• Rural Digital Europe
• 2017-2021close
• US close

With ongoing climate change, the probability of crossing environmental thresholds promoting abrupt changes in ecosystem structure and functioning is higher than ever. In drylands (areas where it rains <65% of what could be potentially evaporated), recent research has shown how the crossing of three aridity thresholds [at aridity (1-Aridity Index) values of 0.54, 0.70 and 0.80] leads to abrupt changes on ecosystem structural and functional attributes. Despite the importance of these findings and their implications to develop effective monitoring and adaptation actions to combat climate change and desertification, we lack a proper understanding of the mechanisms unleashing these abrupt shifts. Here we review multiple mechanisms that may explain the existence of aridity thresholds observed across global drylands, and discuss the potential amplification mechanisms that may underpin hypothetical abrupt temporal shifts with climate change. We propose that each aridity threshold is caused by different and specific mechanisms. The first threshold is mainly caused by physiological mechanisms of plant adaptation to water shortages. The second threshold is unleashed by different mechanisms involving soil processes and plant–soil interactions such as soil erosion, plant community shifts and nutrient cycling and circulation. The collapse of vegetation observed once the third aridity threshold (0.8) is crossed is caused by the mechanisms related to the survival limits of plants that may cause sudden cover and diversity losses and plant–atmospheric feedbacks that link vegetation collapse with further climate aridification. By identifying, revising and linking relevant mechanisms to each aridity threshold observed, we provide a set of specific hypotheses and identify knowledge gaps concerning the study of threshold emergence in drylands. We were also able to establish plausible factors that are context dependent and may influence the occurrence of abrupt ecosystem changes in time. Our review may help to focus future research efforts on aridity thresholds and to develop strategies to monitor, adapt to or even revert abrupt ecosystem changes across global drylands. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. M.B. acknowledges support from Juan de la Cierva Formación fellowship program (FJCI-2018-036520-I) from Spanish Ministry of Science. B.V. and R.S. have been funded by PR01018-EC-H2020-FET-Open MADONNA project. R.S. also counted with the support of the Santa Fe Institute, and the support of Secretaria d'Universitats i Recerca del Departament d'Economia i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya. F.T.M. acknowledges support from the European Research Council grant agreement nº 647038 (BIODESERT) and from Generalitat Valenciana (CIDEGENT/2018/041).

The human microbiome has emerged as the crucial moderator in the interactions between food and our body. It is increasingly recognised that the microbiome can change our mind and health status, or switch on a wide range of diseases including cancer, cardio-metabolic diseases, allergies, and obesity. The causes of diseases are often only partially understood. However, nutrients, metabolites, and microbes are increasingly regarded as key players, even where the complete disease mechanisms remain unclear. The key to progress in the future will be to use and exploit additional, newly emerging disciplines such as metagenomics to complement patient information and to bring our understanding of diseases and the interrelation and effects of nutritional molecules to the next level. The EU has already funded 216 projects under the 7th Framework Programme and Horizon 2020 programmes to promote metagenomics and to advance our knowledge of microbes. This support started with the catalysing MetaHIT project that has produced a catalogue of gut microbes, and has arrived now at the very multi-disciplinary SYSCID action looking at how the microbiome is driving its resilience potential and our health. Together, these projects involve an investment of more than €498 M. However, in Horizon 2020, the new EU Health and Food Work Programmes for 2018–2020 go even further by setting new goals to find applications and to generate more knowledge on the microbiome, nutrition, various hosts of microbes, and their relation to health and disease. The big vision is to modulate health and diseases via the microbiome and nutrition, while at the same time other factors such as omics, molecular signatures, and lifestyle are constant. In this way, microbiome and nutrition research is moving from an isolated and despised offside position to a beacon of hope with a lot of potential and possibilities.

Target reaching is one of the most important problems in robotics - object interaction, manipulation and grasping tasks require reaching of specific targets. We avoid the complexity of calculating the inverse kinematics and doing motion planning, and instead we use a combination of motor primitives. We propose a bio-inspired architecture that performs target reaching with a robot arm without planning. A spiking neural network represents motions in a hierarchy of motor primitives. Different correction primitives are combined using an error signal. We present experiments with a simulation of a robot arm to extensively cover the working space by going to different points and returning to the start point, and experiments to test extreme targets and random points in sequence. Robotics applications - like target reaching - can provide benchmarking tasks and realistic scenarios for validation of neuroscience models. Robotics can take advantage of the capabilities of spiking neural networks and the advantages of neuromorphic hardware to run them.

Mid-air haptic interfaces are promising tools for providing tactile feedback in Virtual Reality (VR) applications, as they do not require the user to be tethered to, hold, or wear any system or device. Currently, focused ultrasound phased arrays are the most mature solution for providing mid-air haptic feedback. They modulate the phase of an array of ultrasound emitters so as to generate focused points of oscillating high pressure, eliciting vibrotactile sensations when encountering a user’s skin. While these arrays feature a reasonably large vertical workspace, they are not capable of displaying stimuli far beyond their horizontal limits, severely limiting their workspace in the lateral dimensions. In this paper, we propose an innovative low-cost solution for enlarging the workspace of focused ultrasound arrays. It features 2 degrees of freedom, rotating the array around the pan and tilt axes, thereby significantly increasing the usable workspace and enabling multi-directional feedback. Our hardware tests and human subject study in an ecological VR setting show a 14-fold increase in workspace volume, with focal point repositioning speeds over 0.85m/s while delivering tactile feedback with positional accuracy below 18mm. Finally, we propose a representative use case to exemplify the potential of our system for VR applications. International audience

Plants use many strategies to move efficiently in soil, such as growth from the tip, tropic movements, and morphological changes. In this paper, we propose a method to translate morphological features of Zea mays roots into a new design of soft robots that will be able to move in soil. The method relies on image processing and curve fitting techniques to extract the profile of Z. mays primary root. We implemented an analytic translation of the root profile in a 3D model (CAD) to fabricate root-like probes by means of 3D printing technology. Then, we carried out a comparative analysis among the artificial root-like probe and probes with different tip shapes (cylindrical, conical, elliptical, and parabolic) and diameters (11, 9, 7, 5, and 3 mm). The results showed that the energy consumption and the penetration force of the bioinspired probe are better with respect to the other shapes for all the diameters of the developed probes. For 100 mm of penetration depth and 7 mm of probe diameter, the energy consumption of the bioinspired probe is 89% lesser with respect to the cylindrical probe and 26% lesser with respect to the conical probe. The penetration performance of the considered tip shapes was evaluated also by means of numerical simulations, obtaining a good agreement with the experimental results. Additional investigations on plant root morphology, movement strategies, and material properties can allow the development of innovative bioinspired solutions exploitable in challenging environments. This research can bring to breakthrough scenarios in different fields, such as exploration tasks, environmental monitoring, geotechnical studies, and medical applications.

For robotics, especially industrial applications, it is crucial to reactively plan safe motions through efficient algorithms. Planning is more powerful in the configuration space than the task space. However, for robots with many degrees of freedom, this is challenging and computationally expensive. Sophisticated techniques for motion planning such as the Wavefront algorithm are limited by the high dimensionality of the configuration space, especially for robots with many degrees of freedom. For a neural implementation of the Wavefront algorithm in the configuration space, neurons represent discrete configurations and synapses are used for path planning. In order to decrease the complexity, we reduce the search space by pruning superfluous neurons and synapses. We present different models of self-organizing neural networks for this reduction. The approach takes real-life human motion data as input and creates a representation with reduced dimension. We compare six different neural network models and adapt the Wavefront algorithm to the different structures of the reduced output spaces. The method is backed up by an extensive evaluation of the reduced spaces, including their suitability for path planning by the Wavefront algorithm.

Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001655 Horizon 2020 Framework Programme http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100010661 Horizon 2020 http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100007601