Anticoagulant rodenticides have been used for control of rodents (principally rats and mice in the UK) for over 50 years. UK and European legislation requires that manufacturers of poison baits provide efficacy data, including how many rodents are killed by a new bait formulation. As a consequence a small number of procedures are carried out in the UK every year which necessitate allowing animals to die from anticoagulant poisoning. There is a lag-time, of 4-6 days, from ingestion of bait to death associated with all anticoagulant rodenticides. This project aims to identify behavioural or biochemical markers during that lag-time that can be used to predict death or survival and allow humane methods to be used for ending the experiment before the animals die.

This project will fund a fellowship placement for a mid-career researcher to work for 9 months with the better regulation teams at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Environment Agency (EA). 'Better Regulation' is the UK government's approach to developing regulation that achieves the desired outcome while avoiding unintended consequences and limiting costs for companies, consumers and the taxpayer. For Defra and the EA, the challenge is to improve, simplify, consolidate and even remove environmental regulations, while achieving at least equivalent outcomes for the environment, society and the economy. Academic research can offer useful guidance on how to tackle this challenge through providing evidence on the impacts, costs and benefits of various approaches to environmental regulation. The project will enable a researcher who specialises in company responses to environmental regulation to provide their expertise to Defra and the EA. During the fellowship the researcher will (1) collate research evidence on the relationships between environmental regulation, innovation, firm performance and economic growth, and (2) consult these and other government agencies to develop an action plan for future research collaboration on better regulation for a sustainable economy.

Oats are a valuable break crop in cereal rotations, a lower input crop than wheat, perform well in marginal areas and are a high value feed that grows well in grassland based rotations. Nevertheless there is a need to improve key traits that will increase the production and utilisation of oats whilst also mitigating climate and environmental change via reduced agricultural inputs. Research also needs to anticipate changes in the market as consumers shift towards healthier diets of which oats are a key component. Discussions with end-user groups from the milling and livestock sectors, as well as processors, all key partners in this project, have identified the priority areas where genetic improvement can make quantifiable improvements to the oat crop. Various approaches to marker discovery have been tested and high density oat maps have been established however it has become clear that there is relatively little polymorphism in cultivated oats and therefore an urgent need to maximise the use of available polymorphism and be able to select precisely for novel polymorphisms from non-UK adapted germplasm if it is to be used effectively by plant breeders. This project will address these issues by developing and applying state-of-the-art genomic and metabolomic tools for targeted oat genetic improvement. The focus is on the understanding and manipulation of key traits that will enhance the value of oats in human health improvement, realise the potential of oats as a high value animal feed and develop new opportunities for using oats through advanced fractionation. In so doing it will also increase the environmental and economic sustainability of cereal based rotations and capitalise on the value of oats as a low input cereal. Powerful enabling technologies for the identification of specific genes and markers will drive the development of breeder -friendly tools accelerating the production of improved oat varieties that will be marketed by industrial partners. This is a multi-disciplinary project which combines modern phenotyping methodologies with the expertise of genomics researchers, oat breeders and end-users, which will also address long term breeding goals by developing experimental populations which are polymorphic for agronomically important traits but more amenable to mapping and forward genetic approaches than conventional agronomic lines. Involvement of the various end-users of oats (food, feed and industrial uses) in the evaluation of novel oat lines will facilitate the transfer of this research into oat breeding programmes and deliver oat varieties with the characteristics that industry requires and deliver environmental benefits to sustainable production systems.

The vast majority of air pollutants are emitted directly into the atmosphere from activities occurring at the Earth's surface. These activities may be anthropogenic in origin or may be natural (biogenic) processes. Of particular relevance to air quality are the emissions of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). NOx or the sum of nitric oxide, NO and nitrogen dioxide, NO2, is emitted by vehicles, power stations and many other industrial activities during the combustion of fossil fuels. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) may be emitted into the atmosphere as unburnt or partially burnt fossil fuels, by the evaporation of solvents and other industrial chemicals and may also be emitted by plants as a biogenic process. In combination NOx and VOC combine through photochemical reactions in the atmosphere leading to the formation of two other extremely important pollutants - ozone and particulate matter. Species such as NOx, certain VOCs, Ozone and particulate matter are all regulated by EU Air Quality directives. Whilst the chemical reactions and atmospheric processing of NOx and VOcs is reasonably well understood, and can be modelled with some skill, large uncertainties arise in models from uncertainty associated with the initial rate of emissions. Defra is responsible for a highly detailed emissions inventory for the UK (the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory NAEI), which is the starting point for most atmospheric simulations of air quality. The NAEI is constructed to give spatially resolved emissions, calculated from national activity datasets and emissions factors which are then spatially disaggregated to 1x1km grids. The framework under which the NAEI operates is itself tightly constrained by regulated procedures for reporting. In recent years it has become clear that measured trends in certain pollutants, for example NO2, have not followed trends predicted by inventories. In parallel, other studies have shown that species such as biogenic isoprene are also not currently well reproduced by the NAEI. Continued exceedences of certain air pollution targets is of significant concern to the responsible Government department Defra, who have identified reducing this uncertainty associated with emissions as a key evidence need. Emissions inventories are essentially paper-based calculations of likely emissions, and it is not straightforward to challenge these with real-world emissions measurements, on large spatial scales. In this project we will apply and demonstrate a novel "top down" experimental method for measuring pollution fluxes at the city-wide or landscape scale. We will fit fast-response sensors for NOx and VOCs on NERC's light research aircraft, a Dornier 228, and fly the instruments over Greater London and over rural East Anglia as low and as slow as possible. This aircraft is already fitted with an instrument to measure atmospheric turbulence, and by combining the data from the turbulence probe with that from the chemical sensors (using data analysis techniques known as eddy covariance and virtual disjunct eddy covariance) we aim to demonstrate that we can make top down flux measurements for NOx and VOCs at these scales. We will then compare the experimentally derived data with that produced by the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory, as a starting point for understanding where and why difference occur. The technique, if successful, would be of considerable strategic importance to Defra, who are co-funding this project. There are however very important applications outside of the urban domain. Understanding emission fluxes of gases in remote and pristine environments is a key element of understanding the earth system. The techniques to be developed here have potential transfers in to fields such as forest and marine biogeochemical gas exchange.

The increasing global demand for food, concerns over dwindling reserves of good quality phosphate rock and the climate-change impacts of fertiliser manufacture, fluctuating fertiliser prices, and the adverse environmental, social and economic consequences of phosphorus (P) pollution of water require the development of innovative and more sustainable solutions to the use and management of P on farms. Current systems of production rely on inputs of highly water-soluble fertilisers to maintain large reserves of background P in the soil. Recovery of applied P by crops is consequently low (<30%) and this inefficiency is not only wasteful of resources but also increases the risk of eutrophication through increased P loss in runoff from land. A peak in global phosphate rock production could occur within the next two decades whilst eutrophication is estimated to be costing the UK over £75 million per annum. A potential alternative and more sustainable strategy for P use in arable farming systems is to maintain a lower background of soil P but supplement this with more targeted P applications and/or by fertilisers that are more efficiently used, and/or fertilisers recovered from domestic or livestock wastewaters. We propose here that adoption of these more sustainable P use strategies will reduce growing costs and current dependence on elevated soil P-fertility, so will help to preserve finite global reserves of P and reduce export of P in runoff from land. In this proposal a multi-disciplinary, cross-industry research team will investigate and develop a new direction for P management that will improve P-use efficiency in arable crops, maximise recycling of wastewater P, reduce the pressure on rock phosphate reserves and minimise wider environmental impacts. Through multi-centre modelling, laboratory studies and field experiments we will compare and develop methods to improve P-use efficiency by (a) reducing the fixation of applied P by soils, (b) improving the accessibility of applied P to crops, and (c) improving the exploitation of soil P previously considered to be largely unavailable to crops. The magnitude of the economic and wider environmental benefits from maintaining lower soil P-fertility need to be quantified across a range of soil types and cropping systems. On completion, the project will deliver novel and profitable soil and fertiliser management strategies that will help farmers maintain the economic viability of their farm businesses and meet any future restrictions on P management under the Water Framework Directive. The project will have relevance across the spectrum of conventional, LEAF and organic farming systems and will involve overseas collaboration on what is internationally recognised as a key issue for sustainable farming and global food security. BBSRC funded project will develop mathematical models and optimisation techniques to describe phosphate movement and uptake by cropping systems.