MicroSOS project aims to enable exchange and mobility between academic and non-academic partners from the agricultural and environmental sectors. All the participants in MicroSOS have a connection to soils and agriculture, which are under stress due to Climate Change impacts while being drivers of Climate Change as well due to the dynamics of the plant microbiome and its relationship to nutrient cycling and GHG emissions. Unlocking the power of the microbiome in agriculture will drive novel approaches for better management and improvements in the sector, making a true connection between fundamental research and applicable developments with societal relevance. The objectives of the MicroSOS project are: 1. To transfer skills, knowledge, and competencies between institutions focused on agricultural topics. 2. to enhance the career prospects of early career researchers by engaging them in multidisciplinary exchanges on plant microbiome and agriculture. 3. To create sustainable collaborations between European and Southeast Asian institutions by converting knowledge and exchange into more ideas for new projects. 4. To create a platform for communicating science to non-academic partners and the general public to ensure the relevance of science in crop management and agricultural development, including the sector's needs in fundamental science. To achieve these objectives, nonacademic firms experts in agricultural interventions and applications will exchange knowledge with academic institutions with expertise in fundamental aspects of the microbiome of the plant and soils. This combination creates an ideal network to enable the co-development and co-creation of knowledge during the staff exchanges that can yield successes in broadening the career prospects of a balanced team of young researchers from Europe and other underrepresented origins by having exposure to this network.

Big data is becoming a hype that is going to completely redefine industries within very traditional sectors like agriculture, food and beauty. The emergence of niche big data companies like Enolytics (“bringing big data insights to the wine industry”) is threatening to disrupt these industries against the interests of the EU. BigDataGrapes wants to build upon the rich historical, cultural and artisan heritage of Europe in order to change this picture. It aims to support all European companies active in two key industries powered by grapevines: the wine industry and the natural cosmetics one. It will help them respond to the significant opportunity that big data is creating in their relevant markets, by pursuing two ambitious goals: a. To develop and demonstrate powerful, rigorously tested, cross-sector data processing technologies that go beyond-the-state-of-the-art towards increasing the efficiency of companies that need to take important business decisions dependent on access to vast and complex amounts of data, and assess them in challenges informed by the grapevine-powered industries. b. To create a large-scale, mulifaceted marketplace for grapevine-related data assets, increasing the competitive advantage of companies that serve with IT solutions these sectors and helping companies and organisations evolve methods, standards and processes to help them achieve free, interoperable and secure flow of their data. BigDataGrapes is targeting technology challenges of the grapevine-powered data economy as its business problems and decisions requires processing, analysis and visualisation of data with rapidly increasing volume, velocity and variety: satellite and weather data, environmental and geological data, phenotypic and genetic plant data, food supply chain data, economic and financial data and more. It therefore makes a perfectly suitable cross-sector and cross-country combination of industries that are of high European significance and value.

Changes in rural areas, such as depopulation, land abandonment and the loss of biodiversity, may proceed very slowly yet are often irreversible. Policymakers can steer these developments in order to reduce their negative impacts but this requires knowing whether current policy instruments are effective, who is benefiting from them and in what measure, what driving forces will be most influential and how they will affect people, planet, profits and land-use. To be truly useful, this knowledge must transcend siloed thinking and be the corollary of a joint effort uniting different actors under a common cause. PoliRur will provide this knowledge by combining several key activities needed to design effective place-based, human-centric and forward-looking rural policies. These include actionable research that takes place within an inclusive learning environment where rural populations, researchers and policymakers come together to address common problems; an evaluation exercise that uses text mining to assess the perceived effectiveness of past or planned policy interventions; and a foresight study that tries to glean the development trajectory of agriculture and its allied sectors until 2040 using several scenarios in which the evolution of rural populations occupies a central place. As a result of these activities, PoliRur will leave decision makers at different levels of government better equipped to tackle existing and emerging rural challenges, rural populations more empowered and rural areas more resilient.

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.