Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet CWCC-Dynamics (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Mounds and margins on the North Atlantic host highly diverse and structurally complex megabenthic communities, such as cold-water coral (CWC) reefs. These communities have been widely impacted by fishing activities, and thus CWC reefs are identified as vulnerable marine ecosystems in need of protection. Recently, several deep-sea environments (e.g. mounts, canyons) hosting CWC reefs, in EU Atlantic waters have been integrated in Marine Protected Areas (MPA). However, few of these MPAs have incorporated management plans. To establish suitable management policies, it is required to implement monitoring strategies that account for these diverse community dynamics and how they may be influenced by environmental drivers. Particulate organic carbon (POC) fluxes are known to shape deep-sea benthic communities, indicating that variations in food supply is a major driver affecting community structure and dynamics. Yet, the relationship between POC fluxes and benthic community dynamics at different temporal and spatial scales are not fully understood. Elucidating deep-sea benthic community dynamics, represents an important challenge for future research especially as management of human impacts becomes a priority. This project’s main goals are to assess the dynamics of CWC communities in mound and margins on the North Atlantic, and examine how different environmental factors may be influencing them. Community dynamics will be assessed via convolutional neural networks which will allow to assess changes in community composition and structural complexity on 3 areas that have been monitored with benthic platforms equipped with HD cameras and several environmental sensors during several months (12 – 24 months). This project will be of wide scientific interest as it will provide insight into the resilience of CWC communities to environmental change and the basis to establish a set of essential variables to be monitored over the long term and support sound conservation actions.

Mots clés : benthic community dynamics, deep sea ecosystems, megabenthos, cold water corals, ecological monitoring, deep learning, primary production

Participants :
- Dutch Research Council (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 187572.48 €
Projet ECO-MOUNTAIN (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Mountains in Europe are highly valued as they provide diverse living and recreational opportunities and unique landscape sceneries, are key economic assets, and because they are treasures of unique flora and fauna. Their vulnerable environment is, however, threatened by the frequent occurrence of shallow landslides and water erosion which produce large amounts of sediment during floods. The urgency to mitigate natural hazards calls for an improved understanding of how physical and biological dimensions of ecological restoration interact. Hence, the ECO-MOUNTAIN project proses an environmental connectivity framework as the keystone to the ecological restoration degraded mountains. A study area was selected in the Pyrenees, where I will benefit from the support of local stakeholders engaged the restoring degraded mountain slopes. Special focus is given to developing a novel sediment source fingerprinting method using environmental DNA (eDNA). As strong interrelations exist between vegetation, soils and geomorphology, plants leave an eDNA signature on sediments which reflects the degradation status of the area. It will allow to define erosion hotspots at unprecedented precisions and serve as a tool to monitor the impact of ecological restoration schemes in large catchments. The validity of the novel eDNA fingerprint methods will be evaluated against conventional fingerprinting method (carbon/nitrogen) and soil mineralogy. I will be hosted by Dr. Stokes at the AMAP joint research group in Montpellier (France). Having access to excellent training and laboratory facilities at AMAP, I will be able to grow as a multiskilled soil restoration scientist. Guidance will also be given by Prof. Cammeraat (geomorphologist) and Dr. Evrard (geochemist) and they will host me in their state-of-the art laboratories during short research stays. From this fellowship project, I expect to grow as an independent scientist and reap the rewards for years to come in my future career.

Mots clés : environmental dna, vegetation, landslide, sediment source fingerprinting

Participants :
- Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 196707.84 €
Projet FLAMMINGGOS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Mounting evidence suggests that aquatic invertebrate activity can enhance wetland sediment greenhouse gas (GHG) flux. However, waterbirds have been shown to reduce densities of aquatic invertebrates, which could potentially moderate GHG flux. Alternatively, carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) subsidies in waterbird guano may stimulate microbial activity. These bottom-up forces may stimulate GHG flux and dampen the top-down effects of predation. For the proposed study, a network of long-term waterbird exclosure plots will be established within the Doñana Natural Space in southern Spain. 144 experimental plots will manipulate the presence of waterbirds in vegetated and unvegetated wetlands, and will create a gradient in C, N, and P (guano) inputs, with the following six treatments: X = no birds present, W = waterfowl present, and F = flamingos + waterfowl present. Controlled laboratory and outdoor mesocosm studies will further examine the interacting stimulatory effects of waterbird guano and benthic invertebrates on GHG flux. Responses compared among treatments will include benthic and water-air fluxes of nitrous oxide, methane, and carbon dioxide, invertebrate densities and biomass, and abundances of microbial genes that are functionally linked to GHG flux (e.g. nirK, nirS, nosZ). Environmental data will be incorporated into predictive GHG flux models, including benthic invertebrate density and biomass; macrophyte density and biomass; water and sediment C, N and P content; and temperature and dissolved oxygen. By manipulating waterbird and invertebrate densities, this will be the first manipulative field study to simultaneously test the hypotheses that benthic invertebrates stimulate GHG emissions, and that higher trophic levels (waterbirds) exert both top-down and bottom-up influence on this process. This represents a new and potentially transformative line of inquiry into the roles of multiple trophic levels in regulating global wetland GHG flux.

Mots clés : waterbird, trophic cascade, greenhouse gas emission, flux, wetland, top down, bottom up, macrophyte, invertebrate, flamingo, waterfowl, polychaeta, oligochaeta, chironomidae, methane, nitrous oxide

Participants :
- Spanish National Research Council (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 158121.6 €
Projet ECO-SOS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The water resources and especially the drinking water in Europe and globally face new challenges with the emerging micropollutants, originating from pharmaceuticals, personal care products, plastics, flame retardants, etc. Even though they present in extremely low concentrations and do not exhibit acute toxicity to living organisms or environment, the long-term effects are uncertain. The water and wastewater treatment plants do not fully remove or eliminate them; thus, they accumulate in the water resources leading to higher concentrations increasing the health and environmental risks. Hence, the revisions of the EU drinking and wastewater directives are anticipated to require monitoring and control of these substances. However, that poses a challenge to the water utilities in Europe; The current analytical and monitoring systems of detection of these compounds at low concentration are expensive, time-consuming and usually complicated. Current studies have only reported the fate of these substances during various treatment processes but not on how to optimise them to maximise removal. To solve this problem, we would like to combine the expertise of the host research group and fellow applicant—the group of prof. Ratnaweera has experience in the development of real-time control and monitoring systems, while the fellow applicant is specialised in the analysis and removal of emerging contaminants during treatment processes. Thus, the global objective is to develop novel, cost-effective and simple to use surveillance system that would also enable the optimising of the removal of emerging contaminants in water. The concept will be developed and verified in collaboration with Norwegian and European water utilities addressing their needs and concerns.

Mots clés : big data analytics, soft sensors, contaminants of emerging concern

Participants :
- Norwegian University of Life Sciences (Norvège) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 202158.72 €
Projet AutoPlayPig (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The welfare of animals kept for human consumption is of high concern globally, also within the European Commission including the welfare of the domesticated pig . As animal well-being is not just the absence of negative affective states, but also, and probably predominantly, the presence of positive affective states, identifying indicators of positive affective states in farmed animals can increase our capacity to improve their health and welfare. One such indicator is play behaviour. Play in pigs is an event occurring sporadically. Thus, using play behaviour for welfare assessment will not be possible through direct observations. Instead, it demands automation and continuous monitoring, two key elements of Precision Livestock Farming (PLF). The current project aims to investigate the relation between play behaviour in pigs and sensor data from image and sound analysis combining ethology and computer science into one field of Computational Ethology (CE). The project will focus on the CE part of the research, but the knowledge obtained could be used to develop real-time PLF algorithms for use in pig herds to observe the frequency and duration of play behaviour at pen level, beneficial to both the farmer, consultants, inspectors and future research projects within play behaviour in pigs. Training of the reseacher will include a thorough introduction to the field of CE and PLF, to the decoding and labeling of feature variables and to the use of machine learning algorithms on sensor data; all expertise fields of the hosting research group. All in all, the current project will take the first steps in developing a method for automatic recognition of play behaviour and positive affective states in pigs, as well as training the researcher for a future career within Computational Ethology and Precision Livestock Farming.

Mots clés : computational ethology, precision livestock farming

Participants :
- KU Leuven (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 178320.0 €
Projet PEMB (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Economic Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The well-functioning of modern democracies crucially hinges on the information that voters receive, and mass media are the primary source of policy-relevant information. Yet, substantial evidence indicates that media bias has an impact on voters’ decision, and there is a widespread concern among governments regarding the implications of such information distortions on political outcomes. To date, it is not clear what the effects of media bias are and how regulators should intervene in order to mitigate the problem. This project will employ both novel game-theoretical and experimental techniques to understand the impact of strategically biased news. This innovative modelling strategy will allow me to address two key and timely questions: how media bias affects electoral and political outcomes? How should news markets be regulated? The main objective is to understand political distortions as a function of the news providers' costs of information misreporting. Regulators often intervene by affecting such misreporting costs, e.g. via direct fines or the introduction of media watchdogs. However, this link is highly understudied, and until now there is no formal model that can assess what are the implications of interventions directed toward regulating misreporting costs. The project will focus on understanding the distortions of media bias on three crucial dimensions: (i) the choice of voters, (ii) the process of policy-making, and (iii) competition. The nature of the project is intrinsically multidisciplinary as it involves both theoretical and empirical investigations which are highly relevant and pertinent to studies in economics, political science, and media studies. Results have the potential to improve the efficacy of regulations of the media sector, mitigate the informational distortions in electoral and political outcomes, and make room for further research in the political economy of media bias and its market determinants.

Mots clés : media economics, information economics, regulation

Participants :
- University of Trento (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 171473.28 €
Projet ADAPT (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The world has recently seen the worst wildfires in human living memory, including the ongoing siege of California wildfires and 2019-2020 Australian bushfires, which burnt 72,000 square miles. Predictions that global warming will enhance the number of high fire risk days in fire-prone regions highlights the importance of understanding the relationship between plants, climate and fire. Plants that live in fire-prone regions often possess distinctive traits that allow them to thrive following wildfires. However, it remains a major ecological debate if such trait acquisition has actually been driven by fire itself. To understand the drivers of trait acquisition and their continued function in modern ecosystems, we have to look to the past. ADAPT will examine the evolution of the earliest proposed fire-adapted trait, branch shedding in conifers, which emerged in the Permian (280 Mya). To date no research has established the conditions surrounding the origin of this important trait. Therefore, whether this trait emerged as a response to fire or the otherwise changing climate is unknown. ADAPT will test the hypothesis that fire-proneness is a prerequisite for the evolution of fire-adaptive traits, where it will uniquely examine whether a shift in fire-regime post-dates the appearance of branch shedding, suggesting that the trait was the result of multi-agent selection co-opted to improve fitness of some conifers; or prior to the evolution of branch shedding, suggesting that the trait evolved in response to selection by fire and that fire has been a selective force over 100s of millions of years of Earth history. Fire-adapted traits are what continue to ensure survival of plants in Earth’s fire-prone ecosystems. As such, the results of ADAPT are critical if we are to understand the continued functioning of fire-adaptive traits in the changing environmental conditions of the modern world and assess the resilience of Earth’s ecosystems to climate-driven changes in wildfires.

Mots clés : paleobotany, late paleozoic, fire ecology, conifer evolution, plant innovation, wildfire, euramerica

Participants :
- University of Exeter (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 224933.76 €
Projet EnlightenedLoom (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : TERMINATED

The world often presents us with sequences of multisensory stimuli unfolding over time, like a car appearing after we hear it approaching. In the cerebral cortex, individual neurons integrate information across senses and time in order to identify these objects. Meanwhile, neuromodulatory molecules shape neural computations, adapting them to context and experience. It is from this interplay that the spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity containing the code for how we perceive the world originate. However, these activity patterns have long been experimentally inaccessible, and they have never been investigated concurrently to neuromodulation. With this project, I will reveal the causal role of functionally-identified ensembles of neurons in the perception and learning of audio-tactile sequences. I will combine, for the first time, two-photon (2p) imaging and holographic-optogenetics with fluorescent neuromodulation sensors. My experiments will be performed in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) of the mouse, a multimodal area acting as sensory history buffer. I will focus on noradrenaline (NA), a modulator so far involved in sharpening processing of weak unisensory features. I will 1) test which PPC neurons are sufficient, when activated, to bias perception of multisensory sequences during a behavioural task; 2) simultaneously, I will test whether and how PPC levels of NA change when altering sequence discriminability. My experiments will be supported by a solid theoretical framework based on Information Theory. In conclusion, I will use a unique combination of advanced molecular, optical, and computational tools to pursue a novel, causal and integrative approach to cortical function: one where functional neuronal subgroups and neuromodulation are investigated together, at high-resolution, to explain the multi-layered biological basis of the fascinating interaction between our brains and the world.

Mots clés : temporal sequences, association cortex, optogenetics, calcium imaging, all optical, behaviour, information theory, neuromodulation, noradrenaline, multisensory

Participants :
- Italian Institute of Technology (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 183473.28 €
Projet PRENET (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The “PRENET” proposal aims at investigating the geographical extent, directionality and intensity of social communication in the early prehistory of the Eastern Mediterranean seascape and the cognitive/behavioural factors behind the observed patterns. The specific scientific objectives of the proposal are: 1) the investigation of social interactions in Eastern Mediterranean through the examination of raw material movement in early prehistoric Cyprus, and 2) the determination of cognitive/behavioural elements behind our ancestors’ choices of specific raw materials, through the study of raw material selectivity. Misconceptions abound with regard to the eastern part of the Mediterranean and especially the island of Cyprus with current notions seeing the sea as a barrier to early human presence. However, given its geographical location and its complex ecology and habitats this lack of human presence in Cyprus seems to be research–related rather than factual. The “PRENET” project aims at firmly putting such theories to rest by establishing the scales of raw material movement and communication networks in the Eastern Mediterranean. Drawing from her previous work, where the Experienced Researcher developed a social network model for the investigation of the scale of past social life, she will address this phenomenon by looking at lithic raw material movement in early Cypriot archaeological sites. The Fellowship will be an excellent opportunity for her career diversification by training-through research and her further development towards professional maturity.

Mots clés : raw materials, selectivity, movement, social networks, behaviour, cognition, aesthetics, insular environments, cyprus

Participants :
- University of Cyprus (Chypre) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 151648.8 €
Projet STABLE_FABRY (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The “holy grail” of exoplanet research today is the detection of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. Doppler spectroscopy is an indispensable tool for finding and characterizing extrasolar planets; however, detecting an Earth twin by measuring the radial velocity (RV) perturbation it imposes on the parent star requires nearly one order of magnitude better RV precision than the best current spectrographs provide. A key component in addressing the limitations of existing instruments is the development of extremely precise calibration light sources that can be used to track drifts and imperfections of the spectrograph, removing them from the science data. A stable, reliable, and relatively inexpensive calibrator solves a “chicken and egg” problem in the field – motivating the building of more stable spectrographs, secure in the knowledge that they will be able to perform to their potential. Project STABLE_FABRY consists of developing a novel calibration technique that can be applied to a wide range of high resolution spectrographs. This technique uses a broadband Fabry-Perot etalon to provide the calibration spectrum; the etalon is stabilized by referencing it to an atomic transition using standard laser spectroscopy methods. Our preliminary work already indicates that a stability of 3 cm/s can be reached with this method, making it precise enough for detection of Earth-like planets. The only other currently available calibration technology with demonstrated precision at that level is the laser frequency comb, which is an order of magnitude more complex and significantly more expensive. Our technique can easily be adapted to different echelle spectrographs in the visible and near infrared by simply using an etalon optimized for that particular spectrograph. Developing this concept into an observatory-ready system will present a major breakthrough for high precision spectrographs, enabling detections of Earth twins with Doppler spectroscopy.

Mots clés : astronomical spectrographs, extrasolar planets, precision measurements

Participants :
- Heidelberg University (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 159460.8 €