The overall interest of this research is to strengthen the adaptive capacity and food security of rural communities in Northern Nigeria through comparative vulnerability assessment of the dryland farmers, pastoralists and artisanal fisherfolk in Kebbi State, with a view to manage the effect of climate change on their livelihoods and their general wellbeing. The research will also establish a model to integrate the indigenous knowledge (adaptation strategies), government policies, national /local and international interventions as well as institutional arrangements on the future of adaptive capacity of strategies of climate change on food security and livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa.

Biologists observe that fungi and oomycete suffer from viral infections. These Viruses of Filamentous Organisms (VFOs) can disarm and reduce fungal and oomycete pathogens' ability to infect plants (hypovirulence). This provides biologists with a strategy to control these pathogens with viruses as biocontrol agents.

This project aims to develop pipelines to characterise viral diversity in important plant pathogens (Fusarium, Alternaria and Phytophthora genera) from publicly available sequence repositories. Viral distribution among these groups will be associated with high-resolution phylogenetics to identify associations between fungal taxa and viral distribution. 

The study of viral distribution amongst fungal taxa, alongside the increased availability of genomic data, offers new opportunities to investigate the role of Vegetative Compatibility Groups (VCGs) as barriers to viral transfer and the role of genomic defence mechanisms to limit viral and transposon proliferation in fungal genomes.

By achieving these objectives, this work will  define new criteria that candidate mycoviruses will have to pass to be successful biological control agents. Study of VFOs and the effects on their filamentous hosts may also present biologists with additional uses, such as providing a tool to study the mechanisms that control pathogenicity in filamentous organisms and VFOs ability to serve as heterologous vectors.

Keywords: Mycovirus, Virology, Viral Diversity, Fungi

Allan is broadly interested in the use of biological markers to understand single and multi-species dynamics.

African giant pouched rats are one of the world’s largest species of rodents and have considerable socio-economic importance as a source of bushmeat, a pest in agriculture, zoonotic disease reservoir and for their use in biosensor programmes to detect landmines and diseases such as tuberculosis.

Among other aims, Allan intends to use field-based and molecular techniques to profile and characterize their ability as biosensors for captive breeding programmes and conservation management.

This research study is within the Food and Markets Department and there is an opportunity of spreading the research studies between the post-harvest and the chemical ecology groups at NRI where studies will concentrate on characterising the volatile signatures associated with disease development in apple caused by the fungal pathogen Neonectria ditissima. This will be followed by more detailed genetic analysis of disease progression at NIAB-EMR where Asoo will be able to learn classical plant pathology techniques blended with advanced genetic analysis identifying potential genes of interest that might confer resistance to important orchard borne infections such as Neonectria spp. It is hoped that potential gene markers can be identified that may contribute to selection of new breeding material with improved resistance to the infection both in the field and infections of stored fruit.

I aim to explore the linkages of climate change, conflict and food security through an in-depth qualitative study of Karamoja, a pastoral and politically marginalised area of Uganda that has suffered conflicts between pastoralists and between pastoralists and the Ugandan state. Particular attention will be paid to the experiences and perceptions of pastoralists and their neighbours.  

Primary research questions will include the following:

• How important are climate change/climate variability and violent conflict within the risk perceptions of the case-study populations, female and male?
• What causal connections are made by pastoralists and their neighbours between climate change/climate variability, violent conflict, and other livelihood stressors?
• To the extent that conflict is seen as a major threat, what strategies are proposed by pastoralists and their neighbours for managing it?
• What qualitative and participatory methodologies are useful in investigating such potential linkages?"
• What are the implications of the findings for larger-scale research initiatives, and for policy-making?

The research is expected to unearth the interrelations among climate change, violent conflict and food security. Hence, help Governments and Academia in policy formulation and informed decision making on how to manage climate change related conflicts in pastoral settings through an integrated approach

The overarching aim of this research is to identify the key pollinators of beans and the margin flowers on which they forage. This action will evaluate the impact of different agrisystems, field margins and non-crop habitat on ecosystem services,  especially pollination services, for smallholder bean-maize farming systems at multiple scales and determine additionally the role of trees as components of bean system landscapes and as pollinator forage and refuge. The work also entails the development of predictive tools to evaluate landscape traits for promoting pollination ecosystem services. The afore-mentioned objectives are being addressed through landscape and farm-scale assessments of floral resources and refuge for beneficial insects, observation and monitoring of pollen deposition by specific pollinators and interactions between these pollinators and non-crop flowers, DNA sequencing, chemical analysis and high resolution spatial analysis.

This work will result in the further enhancement of existing methods of maximising on and scaling up ecosystem services, especially pollination services, for increased agricultural yields. This will, in turn, bring to smallholder farming communities food and nutrition security, surplus and additional income from its sale, access to other necessities of life and ultimately incentivise them to conserve the biodiversity that facilitates these outcomes.

The declining population of both managed and wild bees have prompted the need to find and implement conservation measures to reduce pollinator declines. Conservation strategies aim to rebuild natural populations by restoring ecosystems through their implementation and natural resources management. There are many conservation strategies intended to help pollinators. However, we do not know how successful the strategies and management interventions for pollinators are.

Some pollinators’ physical or ecological traits confer higher robustness against habitat changes, while others have traits that render them more sensitive. Similarly, we predict that some physical or ecological traits in different species of wild bees will influence their likelihood of responding to conservation and habitat restoration. Diana is using a meta-analysis to synthesise the literature on wild bee traits and response to conservation strategies,

This will lead into a development of habitat suitability indices for different bee groups and the creation of a predictive model to understand the landscape-scale impacts of conservation measures on wild bee populations. Part of the research will be developed in Scotland within an area defined by the Balruddery Catchment. This research will intend to guide future restoration programs to consider the needs of wild bees rather than the botanically focus endpoint.

In February 2020, he joined NRI as a PhD student at the University of Greenwich. Having over five years of relevant experience in market and industry, he is now seeking to boost the innovative practical approaches to tackle the real engineering barriers on reaching sustainable food security in developing countries.

Harrison’s research aims to understand what impacts climate-adapted rice cultivation, called The System of Rice Intensification (SRI), may have on Anopheles mosquitoes, the vectors of malaria, with respect to their ecology and biology.

Water in rice fields can provide aquatic habitats for these mosquitoes, and this project will focus on exploring the abiotic and biotic factors that may make SRI more or less suitable for the development of malaria mosquitoes.

In malaria endemic countries such as Tanzania, where field research will take place, rice cultivation has already been linked to ecological changes in vector populations, however the impact on malaria burden is unclear. Tanzania has and plans to continue increasing rice production to meet a growing consumer demand. Climate adapted practices such as SRI are being promoted to rice farmers in efforts to increase yields per unit area, while saving water and reducing agricultural inputs.

This research will help to inform agricultural practice in ways that mitigate increased production of mosquitoes, especially in resource-poor communities that depend on rice as a commodity but may be disproportionately affected by malaria.

The PhD research will explore: (i) through a socio-psychological framework/lens factors driving small-scale fishers’ strategies to reduce Postharvest Losses (PHL) in Lake Malawi and; (ii) bioeconomic modelling of the value chain (e.g. quantifying returns/losses etc. at various stages of the value chain).