Project acronym VEWA
Project Ve-Wa:Vegetation effects on water flow and mixing in high-latitude ecosystems–Capability of headwater catchments to mediate potential climate change
Researcher (PI) Doerthe Tetzlaff
Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), PE10, ERC-2013-StG
Summary "Our ability to predict consequences of climate change on the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of water resources in high-latitude uplands is a formidable challenge. These regions are highly sensitive to climate induced changes as small differences in temperature determine the status of frozen ground, the state of precipitation, and the magnitude and timing of snow accumulation and melt. Recent findings in mid-latitude regions suggest that there exist “two water worlds” – mobile water expressed in the stream and tightly bound water represented by plant water – which means that a substantial proportion of precipitation that infiltrates the soils becomes isolated from discharge to the streams, indicating that the composition of stream water alone is insufficient to understand routing and transit times of water in catchments. These findings challenge the core assumptions in our perceptual models of how we think biophysical systems work and how we make predictions of water partitioning of how inputs of water are evaporated, stored and reach the streams. High-latitude headwater catchments are characterised by lower evapotranspiration, consequent lower soil moisture deficits and different seasonality than mid-latitude sites. This interdisciplinary proposed project will address novel questions on vegetation-water linkages by using isotopic tracers in different waters as ""fingerprints"" across different spatial scales along a climate gradient as a precursor to understand future response to change in high-latitude upland catchments. The proposed project will – for the first time - examine the mechanisms of water storage, transmission and release and possible implications of climate change in high-latitude ecosystems along a cross-regional transect. Such geographically extensive comparison has never been conducted in these environments. This allows the consistency of processes and drivers to be assessed across broad spatial scales."
Summary
"Our ability to predict consequences of climate change on the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of water resources in high-latitude uplands is a formidable challenge. These regions are highly sensitive to climate induced changes as small differences in temperature determine the status of frozen ground, the state of precipitation, and the magnitude and timing of snow accumulation and melt. Recent findings in mid-latitude regions suggest that there exist “two water worlds” – mobile water expressed in the stream and tightly bound water represented by plant water – which means that a substantial proportion of precipitation that infiltrates the soils becomes isolated from discharge to the streams, indicating that the composition of stream water alone is insufficient to understand routing and transit times of water in catchments. These findings challenge the core assumptions in our perceptual models of how we think biophysical systems work and how we make predictions of water partitioning of how inputs of water are evaporated, stored and reach the streams. High-latitude headwater catchments are characterised by lower evapotranspiration, consequent lower soil moisture deficits and different seasonality than mid-latitude sites. This interdisciplinary proposed project will address novel questions on vegetation-water linkages by using isotopic tracers in different waters as ""fingerprints"" across different spatial scales along a climate gradient as a precursor to understand future response to change in high-latitude upland catchments. The proposed project will – for the first time - examine the mechanisms of water storage, transmission and release and possible implications of climate change in high-latitude ecosystems along a cross-regional transect. Such geographically extensive comparison has never been conducted in these environments. This allows the consistency of processes and drivers to be assessed across broad spatial scales."
Max ERC Funding
1 500 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-10-01, End date: 2018-09-30
Project acronym VR3PP
Project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic
Researcher (PI) Christos Lynteris
Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2013-StG
Summary The project will investigate how the emergence of photography as a new technology played a pivotal role in the wider acceptance of bacteriological explanations of pestilence in the course of the third plague pandemic (1855-1959) and how it transformed public consciousness of infectious disease, hygiene, and the role of international cooperation in the protection of public health, by establishing plague as a paradigmatic agent of death and disorder in the modern age, whilst, at the same time, opening up an era where the meaning of health emergencies is actively and publically negotiated on a cross-cultural global basis. The project will collect and analyse for the first time all visual documents of the third plague pandemic, which broke out in 1855 in Southwest China and raged across the globe until 1959, causing the death of approximately 12 million people. The project’s aim is to engage in a historical and anthropological analysis of this global network of visual representations, underlining how it played a crucial role in the negotiation of geopolitical, colonial and biopolitical relations at the turn of the 20th century, with great bearing on public health consciousness and the social imagination of a new era of globalised hygienic modernity. Research will focus on four regions: China and Japan; India; Africa; South and North America, the first investigated by the Principal Investigator, while the rest being allocated to 3 postdoctoral researchers, all employed full-time in the project. While investigating the visual record of plague in their respective regions, researchers will engage in a collaborative and interdisciplinary analysis of the entangled history of the visual representation of the third pandemic, taking as a common analytical ground 4 different but vitally interlinked aspects of the visual representation of the pandemic: a) the built environment; b) civil disturbance and public order; c) death, corpses and burial; d) race, class and discrimination.
Summary
The project will investigate how the emergence of photography as a new technology played a pivotal role in the wider acceptance of bacteriological explanations of pestilence in the course of the third plague pandemic (1855-1959) and how it transformed public consciousness of infectious disease, hygiene, and the role of international cooperation in the protection of public health, by establishing plague as a paradigmatic agent of death and disorder in the modern age, whilst, at the same time, opening up an era where the meaning of health emergencies is actively and publically negotiated on a cross-cultural global basis. The project will collect and analyse for the first time all visual documents of the third plague pandemic, which broke out in 1855 in Southwest China and raged across the globe until 1959, causing the death of approximately 12 million people. The project’s aim is to engage in a historical and anthropological analysis of this global network of visual representations, underlining how it played a crucial role in the negotiation of geopolitical, colonial and biopolitical relations at the turn of the 20th century, with great bearing on public health consciousness and the social imagination of a new era of globalised hygienic modernity. Research will focus on four regions: China and Japan; India; Africa; South and North America, the first investigated by the Principal Investigator, while the rest being allocated to 3 postdoctoral researchers, all employed full-time in the project. While investigating the visual record of plague in their respective regions, researchers will engage in a collaborative and interdisciplinary analysis of the entangled history of the visual representation of the third pandemic, taking as a common analytical ground 4 different but vitally interlinked aspects of the visual representation of the pandemic: a) the built environment; b) civil disturbance and public order; c) death, corpses and burial; d) race, class and discrimination.
Max ERC Funding
1 494 263 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-10-01, End date: 2018-09-30
Project acronym WALLXBIRGEOM
Project Wall-crossing and Birational Geometry
Researcher (PI) Arend Bayer
Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), PE1, ERC-2013-StG
Summary We will use modern techniques in algebraic geometry, originating from string theory and mirror symmetry, to study fundamental problems of classical flavour. More concretely, we apply wall-crossing in the derived category to the birational geometry of moduli spaces.
Bridgeland stability is a notion of stability for complexes in the derived category. Wall-crossing describes how moduli spaces of stable complexes change under deformation of the stability condition, often via a birational surgery occurring in its minimal model program (MMP). This relates wall-crossing to the most basic question of algebraic geometry, the classification of algebraic varieties.
Our previous results additionally provide a very direct connection between Bridgeland stability conditions and positivity of divisors, the main tool of modern birational geometry. This makes the above link significantly more effective, precise and useful. We will exploit this in the following long-term projects:
1. Prove a Bogomolov-Gieseker type inequality for threefolds that we conjectured previously. This would provide a solution in dimension three to well-known open problems of seemingly completely different nature: the existence of Bridgeland stability conditions, Fujita's conjecture on very ampleness of adjoint line bundles, and projective normality of toric varieties.
2. Study the birational geometry of moduli space of sheaves via wall-crossing, adding more geometric meaning to their MMP.
3. Prove that the MMP for local Calabi-Yau threefolds is completely induced by deformation of Bridgeland stability conditions. The motivation is a derived version of the Kawamata-Morrison cone conjecture, classical questions on Chern classes of stable bundles, and mirror symmetry.
4. Answer major open questions on the birational geometry of the moduli space of genus zero curves (for example, the F-conjecture) using exceptional collections in the derived category and wall-crossing.
Summary
We will use modern techniques in algebraic geometry, originating from string theory and mirror symmetry, to study fundamental problems of classical flavour. More concretely, we apply wall-crossing in the derived category to the birational geometry of moduli spaces.
Bridgeland stability is a notion of stability for complexes in the derived category. Wall-crossing describes how moduli spaces of stable complexes change under deformation of the stability condition, often via a birational surgery occurring in its minimal model program (MMP). This relates wall-crossing to the most basic question of algebraic geometry, the classification of algebraic varieties.
Our previous results additionally provide a very direct connection between Bridgeland stability conditions and positivity of divisors, the main tool of modern birational geometry. This makes the above link significantly more effective, precise and useful. We will exploit this in the following long-term projects:
1. Prove a Bogomolov-Gieseker type inequality for threefolds that we conjectured previously. This would provide a solution in dimension three to well-known open problems of seemingly completely different nature: the existence of Bridgeland stability conditions, Fujita's conjecture on very ampleness of adjoint line bundles, and projective normality of toric varieties.
2. Study the birational geometry of moduli space of sheaves via wall-crossing, adding more geometric meaning to their MMP.
3. Prove that the MMP for local Calabi-Yau threefolds is completely induced by deformation of Bridgeland stability conditions. The motivation is a derived version of the Kawamata-Morrison cone conjecture, classical questions on Chern classes of stable bundles, and mirror symmetry.
4. Answer major open questions on the birational geometry of the moduli space of genus zero curves (for example, the F-conjecture) using exceptional collections in the derived category and wall-crossing.
Max ERC Funding
1 282 912 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-12-01, End date: 2018-11-30
Project acronym WAROFWORDS
Project A War of Words: What Ancient Manchurian History Does to Korea and China Today
Researcher (PI) Remco Breuker
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2013-StG
Summary The past is not past. Ancient history can influence the present day, affecting diplomatic and economic ties between states, and galvanizing public discourse and cultural expression. Since 2003, South Korea and China have been embroiled in a territorial dispute - over ancient states that ceased to exist as such over a millennium ago, in then Manchuria. Both sides have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in establishing the legitimacy of their claims, subsidizing academic research and publicity campaigns. Strategically positioned in the middle lies North Korea, its roots extending deeply into Manchurian history, and the object of Chinese strategic interests. The confrontation has appealed to the popular imagination in both countries. Amateur historians, artists, and film makers have voiced their opinions in writing, art, movies, and TV, in traditional and new (online) media. Why does the past elicit this intense activity in the present? What does the past mean for the present, and what does it do to it?
A WAR OF WORDS will engage this complex of Chinese claims to Manchu-Korean ancient history, South Korean reactions, public discourse and cultural expression in both states, and the role of North Korea. It will approach these issues from an interdisciplinary angle, as an interconnected whole of contemporary national interests, strategic visions for the future of Northeast Asia, revisionist ancient history, and notions of national identity. It will critically review historiography of Manchuria through the ages; chart policy-driven uses and abuses of history in academia and the public domain in the Koreas and China; and complement and challenge habitual IR and security studies perspectives on Northeast Asia, particularly North Korea, by foregrounding ancient Manchurian history and its politico-socio-cultural manifestations in the present. As such, it will radically alter our understanding of a region of tremendous geopolitical, economic, and cultural importance.
Summary
The past is not past. Ancient history can influence the present day, affecting diplomatic and economic ties between states, and galvanizing public discourse and cultural expression. Since 2003, South Korea and China have been embroiled in a territorial dispute - over ancient states that ceased to exist as such over a millennium ago, in then Manchuria. Both sides have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in establishing the legitimacy of their claims, subsidizing academic research and publicity campaigns. Strategically positioned in the middle lies North Korea, its roots extending deeply into Manchurian history, and the object of Chinese strategic interests. The confrontation has appealed to the popular imagination in both countries. Amateur historians, artists, and film makers have voiced their opinions in writing, art, movies, and TV, in traditional and new (online) media. Why does the past elicit this intense activity in the present? What does the past mean for the present, and what does it do to it?
A WAR OF WORDS will engage this complex of Chinese claims to Manchu-Korean ancient history, South Korean reactions, public discourse and cultural expression in both states, and the role of North Korea. It will approach these issues from an interdisciplinary angle, as an interconnected whole of contemporary national interests, strategic visions for the future of Northeast Asia, revisionist ancient history, and notions of national identity. It will critically review historiography of Manchuria through the ages; chart policy-driven uses and abuses of history in academia and the public domain in the Koreas and China; and complement and challenge habitual IR and security studies perspectives on Northeast Asia, particularly North Korea, by foregrounding ancient Manchurian history and its politico-socio-cultural manifestations in the present. As such, it will radically alter our understanding of a region of tremendous geopolitical, economic, and cultural importance.
Max ERC Funding
1 499 955 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-10-01, End date: 2018-09-30
