Increasing human pressure is accelerating environmental change throughout the world, threatening water security for humans and aquatic biodiversity. One example is the widespread nutrient pollution of aquatic ecosystems which may result in biodiversity loss, changes in ecosystem processes and functional attributes such as secondary production and declining water quality. In temperate zones our understanding of the functional attributes of freshwater systems, the ecological services that they provide, and their response to nutrient enrichment is relatively advanced but in tropical/ sub-tropical systems data, and therefore understanding, are limited. We do not know whether the aquatic community responses, and the underlying biological processes, of both areas will be similar or different. These are central questions because understanding how environmental processes control resource availability (in this case clean water) is critical for the responsible use of that resource. We will initiate a long term partnership between Roehampton University (RU) and Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) to compare freshwater systems in temperate and sub-tropical areas across a gradient of nutrient concentrations, community structure (presence of cyanobacteria) and over time. We will identify similarities and differences in aquatic community response to eutrophication in these two distinct regions and evaluate the resultant impact on water quality. Initially we will jointly explore a detailed 8 year data set (2007-2014) for the Peri basin (Santa Catarina Island, southern Brazil) held by Petrucio and compare it with datasets for temperate freshwater systems held by Robertson and Reiss. The Peri basin is a protected area and is used for drinking water supply for a significant part of the conurbation of Florianopolis. It is beginning to show signals of eutrophication and water quality degradation with an increasing dominance and biomass of a widespread toxic cyanobacterium. Our partnership will further develop this data by measuring individual body sizes for organismal groups comprising the freshwater communities within the Peri basin across space and time. Body size is a crucial determinant of the structure of many ecological communities and is a new 'common currency' in ecological research enabling comparison of community structure and responses to disturbance within and between systems. This data will then be used to determine higher level community parameters such as body size spectra, secondary production and food web properties for the Peri basin and determine how these vary through time with changing nutrient concentrations and how this may effect water quality. The collaborators will additionally exchange and develop joint research ideas through informal discussions and seminars but also through the planned workshops and field trips in Brazil, RU conference and visits to freshwater research centres in the UK and by attendance and presentations at the British Ecological Society annual meeting.

This interdisciplinary project explores with youth from income-poor urban settings how they conceptualise sustainable food. It does this through the medium of participatory film. In Rio, the social geography of urban inequality is such that many urban youths grow up in favelas, or informal, income-poor settlements. In London, urban inequality is expressed in other spatial patterns, nevertheless, there boroughs with more income-poor people. Challenges such as reliance on food banks, lack of availability of affordable fresh food, obesity and malnutrition are common in both cities, while at the same time community gardens, community markets, free school meals, campaigns against food deserts etc. exist in both settings. In Brazil, there is also an innovative new policy on regionally appropriate and sustainably sourced school meals. Previous work by the UK-Brazilian project team (ESRC-DFID Choices project) focused on large scale representative surveys and focus groups in Brazil which showed that Brazilians strongly supported sustainable sourcing in public procurement. In each city, the project works with community organisations active in the local area who have been developing digital media or participatory theatre projects with local youths who are often from disadvantaged backgrounds. The aim of the project is to a) to explore with urban youths in receipt of school meals how they conceptualise sustainable food, food justice and urban food sovereignty b) to engage with the youths, the public and policy makers through participatory video, film competitions and public film screenings, thus continuing to build pathways to impact c) to deepen a recent research partnership between two centres of excellence in sustainable consumption at Royal Holloway, University of London and the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). d) to trial participatory methodologies, to compare research practice and prepare future joint research Participatory workshops will be offered Rio and London, which combine the emancipatory pedagogy of Paulo Freire with the new technologies of filming on mobile phone cameras. We will draw on previous findings from the surveys and focus groups and present the results to the 14-18 year old youths for discussion. Then the youths will be invited to participate in a film competition. The winning team from Rio will be invited to a film screening showing the Brazilian and UK films in a London cinema and take part in a panel discussion with policy makers, community activists and local politicians. Equally the team from London will travel to Rio to present and discuss their film there. While there is no predicting what the young film-makers will express in their films, these creative pieces will help initiate discussion wit the public about food justice, sustainable food and urban food sovereignty. Combining an academic, a practice and a policy perspective on the issue, and linking the local level food challenges with an international perspective, the project promises to generate new ways of understanding food futures.

This interdisciplinary project explores with youth from income-poor urban settings how they conceptualise sustainable food. It does this through the medium of participatory film. In Rio, the social geography of urban inequality is such that many urban youths grow up in favelas, or informal, income-poor settlements. In London, urban inequality is expressed in other spatial patterns, nevertheless, there boroughs with more income-poor people. Challenges such as reliance on food banks, lack of availability of affordable fresh food, obesity and malnutrition are common in both cities, while at the same time community gardens, community markets, free school meals, campaigns against food deserts etc. exist in both settings. In Brazil, there is also an innovative new policy on regionally appropriate and sustainably sourced school meals. Previous work by the UK-Brazilian project team (ESRC-DFID Choices project) focused on large scale representative surveys and focus groups in Brazil which showed that Brazilians strongly supported sustainable sourcing in public procurement. In each city, the project works with community organisations active in the local area who have been developing digital media or participatory theatre projects with local youths who are often from disadvantaged backgrounds. The aim of the project is to a) to explore with urban youths in receipt of school meals how they conceptualise sustainable food, food justice and urban food sovereignty b) to engage with the youths, the public and policy makers through participatory video, film competitions and public film screenings, thus continuing to build pathways to impact c) to deepen a recent research partnership between two centres of excellence in sustainable consumption at Royal Holloway, University of London and the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). d) to trial participatory methodologies, to compare research practice and prepare future joint research Participatory workshops will be offered Rio and London, which combine the emancipatory pedagogy of Paulo Freire with the new technologies of filming on mobile phone cameras. We will draw on previous findings from the surveys and focus groups and present the results to the 14-18 year old youths for discussion. Then the youths will be invited to participate in a film competition. The winning team from Rio will be invited to a film screening showing the Brazilian and UK films in a London cinema and take part in a panel discussion with policy makers, community activists and local politicians. Equally the team from London will travel to Rio to present and discuss their film there. While there is no predicting what the young film-makers will express in their films, these creative pieces will help initiate discussion wit the public about food justice, sustainable food and urban food sovereignty. Combining an academic, a practice and a policy perspective on the issue, and linking the local level food challenges with an international perspective, the project promises to generate new ways of understanding food futures.

Despite their global importance and poor protection, TDFS have been studied far less than other tropical forest ecosystems, particularly TDFS areas undergoing restoration. We aim to address this recently identified knowledge gap with the aim of improving the success of TDFS restoration. This project will provide the first assessment of the resilience of existing and restored TDFS to changing climate and climate extremes, through undertaking a comprehensive, community-scale assessment of traits which determine plant water-use, carbon production and nutrient-use strategies across restored TDFS sites. The information generated in this project will create a step-change in our current understanding of the function of restored and natural TDFS sites, facilitating development of state-of-the art vegetation models to improve climate prediction and the creation of new restoration policy through integrating with key stakeholders responsible for the creation and implementation of restoration strategies for Brazil. Our key aims are: Aim 1: Evaluate ecosystem function in TDFS sites restored using different strategies. Aim 2: Understand the pressures on TDFS from climate-change and climate extremes. Aim 3: Improve policy and restoration strategies for the restoration of, and long-term resilience of TDFS in collaboration with the Brazilian government. Tropical dry forests and savannas (TDFS) make up 34% of Brazil's land area and contain >50% of Brazil's plant species. More than 100 million people live in TDFS regions of Brazil and many of these people are from rural vulnerable communities who rely on essential ecosystem services TDFS provide. These services include: 1. water supply, shade and pollinators for Brazil's agricultural frontier; 2. national water security, with 43% of the surface water outside the Amazon falling in TDFS and supplying the aquifers which feed Brazil's three largest river basins; 3. a source of timber and food; 4. carbon storage for climate change mitigation; 5. areas of natural beauty, used extensively for tourism; 6. a living seed bank for >4500 woody plant species, many of which are endemic. Despite this, TDFS remain poorly protected with only 1.2% of dry forests and 7.5% of savannas in protected reserves and <10% of Brazil's dry forest and <20% of its savannahs remaining intact. Recognising the social, economic and environmental implications of the current rates of loss of TDFS, the Brazilian government has responded by committing to restoring 120,000 km2 (an area about half the UK) of natural ecosystems by 2030, with a focus on TDFS. Brazil's Ministry for the Environment (ICMBio) and Ministry for Agriculture (EMBRAPA) have started implementing this restoration plan. However, success rates of restored TDFS areas remains very low, with high variability between areas subjected to varying restoration strategies. The reasons for low success and high variability between strategies remains unknown, hampering current ability to meet national restoration targets. Until now, all TDFS restoration strategies have focused on re-creating the species composition observed in natural, undisturbed TDFS habitats. This focus has assumed that species diversity is synonymous with maximizing ecosystem productivity and resistance to climate variability, yet it ignores the suitability of these species to the new drier and disturbed environment they experience in degraded landscapes. The latest research from tropical rainforests broadly suggests that focusing only on species' diversity is too narrow. Instead, plant resource use strategies, and particularly hydraulic functional traits are likely to be the key to determining ecosystem-scale function and the resistance and resilience of TDFS ecosystems to current and future climate variability. To successfully protect and restore TDFS it is therefore vital that the current lack of understanding about ecosystem function and plant resource-use strategies in TDFS is addressed.