This project addresses soil and water sustainability in landscapes undergoing transitions. Management and social-cultural changes create transitions, altering watershed properties (soil and water quality, and related ecosystem services) in a manner that stakeholders may not understand or appreciate. Yet changes affect stakeholders, what they want to preserve or change, and their views of land management strategies. The general theme of this project, to occur in France, Italy, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, is to determine actual and perceived effects of land use transitions on critical zone (CZ) function in the context of land abandonment. Actual effects will consider biogeochemical cycles under changing inputs of altered land management. Water flows and nutrient concentration/discharge analysis of watersheds will apply available long-term data sets to assess transitions in the CZ that affect biogeochemical cycles, with supplemental sampling during the project. With input from stakeholders we will answer questions such as "Do abandoned landscapes return to a "natural" state or are novel ecosystems generated? and "How does environmental quality/ecosystem health vary based on current and future pathways of CZ dynamics, among landscapes with different land use management? Perceived effects will consider stakeholder expectation, preference and evaluation of ecosystem services and disservices. We will test the extent to which heterogeneity in such perceptions is a function of differences between and within stakeholders (e.g., urban vs. rural, resident vs. visitor, and endorsement of environmental values), and how change is framed across different spatial scales from a local to watershed scale or beyond (e.g., whether change reflects more vs. less human use of land and the reasons for change). We will examine associations between perceptions and support for land use change and management decisions (self-sustained or policy-driven), and inform ways to effectively communicate with stakeholders and consider their views of land use conversion and restoration.

REGENERATE is to support the rapidly growing waste-to-energy anaerobic treated effluent industry. To this end, we will be the first to apply an energetics-driven engineering method in wastewater treatment systems to improve ammonia removal capacity, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and mitigate antibiotic resistance. Therefore, paradigm-shifting innovation is necessary to advance the wastewater industry to a more carbon natural, environmental healthy future. Given that the waste-to-energy anaerobic treated effluent is rich in ammonia and antibiotics, the state-of-the-art energy-efficient Partial Nitrification-Anammox (PN-A) system is incapable to address the increasing greenhouse gas emission (N2O emission) and environmental health demands (antibiotic resistance), albeit its high ammonia removal efficiency. REGENERATE will respond to this challenge, taking advantage of energetics fundamental in a multiple-scale investigation. Microbial energetics drives metabolic pathways and determinates specific end-products and regulates gene expression. Specifically, evidence shows energetics-driven aeration supply can regulate N2O emission reduction and improve antibiotics biodegradation. Multiple combination of engineered aeration strategy is possible; therefore, we will develop a coupled dissolved oxygen level and aeration setpoint energetics-driven approach to investigate microbial consortia found in the PN/A system. The effects of aeration-driven energetics using industrially relevant metrics and analytical chemistry and genomic biology will be examined crossing a lab-, bench-, and full-scale experimentation in this project. Accordingly, a key feature of REGENERATE is to up-scale and achieve rapid industrial adoption of the upgraded PN-A technology by liaising the Project Scholars from Academia and Partners from the Water Industry to implement the research outcomes for operational sites. The other innovation is to introduce microbial energetics as the first principle to current water industry practices. This will be done by using high throughput chemical and genomics analyses to collect an unprecedented engineering and genomics dataset including the lab-, bench-, and full-scale experiments. Further, the dataset will be trained and analysed by the machine learning pipelines developed in the project. Finally, we will access a comprehensive evaluation of the environmental and economic benefits of the PN-A system for the waste-to-energy anaerobic treated effluent industry. Therefore, we will conduct transformative research by including bench-, lab-, and full-scale investigation and apply interconnected research areas including Environmental Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Microbial Genomics, and Machine Learning Computer Science, Water Infrastructure Planning and Engineering, and bring together an interdisciplinary team with 9 scholars and 2 stakeholders. REGENERATE will, thus, encourage deployment and speedy acceptance of the proposed PN-A technology into a more sustainable, healthy waste-to-energy paradigm.