phytovirus species richness and the plant community and viral evolutionary parameters that have shaped this species richness.