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.

TechCare is a multi-actor approach project aiming to develop appropriate business models using innovative technologies to improve welfare management for all EU small ruminant (SR) systems, to enable stakeholders to choose animal welfare-friendly products. SRs play a key socio-economic role in Europe, especially in harsh environments where innovative technology is not much implanted. SRs are often managed as a flock/herd, allowing only average welfare states to be considered. Innovative technologies are a unique opportunity to monitor and improve SR welfare management at the individual or flock/herd level, along the value chain. Based on SR welfare state-of-the-art, TechCare will undertake a multi-actor approach to encapsulate stakeholders’ expectations in terms of welfare and innovative technologies, and provide them with adapted solutions, in a co-design approach. TechCare will cover all stages of SR production and build novel welfare approaches to develop and validate tools, early warning systems, algorithms and indicators for efficient identification of welfare issues, including positive welfare, to include them in welfare management models. The innovative technologies identified in TechCare will pass different stages of validation, from prototyping to large scale studies. TechCare identified solutions will therefore be replicable and adapted to different SR systems, production purposes, and value chains, for improvement of SR welfare management EU-wide. Business models will be constructed and validated with stakeholders. Dissemination, communication and exploitation materials will be produced and widely shared for easy use of TechCare solutions, ensuring their uptake and relevance to all sectors and stakeholders. TechCare will offer a durable improvement of SR welfare management using innovative technologies along the whole value chain and across the EU, and will act as an example in terms of approach and solutions for other species and production systems.

The EU citriculture is threatened by the emerging disease Huanglongbing (HLB, also known as Greening), considered the most devastating citrus disease due to its rapid dispersal, severity and fast progression of symptoms, huge losses in fruit production and quality, cost and difficulty of preventing new infections, lack of resistant citrus varieties and economically feasible treatments for infected trees, and absence of durable control mechanisms. HLB generates multimillion economic losses to citrus industry. Now it is time to start the research in the EU because the vector Trioza erytreae has been detected and is spreading in Spain and Portugal. The overarching objective of Pre-HLB is to develop and implement a holistic contingency plan to protect the citrus sector in the EU from HLB disease drivers and to co-create new solutions to manage the disease through a multidisciplinary approach and in collaboration with experienced partners from America and Asia. The Pre-HLB work plan includes three specific objectives to monitor progress: a) Pre-HLB preventive actions and development of mid-term tools will limit HLB potential introduction, reducing the potential economic impact in EU (estimated in 7.7 billion euros) by 40% b) The consortium will contribute to improve current HLB surveillance, contingency and control strategies. Up to 100,000Ha of citrus cropping area will be monitored to obtain field information on potential HLB infection and the dynamics of the vector in the subareas of highest risk, thus limiting disease/infestation spread. c) Excellent European research centres will join forces to fill research gaps in vector biology, host/vector/pathogen interactions, Aurantioideae genetics and genomics, as well as to develop new biotechnological tools, such as new effectors, metabolites, bio-stimulants and biopesticides.Results will identify HLB-resistance traits and will allow to generate long-term resistance.This is one major milestone in the field of citriculture.