Open Science is around the corner. Scientists and organizations see it as a way to speed up, improve quality and reward, while policy makers see it as a means to optimize cost of science and leverage innovation. Open Science is an emerging vision, a way of thinking, whose challenges always gaze beyond its actual achievements. De facto, today’s scientific communication ecosystem lacks tools and practices to allow researchers to fully embrace Open Science. OpenAIRE-Connect aims to provide technological and social bridges, and deliver services enabling uniform exchange of research artefacts (literature, data, and methods), with semantic links between them, across research communities and content providers in scientific communication. It will introduce and implement the concept of Open Science as a Service (OSaaS) on top of the existing OpenAIRE infrastructure, delivering out-of-the-box, on-demand deployable tools. OpenAIRE-Connect will adopt an end-user driven approach (via the involvement of 5 prominent research communities), and enrich the portfolio of OpenAIRE infrastructure production services with a Research Community Dashboard Service and a Catch-All Notification Broker Service. The first will offer publishing, interlinking, packaging functionalities to enable them to share and re-use their research artifacts (introducing “methods, e.g. data,software, protocols). This effort, supported by the harvesting and mining “intelligence” of the OpenAIRE infrastructure, will provide communities with the content and tools they need to effectively evaluate and reproduce science. OpenAIRE-Connect will combine dissemination and training with OpenAIRE’s powerful NOAD network engaging research communities and content providers in adopting such services. These combined actions will bring immediate and long-term benefits to scholarly communication stakeholders by affecting the way research results are disseminated, exchanged, evaluated, and re-used.

Global trends in population growth and rising economic prosperity will increase the demand for energy, food and water, with more severe impact in fast-growing economies, such as in several African countries. The constraints on water, energy, and food could well hamper economic development, lead to social and geopolitical tensions, and cause lasting environmental damage. DAFNE advocates an integrated and adaptive water resources planning and management approach that explicitly addresses the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus from a novel participatory and multidisciplinary perspective. This includes social, economic, and ecologic dimensions, involves both public and private actors and is socially inclusive, enhances resource efficiency and prevents the loss of ecosystem services in regions where large infrastructures exist or are being built and intensive agriculture is expanding. A decision-analytic-framework (DAF) will be developed to quantitatively assess the social, economic, and environmental impact of expanding energy and food production in complex physical and political contexts, where natural and social processes are strongly interconnected and the institutional setting involves multiple stakeholders and decision-makers. The DAFNE approach will be demonstrated by analysing two cross-boundary case studies, the Zambezi and the Omo river basins. The WEF nexus will be quantified and analysed as the trade-off between conflicting objectives such as hydropower production vs irrigation, land exploitation vs conservation, etc. The nexus will be translated in economic values and impact on growth, ecosystems and ecosystem services. DAFNE will allow a better understanding of the WEF nexus, and generate and explore alternative planning and management solutions based on the cooperation of public and private stakeholders, which foster the profitable but equitable use of resources without transgressing environmental limits or creating societal and/or stakeholder conflicts.

Intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES) are prevalent and dominate many regions, including in several parts of Europe. With climate change and increased abstraction, their number and length is expanding. IRES support high and unique biodiversity values and promote key ecological functions and ecosystem services to people and society. However, they are being degraded at alarming rates due to poor recognition and lack of appropriate conceptual framework to understand, predict and manage their biodiversity and associated functions and ecosystem services. The current development of metasystem approaches which recognize the processes determining biodiversity both at local and regional scales offer a robust and promising framework to understand and predict the effect of climate change on riverine biodiversity and ecosystem services. Adapting this framework to highly dynamic settings such as IRES represents a major breakthrough which would offer to understand and predict 1) how biodiversity is organized in space and time in such fragmented networks 2) how services are produced, transported and used within riverscapes 3) optimize in time and space biodiversity conservation and management practices with respect to climate change scenarios. By responding to the H2020 call ‘Inter-relations between climate change, biodiversity and ecosystem services’, our objectives are to i. model river flows and water uses under climatic scenarios at both European and sentinel catchment scales ii. develop a conceptual framework to cascade these scenarios into biodiversity and ecosystem responses in a meta-system approach iii. identify tipping points in IRES and relevant predictors (eg drying length, duration, timing) and define safe operational spaces (eg flow variability and fragmentation ranges) iv. improve existing catchment-scale tools (eg Estimkart, MARXAN) to manage biodiversity and ecosystem services v. determine nature-based solutions to optimize adaptation and mitigation strategies to climate change in Europe and vi. to seek synergies with on-going H2020 efforts in relation with environmental policies in Europe. Within a strong network of ~15 highly knowledgeable European partners from different disciplines, built thanks to an on-going COST Action (www.smires.eu) coordinated by the current project PI, we will meet the 3 H2020 assessment criteria: excellence, impact and feasibility. This MRSEI grant will allow organizing 2 workshops and assistance from a consulting company to prepare our response and succeed in the call. This will put France on the font of the scene with respect to mitigate and adapt climate change effects on biodiversity and ecosystems services provided by hydrological networks.

Recent studies from the IPCC indicate that Europe is particularly prone to increased risks of river and coastal floods, droughts resulting in water restrictions and damages from extreme weather such as heat events and wildfires. Evaluations also show a huge potential to reduce these risks with novel adaptation strategies. Researchers, innovators and incubators develop innovative products and services to reduce the increased climate change risks. Many of these innovations however hardly arrive at the markets. BRIGAID BRIdges the GAp for Innovations in Disaster resilience. BRIGAID's approach is supported by three pillars. (1) At first BRIGAID takes into account the geographical variability of climate-related hazards and their interaction with socio-economic changes, (2) BRIGAID establishes structural, on-going support for innovations that are ready for validation in field tests and real life demonstrations and (3) BRIGAID develops a framework that enables an independent, scientific judgement of the socio-technological effectiveness of an innovation. BRIGAID's objective is ambitious but achievable with strong consortium partners in EU, two Associated Countries and support from Overseas Territories. BRIGAID (a) brings actively together innovators and end-users in Communities of Innovation, resulting in increased opportunities for market-uptake; (b) contributes to the development of a technological and performance standards for adaptation options by providing a Test and Implementation Framework (TIF) and test facilities throughout Europe; (c) Improves innovation capacity and the integration of new knowledge by establishing an innovators network and (d) strengthens the competitiveness and growth of companies with the support of a dedicated business team. Finally BRIGAID develops a business models and market outreach to launch innovations to the market and secure investments in innovations beyond BRIGAID’s lifetime.

SIMRA seeks to advance understanding of social innovation (SI) and innovative governance in agriculture, forestry and rural development (RD), and how to boost them, particularly in marginalised rural areas across Europe, with a focus on the Mediterranean region (including non-EU) where there is limited evidence of outcomes and supporting conditions. These objectives will be achieved by: 1. Developing systematic frameworks: a) theoretical - for improved knowledge of the complexity of SIs and its dimensions, and its impact on unfolding territorial capital; b) operational - based on a trans-disciplinary coalition (researchers and practitioners) to advance understanding of preconditions and success factors (e.g. instruments, incentives etc.) for implementing/operationalizing SI. 2. Creating a categorisation of SIs which encompasses the specificities in terms of social priorities, relationships/collaborations etc. and serves as an instrument to explore reasons why regions with similar conditions display diverging paths and to 'turn diversity into strength’. 3. Creating an integrated set of methods to evaluate SI and its impacts on economic, social, environmental, institutional and policy dimensions of territorial capital. 4. Co-constructed evaluation of SIs in case studies across the spatial variation of European rural areas, considering which components of territorial capital foster and, or mainstream RD. 5. Synthesis and dissemination of new or improved knowledge of SIs and novel governance mechanisms to promote social capital and institutional capacity building and inform effective options/solutions for shaping sustainable development trajectories. 6. Creating collaborative learning and networking opportunities and launching innovative actions at different/multiple scales, with continuous interactions among researchers, ‘knowledge brokers’ and stakeholders to foster and mainstream SI, leaving a durable legacy.