Case Studies

Microbes play a wide variety of essential roles in keeping our guts healthy and in supporting food and agriculture production. Conversely, some microbial populations can cause serious disease, as foodborne pathogens or infectious agents of food-producing animals and crops.

Plant pests and pathogens can have a devastating impact not only on plant hosts but also the wider biodiversity that use the infected plant (e.g., for food, breeding and shelter).

The Tarland Burn Catchment (~70 km²) has been studied since the year 2000 making it one of the longest running comprehensive catchment management case studies in the UK.

Increasingly trees are being promoted as a means to increase carbon storage and hence off-set climate change.

In 2020, researchers and practitioners collaborated to better understand how inclusive growth can be conceptualised and measured across a large, diverse and predominantly rural region in the north and west of Scotland.

Healthy, intact floodplains play an important role in mitigating extremes of water availability (droughts and floods) expected under climate change. Compared to other ecosystems, intact floodplains also support a disproportionately high biodiversity.

The climate emergency presents a double challenge for public bodies as they reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and learn to adapt to the already changing climate.

In an ever-changing world, it is essential that individuals are able to access, and act upon, the most relevant information and advice, and no more so than in agriculture.

Streams and rivers in farmland areas often have a degraded morphology due to straightening and run-off pollution (inputs of fine sediment, < 2 mm particle size diameter).

A SEFARI Gateway-funded Specialist Advisory Group brought together a broad range of expertise across key industry stakeholders, Government Policy Leads and relevant SEFARI researchers to discuss livestock health and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), to prioritise health conditions that have the greatest impact on emis

The importance of ecosystems and biodiversity to human well-being is now well established as they provide benefits such as timber, pollination and coastal protection. 

The Scottish Government has committed to legally binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2045. This will require a reduction across all sectors of the economy.

Scotland has ambitious strategies for biodiversity protection and climate action with the intention of achieving a greener, fairer and just future.

Combining local, contextualised knowledge with generalised, scientific knowledge is seen as best practice in decision making for biodiversity management. However, there is the potential for conflict if these two knowledges do not concur.

Soil biodiversity is critical to ecosystem functioning, but our understanding of the richness and distribution of soil organisms lags far behind that of biodiversity above ground.

A SEFARI Specialist Advisory Group was established in response to concerns from livestock farmers and agro-ecologists about the adverse environmental impacts of some frontline livestock worming treatments, which reach the environment either in the dung/urine of treated animals or as a result of inappropriate disposa

Improvements in the health and productivity of livestock is key for the future sustainability of farming.

The way we manage land and plan land-use change plays an integral role in the efforts for meeting climatic targets and for mitigating and adapting to climate change impacts.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have been defined many times, but these definitions can be summarised as “solutions to societal challenges that are inspired and supported by nature”.

This preliminary research explored food and drink innovation and clustering in Scotland’s Highlands and Islands and reviewed potential opportunities for engagement with partners in the Arctic region.