Emerging threats and opportunities to managed bee species in European agricultural systems: a horizon scan

Managed bee species provide essential pollination services that contribute to food security worldwide. However, managed bees face a diverse array of threats and anticipating these, and potential opportunities to reduce risks, is essential for the sustainable management of pollination services. We conducted a horizon scanning exercise with 20 experts from across Europe to identify emerging threats and opportunities for managed bees in European agricultural systems. An initial 63 issues were identified, and this was shortlisted to 21 issues through the Horizon Scanning process. These ranged from local landscape-level management to geopolitical issues on a continental and global scale across seven broad themes - Pesticides & pollutants, Technology, Management practices, Predators & parasites, Environmental stressors, Crop modification, and Political & trade influences. While we conducted this Horizon Scan within a European context, the opportunities and threats identified will likely be relevant to other regions. A renewed research and policy focus, especially on the highest-ranking issues, is required to maximise the value of these opportunities and mitigate threats to maintain sustainable and healthy managed bee pollinators within agricultural systems

Deliverable D4.10 Plan for Exploitation and Dissemination of SHOWCASE results

Communication, dissemination and exploitation play a vital role within SHOWCASE as the main means of ensuring knowledge transfer and uptake of results during the project lifetime and after the project is concluded. The project’s strategic objectives and target groups, as well as the key messages and narratives that the project aims to communicate serve as an orientation in the project’s actions in the relevant field. The current Plan for Exploitation and Dissemination of Results (PEDR) has been developed to define target-specific objectives and outline concrete implementation actions.The SHOWCASE PEDR represents a document that aims to guide the communication and dissemination efforts to target project-relevant audiences, convey clear, understandable, coordinated and effective messages, and reach out project results to all interested parties within the various stakeholder groups.The plan presents the different communication and dissemination tools, structured in an implementation plan according to the different target groups and different stage of development of the project. It also provides a list of tailored key performance indicators (KPI) for the project’s outreach activities that aim to provide a means to quantitatively monitor the effectiveness of dissemination activities. Indicative time schedule for implementation and updates is provided.In addition, this document will identify key project results, which will be a subject of exploitation

Bending the curve of biodiversity loss requires rewarding farmers economically for conservation management

Agricultural expansion and intensification are key drivers of biodiversity decline. There is mounting evidence that modern farming impacts the effectiveness of protected areas as one of the key instruments of biodiversity conservation through, for example, eutrophication, pesticide emissions or increasing access to remote areas [1]. This is increasingly acknowledged and in many countries conservation efforts now include farmed lands and engage farmers to enhance biodiversity on their lands. This benefits farmland biodiversity which, especially in Eurasia, supports some highly threatened species groups [2]. However, farmland biodiversity is also functionally important as it provides a wide range of ecosystem services. Examples are natural pest regulation, pollination, carbon sequestration, human well-being, water purification and cultural services. Agricultural management influences the provision of a wide range of ecosystem services and therefore, contributes to food security and mankind’s ability to sustain itself in the mid to long term. There is clear evidence that enhancing farmland biodiversity promotes the delivery of specific ecosystem services [3]. For example, enhancing wild pollinators and natural enemies through the provision of semi-natural habitat enhances productivity of many crops [4, 5]. However, only a few ecosystem services, such as pollination, pest control and nutrient cycling, may provide private benefits to farmers. Other services, such as carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, health benefits and water purification, are public goods which are poorly captured by markets [6]

B-Cubed: Leveraging Analysis-Ready Biodiversity Datasets and Cloud Computing for Timely and Actionable Biodiversity Monitoring

Effective biodiversity management and policy decisions require timely access to accurate and reliable information on biodiversity status, trends, and threats. However, the process of data cleaning, aggregation, and analysis is often time-consuming, convoluted, laborious, and irreproducible. Biodiversity monitoring across large areas faces challenges in evaluating data completeness and quantifying sampling effort. Despite these obstacles, unprecedented amounts of biodiversity data are being accumulated from diverse sources, aided by emerging technologies such as automatic sensors, eDNA, and satellite tracking.To address these challenges, the development of tools and infrastructure is crucial for meaningful interpretations and deeper understanding of biodiversity data (Kissling et al. 2017). Furthermore, a significant delay exists in converting biodiversity data into actionable knowledge. Efforts have been made to reduce this lag through rapid mobilisation of biodiversity observations, digitization of collections (Nelson and Ellis 2018), and streamlined workflows for data publication (Reyserhove et al. 2020). However, delays still occur in the analysis, publication, and dissemination of data.The B-Cubed project (Biodiversity Building Blocks for Policy)*1 proposes solutions to overcome these challenges. It implements the concept of Occurrence Cubes (Oldoni et al. 2020), which aggregate occurrence data along spatial, temporal and taxonomic dimensions. Cube generation will be available as a new service provided by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). By leveraging aggregated occupancy cubes as analysis-ready biodiversity datasets, we aim to enhance comprehension and reduce barriers to accessing and interpreting biodiversity data. Automation of workflows will provide regular and reproducible indicators and models that are open and useful to users. Additionally, the use of cloud computing offers scalability, flexibility, and collaborative opportunities for applying advanced data science techniques anywhere. Finally, close collaboration with stakeholders will inform us of the requirements for tools, increase impact, and facilitate the flow of information from primary data to the decision-making processes

TIER2 - Enhancing Trust, Integrity and Efficiency in Research through next-level Reproducibility

Lack of reproducibility of research results has become a major theme in recent years. TIER2 is an international project funded by the European Commission under their Horizon Europe programme. Covering three broad research areas (social, life and computer sciences) and two cross-disciplinary stakeholder groups (research publishers and funders) to systematically investigate reproducibility across contexts, TIER2 will significantly boost knowledge on reproducibility, create tools, engage communities, implement interventions and policy across different contexts to increase re-use and overall quality of research results in the European Research Area and global R&I, and consequently increase trust, integrity and efficiency in research