In the lower atmosphere ozone (O3) is an important anthropogenic greenhouse gas and is an air pollutant responsible for several billion euros in lost plant productivity each year. Surface O3 has doubled since 1850 due to chemical emissions from vehicles, industrial processes, and the burning of forests. While land ecosystems (primarily forests) are currently slowing down global warming by storing about a quarter of human-released carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, this could be undermined by rising O3 concentrations impacting forest growth. This in turn would result in more CO2 left in the atmosphere adding to global climate change. Tropical rainforests are responsible for nearly half of global plant productivity and it is in these tropical regions that we are likely to see the greatest expansion of human populations this century. For example, Manaus, in the centre of the Amazon rainforest has seen a population boom in the last 25 years, with the number of residents doubling to just over 2 million people. Alongside this growing population, we see the expansion of O3 precursor emissions from urbanization and high-intensity agricultural areas. The global impacts of changing air pollution on tropical forests are potentially profound. In his seminal work in 2007, PI Sitch and colleagues at the Met Office and Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, were the first to identify the large potential risk to tropical forests from O3 pollution, and how that could in turn accelerate global warming. However, their study presented two major challenges for the research community: 1) the scale of this effect is highly uncertain; as their global modelling study was based on extrapolating plant O3 sensitivity data from temperate and boreal species. This project will address this by providing the first comprehensive set of measurements of O3 effects on plant functioning and growth in tropical trees. Also, as both O3, CO2 and H2O are exchanged between the atmosphere and leaves through a plants stoma, higher levels of CO2 provide plants the opportunity to reduce their stomatal opening, which in turn leads to reduced O3 uptake and damage. This project will for the first time investigate the potential synergistic or antagonistic impacts of climate change (CO2 and Temperature) on O3 responses in tropical forest species. 2) a fundamental challenge in all global vegetation modelling is to accurately represent the structure and function of highly biodiverse ecosystems; global models are generally only able to represent a limited set of generalized plant functional types (e.g. evergreen trees, C4-grasses etc). However, recent collection and synthesis of plant functional trait data (e.g. leaf nutrient concentrations, leaf size and shape) have enabled improved representation of ecology and plant function in global models. A group of scientists, including project partner Johan Uddling, have very recently proposed a unifying theory for O3 sensitivity in temperate and boreal tree species based upon leaf-functional traits. We are in a unique position to take this work forward to test the theory in tropical forest species, and to test the implications of this at the regional and global scale. The inclusion of the relationship between O3 sensitivity and basic plant functional traits in our global vegetation model, JULES (Joint UK Land Environmental Simulator), will lead to a step-change in our ability to assess the impact of air quality on tropical forest productivity and consequences for carbon sequestration. The model will be applied at O3 hotspot locations in tropical forests and together with observed plant trait information and O3 concentrations we will be able to extrapolate beyond the single plant functional type (PFT) paradigm. Global runs of JULES will also enable us to investigate the implications of future O3 concentrations, changes in land-use, and climate change scenarios on the tropical forest productivity and the global carbon sink.

Latin American forests cover a very large latitudinal and climate gradient extending from the tropics to Southern hemisphere high latitudes. The continent therefore hosts a large variety of forest types including the Amazon - the world's largest tropical forest - as well as the diverse Atlantic forests concentrated along the coast, temperate forests in Chile and Argentina as well as the cold rainforests of Valdivia and the Nothofagus forests of Patagonia. These forests are global epicentres of biological diversity and include several tropical and extra-tropical biodiversity hotspots. For example, the Amazon rainforest is home to ~10% of terrestrial plant and animal species and store a large fraction of global organic carbon. hotspots. Some of these Latin American forests still cover a large fraction of their original (pre-colombian) extent: the Amazon still covers approximately 5 Million km2, which is 80% of its original area. However, others, such as the Atlantic forest, have nearly disappeared and are now heavily fragmented. Temperate forests have also shrunk, despite efforts to halt further reduction. However, economic development, population rises and the growth in global drivers of environmental change mean that all forests now face strong anthropogenic pressures. Locally stressors generally result from ongoing development, selective logging, the hunting of larger birds and mammals, over-exploitation of key forest resources such as valuable palm fruits, mining, and/or forest conversion for agricultural use. Global environmental drivers stem from the world's warming climate. Yet it is not clear how these local pressures and changing environmental conditions will alter the composition of Latin American forests, and whether there are thresholds between human impacts - such as the lack of dispersers in heavily fragmented forest landscapes or climate conditions exceeding limits of species tolerance - and the community level responses of forest plants. We aim to investigate this, supporting the development of strategies that can preserve the diversity of these forests and their functioning. We achieve this by investigating the relationships between diversity and functioning of these forests; exploring whether there are thresholds in functioning resulting both from pressures of forest use and changing climate; by experimentally testing responses; and by generalizing predictive capability to large scales. ARBOLES aims to achieve these goals by integrating established forest inventory approaches with cutting-edge functional trait, genomics, experimental and remote sensing approaches. Our approach involves combining forest plots with plant traits, which will enable us to characterize state and shifts over time in the face of local human disturbance and changing climate and atmospheric composition. We will focus on traits along the following axes: (i) life-history strategies measuring investment in structure (like wood density, leaf mass per area, maximum height), (ii) investment in productive organs (like leaf nutrients), (iii) investment in reproductive organs, (iv) tolerance to water stress and heat stress. The work is being conducted in collaboration with research groups in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru - and will provide a first cross-continent assessment of how humans are influencing Latin American forests.

Ecosystem services can and should be related to carbon management, in combination with sustainable water and land management. The global nature of climate change mitigation provides opportunities for developing countries to alleviate poverty by capitalizing on their natural resources and trading on the international carbon markets. Such opportunities may arise from biotic carbon sequestration through reforestation or biofuel production. However, the changes in land-use that result from any such initiatives may be detrimental to ecosystem services, such as biodiversity, water quality and water availability. In the long term, changes in climate and population may worsen these impacts, rendering such land management initiatives unsustainable from both biophysical and socio-economic standpoints. Land use change initiatives should therefore be assessed in a framework that incorporates climate and socio-economic change, in order to identify those that have the potential to alleviate poverty in the long term, and discount those that are likely to worsen the problem. The extensive existing work on land management has yielded much valuable data on energy crop physiology, the economic implications of different land management strategies, the observed effects of land management on ecosystem services, and best practice for implementing land management projects. Parallel to this, there has been much work on land surface feedbacks, the water cycle, regional climate variability and change, which has involved the development of state-of-the-art climate, land surface, hydrological and crop models. This project proposes to bring these strands of research together to investigate the sustainability of land management initiatives in a changing climate. Existing tools, informed by published data, would be combined into a modeling framework that would be applied to a series of scenarios involving intensive cultivation of sugar cane. Specifically, the following three issues would be addressed: (1) The feasibility and sustainability (economic and physical) of sugarcane cultivation for biofuel production in a changing climate, and the capacity of such activities to alleviate poverty in the long term. (2) The long term impact of land management on ecosystem services, with particular focus on the effect on water availability (3) Land surface - climate feedbacks, and their impact on the sustainability of land management initiatives and existing land use. The modeling would be applied to sugarcane cultivation in Brazil and Ghana. Brazil has a well-established sugarcane industry that already provides substantial employment and income. The dependence of large parts of the country on biofuel production makes the industry's long-term economic viability a pressing issue. Although production is not currently limited by water availability, this may change in the future due to changing environmental conditions. Ghana was chosen for the other case study because it is on the verge of becoming a major player in the bio-ethanol market, as the result of an agreement signed with Brazilian partners in 2006 to grow bio-energy crops. The prospect of exporting biofuel technology from Brazil to Africa raises urgent questions about environmental sustainability and the capacity of energy crop cultivation initiatives to alleviate poverty. In particular, there is a pressing need for rigorous assessment of the delicate balance between yield (and hence profitability), irrigation, water resources and the livelihoods of local people. The proposed study is primarily a proof of concept, with the main focus on developing a modeling framework and engaging with researchers in Ghana and Brazil, in order to apply it in a useful and informative way. It should be emphasized, however, that the framework would be equally applicable to other energy and food crops, such as Jatropha Curcas and could be applied to any region of the world.

Aculeate wasps are understudied relative to their more popular cousins, bees and wasps, and yet are more biodiverse than bees and wasps combined. This is particularly so for the solitary wasps, who represent over 90% of all aculeate wasp species and exhibit remarkable diversity in their ecology and life-history, especially in their hunting behaviours. Solitary wasps are also the ancestors of social wasps, bees and ants; despite the significant contributions over the last decade of sociogenomics to our understanding of social evolution in insects, we lack genomic resources for solitary wasps - the critical 'starting blocks' of social evolution. Solitary wasps also provide important, but largely overlooked, ecosystem services as top predators of arthropod populations making them key to maintaining equilibrium in biodiversity. Solitary wasps are also prey-specialists and so fill a different niche to the (generalist) social wasps: they provide untapped potential to study genomic sensory mechanisms in the evolution of hunting. The only non-social wasp genome available is for the parasitic jewel wasp, which is not an Aculeate (stinging wasp) and exhibits very specialised life history; we lack any genome sequences of solitary (non-parasitic) hunting wasps. The biodiversity of wasps in Brazil is unrivalled and although there is a strong legacy of wasp research in Brazil, genomic resources for Brazilian insects are largely lacking, and Brazilian entomologists have poor access to state-of-the-art genomic tools. This project will generate the essential fundamental genomic tools and training to kick-start new fields of study in the evolutionary and ecological importance of these biodiverse insects, seeding long-term collaborative projects between UK and Brazilian (BR) researchers. Our collaborative team will integrate state-of-the-art genomic and bioinformatic techniques (UK partner) with expertise in natural history and sensory ecology (BR partners) to exploit the unrivalled biodiversity of Brazilian solitary wasps and position BR scientists as pioneers in the untapped field of solitary wasp genomics. In doing so, we will generate the first genome sequences for solitary wasps. This proposal also takes the first steps in utilising these genomic resources to address an outstanding question in insect ecology: what is the genomic basis of predator-prey evolution? By integrating genomic expertise of the UK partner with the ecological and chemical expertise of the BR partners, this project will spawn a new area of research, led by international teams of BR & UK scientists. The UK partner will train Brazilians in the critical analytical tools required to determine the molecular basis of specialist hunting behaviours in solitary wasps, including genome annotations and comparative genomics methods. With high-quality, chromo-some-level genomes in hand, we will together conduct gene evolution analyses of genes associated with chemical perception - odorant binding receptors and olfactory receptors, and determine how genomic processes have been integrated in the evolution of prey specificity. Finally, in addition to generating these essential resources, and training Brazilian researchers into genomic methods, this project will provide a conceptual and empirical springboard of a long-term collaborations between BR & UK scientists, placing us as pioneers in the molecular studies of solitary neotropical wasps.

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