Engineering Ecosystem Resilience
Living organisms underpin our food, climate stability, and materials – ecological collapse threatens the foundations of civilisation. By pairing advanced monitoring with resilience-boosting interventions, we could halt biodiversity loss and enable people and nature to thrive.
Opportunity seeds
Outside the scope of programmes and with budgets of up to £500k, these opportunity seeds support ambitious research aligned to the Engineering Ecosystem Resilience opportunity space.
From advanced ecosystem sensing and nature-based interventions to autonomous robotics and molecular tools for conservation, we're funding an array of projects across individual research teams, universities and start ups to maximise the chance of breakthroughs.
Predictive foundational AI for ecosystem resilience forecasting
Alice Trevail, University of Exeter
Mossthane: a naturebased biofilter for reducing riverine CH₄ emissions
Mike Hinchliffe, Edinburgh Napier University
Combatting rhododendron using native natural enemies
Benjamin Jarrett, Bangor University
3DTreePrint: Closed-loop resilience monitoring with scalable, repeatable, low-cost 3D structure mapping
Martin Mokroš, University College London (UCL)
PRIZM: Pipeline robot intervention to prevent the spread of invasive zebra mussels
George Jackson-Mills + Alison Dunn, University of Leeds
The Internet of Birds
Tonya Lander + Chris Stevens, University of Oxford
Genetic control by transcription factor engineering: A broadly applicable tool for ecosystem science and species conservation
Florian Hollfelder + Timo Kohler, University of Cambridge
The Ecological Stethoscope: A multi-modal electromagnetic bio-scanner for quantifying wildlife resilience
Amir Patel, University College London (UCL)
Autonomous subsurface engineering of resilient pollinator ecosystems
Emily Russell + Chris Vernall, V2 Studios + Future Natural
Extrachromosomal inheritance for genetic control of invasive invertebrates
Luke Alphey, University of York
ARISE: Accelerating reintroduction of ecosystem-engineering ant colonies with embodied AI
Elva Robinson + Radu Calinescu, University of York
Developing a machine learning method to spatially optimise habitats for genetic diversity
Wolfram Moebius, University of Exeter
Developing guided magnetobiotics for next-generation ecosystem interventions
Joe Smith, University of Sheffield
AMBIANCE: Autonomous marine biodiversity assessment for nature conservation and ecosystem resilience
Loïc Van Audenhaege, National Oceanography Centre