International collaborations at the Faculty of Natural Sciences

Utilising the resources of biological diversity in such a way that they are preserved and ecosystems that have already been damaged can regenerate at the same time: This is the aim of the Europe-wide SELINA research project, which is being coordinated by Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) and started on 1 July 2022. The European Union (EU) is funding the project within its new HORIZON research framework programme with a total volume of 13 million euros.
The research project is based on the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030, which was adopted in May 2020. With the biodiversity strategy, the EU is pursuing a long-term plan to protect nature and reverse the degradation of ecosystems. To this end, it provides for a series of concrete measures and commitments, including the new project.
The SELINA project has created the appropriate context to consolidate scientific knowledge on ecosystems and their services.
SELINA can be seen as the successor project to the ESMERALDA project, which was also carried out at the Institute of Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology. This still had the character of an inventory and evaluation of ecosystems and their performance, whereas SELINA, with its 15 individual projects, focusses on concrete implementation. The experiences and findings are then to be incorporated into future decision-making processes in business and politics.
The primary aim of SELINA is to develop practice-orientated decision-making recommendations based on scientific findings and to initiate social changes that serve the protection and sustainable use of the environment.

What is the project about?

UPSCALE is a new H2020 Research & Innovation project worth €7.66 million, starting in November 2020 and lasting for 5 years. The project aims to take key steps to realize the transformative potential of push-pull technology by expanding its scope and applicability from individual fields to whole landscapes and regions, and from cereal to other important crops and cultivation systems. The overall goal is to address food security, livelihoods and climate change resilience in the sub-Saharan region of East Africa, while reducing the environmental impact of agricultural practices. For this, it will foster the design, adaptation and adoption of strategies for integrated agro-ecological management based on push-pull technology for wide-spread and climate-resilient sustainable intensification.

Who is behind the project?

The UPSCALE consortium consists of a group of 18 partners from 4 European and 6 African countries teamed up under the lead of the Leibniz University of Hannover (Germany). The UPSCALE consortium is ideally composed to tackle the challenges of developing and upscaling the push-pull management system in East Africa: the expertise of icipe in development of push-pull management systems is complemented by other partners’ skills and track record in key research areas such as research synthesis, cropping systems ecology, spatiotemporal modelling, chemical ecology, landscape ecology, food-web ecology, soil science and social science including socioeconomics, sustainability science, gender, and policy, as well as international experts on stakeholder engagement and communication.

Which novel technologies are going to be developed during the project?

UPSCALE is a highly ambitious project that advances both science and technology beyond the state-of-the-art, representing the springboard to unlock uptake by addressing and involving ‘critical levers’ at all levels and scales of society, including applied research, policy and multi-actor value chains in Africa and Europe. In practice, UPSCALE will introduce a novel application of ecological methods, modelling tools and social-ecological approaches to the barely explored ground of providing data-driven, quantitative and qualitative tools to assess and improve social-ecological resilience of ecosystem services and farms. UPSCALE will examine this under state-of-the-art scenarios of climate change, closing the gap between small-scale models and coarser large-scale models, to build an improved cross-scale social and ecological modelling framework which yields key information for management, dissemination and policy decisions. Moreover, UPSCALE will develop and adapt dissemination toolboxes including a Knowledge Exchange Hub (KEH), mobile app, interactive integrative maps for spatial targeting of dissemination efforts, long-lasting multi-actor communities (MAC). Multi-actor design and integration of empirical models for push-pull adoption and effectiveness are the basis for targeted and rapid spread of push-pull and sustainable intensification information to key stakeholders, thus ensuring the relevance of research, as well as the feasibility and increased uptake of proposed solutions and implementation of results.

What is the geographical scope of the project?

The project activities will be conducted in five main study regions within East African countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania) each of these regions being selected to encompass different biophysical (including climate, soils, topography) and farming system characteristics. All the selected regions have been exposed to varying degrees to the push-pull technology through previous training and dissemination, notably by the UPSCALE project partners. All the regions share several constraints for push-pull expansion including limited access to agricultural extension services and frequent shortage and high expense of seeds for push-pull implementation. Therefore, these regions are essential for implementing the experimental tasks following a standardized, common study design across countries and are open for collaboration and merging with study and dissemination sites of other ongoing or recent projects.

The aim of the join research project is to use different plant species as biofilters and to establish sustainable value chains. Plants can purify nutrient-rich water and wastewater by taking up nutrients such as nitrate and phosphate and converting them into biomass. They are also able to break down or detoxify organic and possibly toxic substances that occur in the environment. These plants can be used as food or as fodder. Some of the target plant species contain valuable ingredients that can be used in medicine or as dietary supplements. The plant residues can be used to generate bioenergy, e.g. for the production of biogas. The digestate, in turn, would be returned to the cycle as fertilizer. At the LUH and especially at the Institute of Botany, all areas of this value chain have been examined and appropriate methods have been established, e.g. also for the quinoa plant (Chenopodium quinoa) cultivated in Guatemala, and are now to be implemented in the potential partner country.