VALOR is built around stakeholder engagement at both the regional level through our focal regions and the international level through our steering committee – a group of end users who have helped develop and refine the project from the outset and who are committing in-kind or subcontracted time to the project. VALOR will continue to engage with these actors throughout the project (WP1) while conducting high-quality quantitative and qualitative research over four empirical work packages (WP2, WP3, WP4, WP5). The information synthesised from this will then be used to explore the resilience of pollinators and pollination service benefits under future scenarios (WP6) and develop a series of suitable tools for engaging actors with pollinator management (WP7) (Fig. 2).

Figure 2.  

VALOR Project structure*1.

WP1: Multi-Actor engagement and co-development (Lead: SLU, Co-lead: UREAD)

Work Package 1 is an overarching set of tasks that underpin the other work packages and facilitate the integration of focal region and international stakeholders into the multi-actor process. WP1 will build on stakeholder mapping conducted under related projects (e.g., Safeguard, PoshBee) to conduct discourse analysis with key EU actors to understand the role of pollinators and knowledge about pollinators in policy formation and governance (Tasks 1.1 and 1.2). Building from this, we will engage our steering committee and other stakeholders from within and beyond our focal regions in a series of workshops and interviews to

1. co-develop pollinator-relevant expansions to the widely used UNSSP scenario narratives in order to build a sense of ownership and meaningful basis for decision making (Task 1.3),
2. identify needs and co-design a series of user facing tools developed within the project (Task 1.4).

Finally, throughout the project, this work package will have a regular forum for partners to meet and gather input and feedback from stakeholders within the focal regions and beyond, to allow for the joint construction of demonstration case studies (Task 1.5). The work package will produce a series of user-facing reports, written in non-technical language that will serve as a backbone for WP6 and WP7, and provide a template for future stakeholder co-development activities around biodiversity and ecosystem services (Table 2).

WP2: Synthesising knowledge on the role and status of pollination services (Lead: UFR, Co-lead: UNE & ULUND)

Work Package 2 will comprehensively synthesise knowledge on the key animal pollinators and pollination service benefits from pollinated plants through a series of in-depth data syntheses. First, Task 2.1 will update and extend the seminal work of Klein et al (2007), which defined the dependence of globally important crops with fifteen years of updated primary literature. This will allow us to produce a definitive, open-access database of animal pollination influences on yield, quality, nutrition and, ultimately, economic output of cultivated crops within and beyond Europe. Task 2.2 will, for the first time, bring together and catalogue the evidence for cultural values of pollinators and their indirect role in supporting other ecosystem services such as soil quality (via legumes such as clovers) or erosion control through pollinated plants. Task 2.3 will integrate existing datasets from published sources (e.g. GHISBAIN et al. 2023) and repositories (e.g. GBIF – Borges et al. 2022) with pollinator Red Lists to assess the vulnerability of crop and non-crop pollination service links in different biogeographic regions, including the unique assemblages in EU overseas territories. Building on these outputs, Task 2.4 will then synthesise evidence to identify the key species responsible for driving pollination services to major crop and non-crop plants across Europe, including European Overseas territories. Finally, Task 2.5 will synthesise suitable indicator databases to outline data workflows for improved natural capital modelling that builds on current and upcoming EU datasets. The outcomes of this work package will provide key data both to the project but also to wider actors through a series of curated open-access databases and outlines of knowledge needs.

WP3: Pollinator Dependencies of Natural Ecosystems (Lead: CSIC, Co-lead: WU)

Work Package 3 combines high-quality ecological field research and modelling to extend our knowledge of the roles of pollinators in maintaining interconnected natural and human-modified ecosystems and the cascading impacts that disruptions to plant-pollinator networks will have on ecosystem service provision. In each focal area, the work package will undertake highly detailed field ecological research to explore the responses of key wild plants in each focal region to variations in pollination services (Task 3.1), and assess plant-pollinator and food web network mapping to understand the role of pollinators in maintaining functional and stable ecological networks at the landscape level (Task 3.2). These data, alongside data collected from open datasets and other current and past research projects (e.g., Horizon 2020 Safeguard and Horizon Europe RestPoll) will be used to: improve upon widely used process based modelling of pollinator populations within the wider landscape (Task 3.3), model the impacts of known pressures on the persistence of plant-pollinator interaction networks across habitats (Task 3.4) and spatially model the vulnerability of European ecosystems, including culturally significant landscapes, to pollinator losses (Task 3.5). The tasks in this work package will address significant knowledge gaps in understanding of the functional role of pollinators in wider interconnected ecosystems, identify key pollinator assemblages, and produce crucial ecological models that can directly inform other work within the project and directly address stakeholder needs, such as providing information on local habitat vulnerabilities or informing EU Nature Restoration strategies.

WP4: Local scale economic and social dependences (Lead: BOKU, Co-Lead: UJ)

VALOR Work Package 4 will use methods from multiple disciplines to extend our understanding of the use and non- use benefits of pollination services at a local scale, from simple abstract measures of monetary benefits to fields, to more meaningful measures of farm business profitability and local cultural values. Our work will combine quantitative agronomic modelling to address long-standing questions about the relationships between pollinator visitation and crop yield reactive to other inputs (Task 4.1) with detailed surveys of typical farm business activity, integrating these into field and activity-based models of farm profitability (Task 4.2). This information will then be combined with farm-scale multi-input production function models (Task 4.3) to upscale these outputs and assess the relative resilience of farms to pollination service shifts in the short and long term across landscapes. These economic tasks will be complemented with discourse-focused workshops and interviews, looking into co-develop an understanding of the direct and indirect cultural values of stakeholders that engage with the landscapes in the focal regions (Task 4.4). The outcomes of these tasks will be extended to assess the costs and benefits of co-designed land use and farm business re-orientations to respond to pollination service losses (Task 4.5). This work package will produce novel and realistic measures of the economic and non-economic values associated with pollinators, and explore how they contrast across our focal regions, as well as provide novel research into the resilience of different actors to pollination service shifts.

WP5: Dependences of value chain actors (Lead: WU, Co-Lead: UH)

Work Package 5 will expand the knowledge of the economic and nutritional impacts of animal pollinators on actors throughout wider value chains through new primary data and modelling along a chain of actors. The work package will span food, feed, material, energy and medicinal crops, beginning with those within our focal regions but also including major global commodity crops (e.g., coffee, palm, soy) that are key for these sectors in Europe. We will begin with an exploration of the structure of the value chains, through collaboration with our stakeholder steering committee members, and the consequent (perceived) economic impacts of pollinator losses on the actors within these chains (Task 5.1). We will then explore costs and impacts of strategies for different actors within these value chains to build resilience to pollinator losses through quantitative economic modelling and interviews with our steering committee (Task 5.2). In parallel, VALOR will also examine the impacts of global pollinator shocks on the volume and value of crop trade through established global trade models to identify countries where pollinator shocks could pose a significant risk to European agrifood systems (Task 5.3). Finally, throughout the project, we will conduct a comprehensive analysis of the impacts that pollinator loss - if unmitigated - will have upon the affordability and availability of nutritious foods to different people across Europe and the environmental impact this may have, using publicly available dietary and environmental impact databases (Task 5.4). The outcomes of this work package will directly link pollinators to human health, push the boundaries of economic research into biodiversity loss on food system resilience, and substantially expand our outreach and tool development activities by providing value chain case studies that are relevant to a wider range of business, policy and public health actors.

WP6: Forecasting and enhancing resilience of society and pollinators under changing future conditions (Lead: ULUND, co-lead: SLU)

Work Package 6 will combine ecological-economic modelling with scenario narratives to analyse the multidimensional impacts of different mechanisms, particularly policy instruments, that actors can employ to reduce and reverse the pressures on pollinators (including climate change) and the effects this has on their resilience to pollinator shifts. The work in WP6 is underpinned by the expanded UNSSP scenarios co-developed with stakeholders (WP1) and supplemented with information on the relative impacts of pressures and drivers on pollinators from other WPs and the EU Ecosystem Assessment (Maes et al. 2020). The work package contains four interrelated tasks: First, Task 6.1 will use econometric analysis of publicly available data to identify and explore how drivers of change in land use affect the relative pressures on pollinators at a European scale. Task 6.2 will then develop ecological- economic models of the focal regions based on agricultural data and production functions from WP4 to explore the impacts that the drivers of change and the scenario narratives are likely to have on land use within the VALOR focal regions based on farmers’ optimising behaviour. Task 6.3 will then explore the impacts that these elaborated scenarios will have on the focal regions (based on Task 6.2) and beyond by using the models and outcomes from WP3 (pollinator interactions, plant responses), WP4 (pollination services to crops, farm business performance, cultural values) and WP5 (value chain impacts, trade and nutrition). Task 6.4 will then explore the optimal policy responses to increase resilience of pollinators to future changes, and mitigate potential losses, drawing on lessons from WP3, WP4 and WP5. This work package will coalesce the outcomes of the other work within VALOR to produce cutting- edge assessments of how drivers translate to pressures and the subsequent effects on the status of pollinators, the impacts on human society, as well as the ideal responses to handle these changes. The outcomes, in addition to world-leading research papers, will form a significant aspect of our dissemination activities, inviting end users to explore our scenarios and demonstrating the strength of our interdisciplinary, systems-based approach.

WP7: Co-developed tools for expanded engagement and interaction (Lead: PENSOFT, Co-lead: UNEP-WCMC)

A key component of VALOR’s ambition is to substantially improve the availability, accessibility and accuracy of resources for assessing the pollination-related dependencies and impacts of policy, the public and businesses of all sizes and sectors to relevant actors. Work Package 7 will undertake this through a series of new or expanded tools, co-developed through engagement with WP1, that is designed to directly address the needs of different actors at the scale of regions, the EU, and globally. Task 7.1 will synthesise the results of the project to identify appropriate metrics and guidelines for incorporating pollinators into business and policy decisions (e.g., Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) accounting frameworks). In Task 7.2, we will integrate our findings into an existing, widely used decision support tool for financial institutions, businesses, and policymakers at all levels (ENCORE), alongside other linked tools as appropriate, that will greatly improve the details of risks and advice on mitigation that are provided to end users. Task 7.3 will build a new tool for farmers, land managers and NGOs to examine the spatial impacts of landscape decisions on pollinators, building on the existing INCA maps of pollinator natural capital. Task 7.4 will collect the different methods and models developed within the project and refine them into an accessible handbook that will allow interested users from across sectors, with little expertise in pollinators, to generate the data necessary for the models we will make freely available from the project, allowing them to conduct their own custom-made case studies. Finally, Task 7.5 will collect key information from throughout the project and make it available through an expansion of the Safeguard project’s SafeHub online portal, illustrating our approach with a series of public-facing case studies from our focal regions. The outputs of this work package will form the core of our dissemination activities and VALOR’s lasting legacy outside of the research community.

WP8: Project Management and Impact (Lead: UREAD, co-lead: PENSOFT)

Work Package 8 will focus on the coordination of the project and its dissemination and engagement activities. The project will be coordinated by UREAD, who are experienced with international collaborations and previous EU research projects. The work package will maintain the coordination between VALOR and the other project funded through the call, as well as other related research projects (e.g., RestPoll, SHOWCASE) and other international research organisations (e.g., FAO, IPBES, IPCC). The work package will be supported by PENSOFT, who are very experienced in project branding, outreach and dissemination and will coordinate the wider outreach activities of the project. Task 8.1 will establish the project coordination standard operating procedures, which will include the gender action plan and three quality assurance mechanisms to support effective collaboration with focal region stakeholders, and delivery and exploitation of the key outcomes. Task 8.2 will develop a recognisable project visual identity, including a variety of promotional materials and a dedicated website. Task 8.3 will develop and implement a Data Management following FAIR data principles for the collection, storage, evaluation and exploitation of the data that will be collected during and after the project. Task 8.4 will develop a detailed PEDR that will guide all communication and dissemination activities of the project and support the successful exploitation of VALOR outcomes. Task 8.5 will ensure the ongoing communication & dissemination of project findings to relevant end users, throughout and beyond VALOR’s duration. Task 8.6 will identify and plan collaboration pathways with existing projects, networks, programmes and initiatives pollinators, agricultural sustainability and food systems.

WP9: Research ethics (Lead: UREAD)

Work Package 9 will ensure compliance with research ethics and GDPR regulations. We will manage this through developing a set of guidelines early in the project that will support the consistent collection of data from human subjects and the lethal trapping of wild insects under FAIR principles (Task 9.1). This will be managed by UREAD with the support of an independent ethics advisor who will report to the EU on a regular basis.

Multi-actor approach

VALOR is a fundamentally multi-actor project, developed by a collaboration of Universities, public research institutions (CSIC), NGOs (ELO, UNEP-WCMC, which works in collaboration with the UN Environment Programme) and science communication experts (PENSOFT), all of whom will have a leading role in multiple tasks, and the VALOR steering committee, a group of policy makers, NGOs and businesses from multiple sectors who have committed in kind time and data access in order to directly co-develop tasks in the project, from data to outputs (notably Task 3.2, Task 5.1) and will act as early adopters of our findings. Our project has been co-designed through over 20 open meetings, workshops and individual one-to-one consultations with end users, including international research, businesses and policy actors, and trusted local collaborators (focal region stakeholders). These focal region stakeholders (Fig. 3) are already engaged in adjacent projects, where they are co-designing and developing research with the project team. VALOR builds upon these collaborations to address stakeholder-identified key challenges around the dependence of these areas on pollinators, and a dedicated task will ensure consistent engagement throughout the project (Task 1.5). Our approach will not only add further value to these existing activities and allow us to leverage their extended networks to further our multi-actor community, but will maximise impact by building greater trust and collaboration with these actors in the long term. These actors will be engaged in the project to co-develop economic and social science research, responses to pollinator declines and narrative demonstration case studies to showcase our approach and encourage other actors to adopt our methods and models when conducting their own investigation into the values of pollinators.

Figure 3.  

VALOR's multi-actor community.

VALOR has specific tasks (WP1, T8.1, T8.6) to drive and expand our multi-actor and co-development activities that draw upon, and feed into, the other WPs. We will work with these actors throughout the project to

1. determine key plants and crops to focus our ecological, economic and social activities,
2. develop, refine and test tools,
3. review and provide feedback on our scenarios and proposed solutions to maximise the quality, relevance and impact of the project’s outcome (Table 3).

VALOR partners have coordinated or led work packages in several key research projects into pressures on pollinators (e.g, PoshBee, WildPosh, PollinERA), pollinator management and restoration (RestPoll, SHOWCASE), sustainable farming (LIFT, FRUTTMAC), supply chain resilience (SURE-Farm, BATmodel), health and wellbeing (FoodSEqual, NNR2023) and tools for facilitating management change (D4AgEcol, Esmerelda). The consortium has also been heavily involved in the IPBES Assessment of Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production, the EU Red Lists of Bees and Hoverflies, the EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme, the UNEP National Ecosystem Assessment Programme and the EU Biodiversity Working Group on Pollinators. Not only will VALOR benefit from the existing engagement and outcomes of these projects (Table 4), but it will add new dimensions to their outcomes: assessing the ecological resilience of plant-pollinator networks across entire landscapes, exploring the social and economic impacts of pressures and restoration measures, expanding sustainable farming and business research to explicitly include pollinators as a risk to different sectors, and developing forecasts and insights into policy and practise oriented projects. VALOR will synthesise the evidence from these projects to identify research gaps, synergies and opportunities through active engagement (Task 8.6). In particular, VALOR has strong links with the coordinator of the BUTTERFLY project, also funded under this call and the Agri4Poll project funded under HORIZON-CL6-2024-BIODIV-01, which shares several partners.

VALOR has a specific task that will drive these collaborations (T8.6), which we envisage will take three forms: building on the legacies of past projects through the use of datasets, models and approaches. Synergies with existing projects, where VALOR focal region data, models and data products can increase the impacts of the projects and lead to joint publications. Finally, direct collaboration where VALOR will share field sites and directly use emerging data, models and outcomes from the projects to produce joint publications, impact materials and deliverables (Fig. 4).

Figure 4.  

VALOR links with other projects.

Finally, VALOR will also work with one Australian and two Chinese associate partners, who will contribute datasets (WP2) and key connections in the value chain (WP5, WP6) and in policy (WP1). These partners will leverage this collaboration to actively develop additional research that can deepen our work by adopting VALOR's approaches outside the EU. VALOR will also actively encourage collaboration with other projects as they emerge and support collaborators within our wider network in replicating our approaches or contributing data to our deliverables.

Finally, VALOR will also work with one Australian and two Chinese associate partners, who will contribute datasets (WP2) and key connections in the value chain (WP5, WP6) and in policy (WP1). These partners will leverage this collaboration to actively develop additional research that can deepen our work by adopting VALOR's approaches outside the EU. VALOR will also actively encourage collaboration with other projects as they emerge and support collaborators within our wider network in replicating our approaches or contributing data to our deliverables.

VALOR will adhere to the EU Guidelines on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Research Data. Data management policies will be developed in Task 8.3, with a deliverable on this task in Month 6, and an update in Month 42. We will generate observational ecological data from field work in the focal regions (Tenerife, Spain, Germany, Poland, Netherlands, UK, Sweden), stored as MS Excel files. We will generate text data and audio/video recordings from interviews with policymakers and value chain actors from across the EU (and in select tasks from China) and from focal region stakeholders, workshops, farmers and wider public. These will be transcribed and rendered pseudonymous before processing and publication. These activities will be subject to GDPR and local data protection law complicit ethical approval by the task lead and stored on password protected drives at by the task lead. No participants will be identifiable from the processed data. Any data that cannot be fully rendered pseudonymously will remain confidential. All other data will be generated from the synthesis of existing databases (e.g., Eurostat, INSPIRE) or literature. Model outputs will include rasterised maps of regions. The project is expected to generate ~1TB of data, mostly from maps. Upon publication, all non-confidential data and codes will be stored in FAIR online repositories (e.g., Dryad or Zendoo), with associated DOI assignment and published under open licences. UREAD and PENSOFT will assume responsibility for data management and curation. Most data will also be available via Safe-Hub for added visibility, accessibility and engagement. There are no plans for commercial exploitation of the data, although some open-licensed data will be used to generate commercial data products (ENCORE). Metadata will follow Darwin Core and Ecological Metadata Language, both standards for ecological data, and vocabularies that align with ontologies offered by INSPIRE and other open data centres. All publications will be made openly available via gold open access or suitable repositories immediately upon publication, and all partners have open access fee waiver agreements with several major publishers. Tools will be freely available via Safe-Hub and ENCORE, and, where appropriate, codes will be published on GitHub and archived in Zendoo.

VALOR is a fully interdisciplinary project with significant prominence and resources attached to both natural (WP2, WP3, WP4) and social (WP1, WP4, WP5) sciences. VALORs systems based approach spans a complete link from primary pollinator ecology and taxonomy (WP2, WP3), to agronomy (WP4), farm business economics (WP4), quantitative and qualitative social sciences (WP1, WP4), value chain and macroeconomics (WP5) and health, nutrition and life cycle modelling (WP5). All partners include either a mix of social and natural science researchers or experienced interdisciplinary researchers (including the project co-ordinator). Work Package 6 in particular is designed to support the complete integration of these different disciplines towards a single research question. Our multi-actor approach, engaging with both our steering committee and focal region stakeholders, is supported by dedicated policy (SLU, ELO, UNEP-WCMC) and business (UREAD, UNEP-WCMC) researchers.

The VALOR consortium recognises the importance of gender and gender identity in shaping research, particularly stakeholder-facing research. Failure to account for these dimensions, particularly where cultural gender norms may play a role in land management activities, can lead to biased research data and ineffective engagement activities. We will build a dedicated gender equality and diversity plan that builds upon and learns from the lessons from similar plans in other projects (e.g., RestPoll, WildPosh) and is embedded in our multi-actor approach. This will recognise the importance of intersectionality, and include dedicated attention to and reporting of gender dimensions when recruiting participants and engaging with focal region stakeholders. The project's Focal Region Management group (Task 1.5) will maintain information on the rate of engagement with female and minority gender identity actors and participants, and work with partners who are experiencing difficulties in recruiting diverse participants, and the internal review process will be used to raise issues with gender biases in data collected. All participant institutions have gender equality plans and will be expected to attend diversity and inclusion training offered by their institutions before hiring in order to promote sensitivity to these issues. Recruitment of postdoctoral researchers and PhD students will also aspire towards gender balance in the overall consortium, and female and non-binary researchers will be supported to attend training and development work, and hybrid options will be mandatory for all in-person meetings. The VALOR consortium also recognises that these issues are intersectional and will actively engage with initiatives to support researchers of minority ethnic groups, the LGBT+ community, disabilities and those who are neurodivergent. The coordinating institution, UREAD, has a number of commitments to promoting equality, including a UK Athena Swan Silver award for promoting gender equality, a race equality charter Bronze award for commitments to supporting racial diversity and is a member of the employers' network for equality and inclusion and the Business Disabilities forum.

1. Changes in EU or National level policy in agricultural, environmental, health, business and science can affect the relevance of our work to policymakers, particularly if there are significant revisions to key policies such as CAP. Our policy and practice facing work will engage with relevant policymakers and experts from the project's inception and, through WP1, be continually updated throughout the project. Our scenario (T1.3, WP6) and tool development (T1.4, WP7) activities are not linked with specific policies to ensure they are relevant to any changes. Finally, we will work with the Croatian Government (steering committee member MINGOR) to ensure that our messages are suitable for stakeholders beyond the usual Western European sphere.
2. Stakeholder fatigue presents a serious challenge to research impact. We will minimise this risk by 1) working closely with existing partners to develop our comprehensive systems based approach, 2) careful planning of all activities to minimise the time requirements for stakeholder engagement at a local level (T3.1, T3.2, T4.2, T4.4, T7.5), 3) adopting lessons from stakeholder engagement at all levels as part of the research process to ensure that they directly address their interests and needs (WP1) and, 4) quality control of impact activities (T8.1) to ensure that all outputs have a clear and easily understood message that is relevant to stakeholders can engage with. We will also engage with a number of other pollinator-focused research projects (including BUTTERFLY, the sister project to VALOR) and portals, e.g. EU Pollinator Information Hive, to develop collaborative impact activities with consistent messages that build upon and enhance one another.
3. Market shocks and changing conditions could result in significant changes in value chains and business engagement with biodiversity issues, in turn affecting our efforts to engage stakeholders and mainstream pollinators in business decisions and dietary considerations. VALOR is structured to consider both local and international markets, however the protocols for more localised tasks will be developed with local conditions in mind, notably the Canary Islands, which have a very different market structure to other focal regions. We aim to minimise this risk through collaboration with our steering committee, which represents a diverse group of businesses, and through wider business engagement (particularly by our non-academic partners UNEP-WCMC, ELO), to ensure that our impact activities, particularly relating to tools (WP7) and mainstreaming pollinators as natural capital (T2.5), are adequately covered. We will also collaborate closely with Chinese associated partners to adapt our impact activities to changing trade conditions between the EU and its largest trade partners.

As the broadest of the CDE activities, communication efforts in VALOR will start from the beginning of the project and will continue beyond its lifetime, working towards the positive societal impact of the project, i.e to expand the understanding of the role of pollinators in European Society and the Economy to foster their consideration in decision-making. To communicate its activities and results, VALOR will employ a variety of materials, formats and channels tailored to the needs of each specific target group (see Table 5). Diverse promotional materials (a corporate presentation, virtual meeting backgrounds, one-pager, poster, rollup banner, etc.) written in popular language will be created (D8.2, M6) to raise awareness of the project, and provide partners with visually impactful materials which they can distribute among their networks, use to present the project at events and meetings or share on social media.

Innovative communication formats such as podcasts or video series will be used to increase societal awareness of the importance of pollinators. The project will also distribute a bi-annual e-newsletter, which will inform stakeholders about the latest project news and progress, facilitating links and engagement with actors beyond the project itself. VALOR will also approach established contacts in a variety of large media, newsrooms and message outlets, such as partners’ newsletters and blogs, e.g. EurekAlert!, AlphaGalileo, ScienceDaily, etc. The project will embrace a mutual learning approach, encouraging partners to use their personal and institutional social media channels, as well as to reach out and seek potential knowledge exchange with organisations, networks and projects: Biodiversa+, BioAgora, EIT Food, IPBES, IPCC, GEO BON, EuropaBON, One Earth, GBIF, Safeguard, TRANSECO, MISTRA Food Futures, BATModel, SHOWCASE, RestPoll, FoodSEqual, WildPosh, PollinERA, SPRING, STING, TRANSPATH.

VALOR’s dissemination efforts will aim to make its results as easily available as possible to potential users, contributing to the project’s scientific and economic/technological impact. The project will tailor various uni- and bi-directional channels to the needs of its stakeholder groups, eliciting their expertise, knowledge, and perceptions as part of the project’s core activities. The project’s social media channels (BlueSky/Facebook and LinkedIn as a start) will be operational from the very beginning, engaging relevant stakeholders in the project’s activities, while also disseminating results as soon as they become available in order to maximise their uptake. Regular updates will also be shared via VALOR’s website, which will serve as a central dissemination tool, storing project outputs such as deliverables and publications, as well as providing access to project events, policy briefs, promotional materials, etc. These will also be conveyed to DG-Environment for hosting on the EU Pollinator Information Hive. Moreover, VALOR materials will be incorporated into SafeHub. Developed under H2020 Safeguard, this knowledge exchange hub will be a “one-stop shop” for data, information and toolkits from Safeguard and other relevant pollinator projects.

The stakeholder community will further benefit from tutorial videos on the project’s tools and model usage. The possibility to open a project collection in an open-access journal will be considered in order to guarantee broader reach of the results, long-term accessibility, as well as provide access to less traditional research outputs such as public deliverables, reports, policy briefs, etc. In the end, the project will have a comprehensive collection of all results as re-usable, openly accessible, citable publications and datasets, hence ensuring VALOR outputs will remain available beyond the project’s lifetime. VALOR will rely on the substantial networking potential of its consortium members, who will help engage stakeholders in joint activities through their key roles in ongoing or completed European research projects and initiatives (see Table 4 for relevant projects with VALOR participants). Project partners will also build new links by presenting the project and its results at relevant events at local, national and international scales (i.e. the 10th Congress of Apidology (EurBee); the 7th European Congress of Conservation Biology; the European Association of Agricultural Economists 2025; XXVII International Congress of Entomology; IAAE 2027; British Ecological Society 2025; European Society of Rural Sociology 2025 etc.). Furthermore, VALOR will actively participate in the forthcoming European Bee Award ceremonies organised by ELO. All of VALOR's activities will be supported through our steering committee, which will advise on audience-specific targeting of materials, practice abstracts and briefs, and through collaborations with other related projects, and key outputs will be communicated to DG-Environment for hosting on the EU Pollinator Information Hive.

VALOR’s exploitation efforts will focus on making concrete use of project results for societal and policy support purposes (see Table 7 for a more comprehensive overview of VALOR’s KERs – exploitation to be undertaken by lead partners, in collaboration with UREAD and Pensoft, as part of Task 8.5). To increase the exploitational potential of its results and the probability of their uptake, the project will maintain a continuous collaboration with stakeholders and other relevant initiatives involving them in a number of consultation exercises (e.g., in-depth interviews with representatives of the municipalities, governances, local organisations in WP4) and joint activities, such as joint policy briefs, policy webinars, events, press releases and social media support. This will include close collaboration with the BUTTERFLY project, also funded under this call. To ensure the project's policy recommendations can be exploited by decision makers to improve current policy, VALOR will issue a collection of concise policy briefs, which will be distributed in relation to relevant events (e.g., CBD COP17), maximising partners’ existing stakeholder networks from other Horizon Europe projects and via information platforms such as Knowledge4Policy and the EC’s Horizon Results Platform, serving as a bridge towards policymakers. In parallel to each policy brief, carefully targeted policy webinars will be co-hosted with relevant policy experts from the Commission and MS. In addition, VALOR will join relevant stakeholder networks (e.g., BioAgora’s External Researchers and Stakeholders Network) and submit opinions to open calls for evidence, aiming to provide contributions relevant to science-policy bodies (e.g., IPBES, IPCC, CBD, etc.). Furthermore, the project will actively seek support from the Horizon Results Booster (HRB) to better exploit the project activities, in consortium with other related projects. HRB proposes clustering of projects for common dissemination, enhanced exploitation plans, business plans for R&I results and mature results commercialisation services.

Management of knowledge generated will follow terms developed under the Consortium Agreement, based on the principles that:

1. background information contributed by each participant (including non-partners) will be provided to project partners on a royalty-free basis,
2. Results will be owned by the participant that generated them.
3. Participants are responsible for planning with any third parties that might claim these rights for deliverables they are responsible for.
4. Results produced jointly by two or more participants will be shared among the participants who carried out the work, the terms of which, including costs for possible protection, will be agreed upon in writing via a joint agreement where applicable.
5. Each participant is responsible for examining possibilities to protect results that could be commercially exploited and will ensure that adequate steps towards such protection are taken prior to dissemination activities.
6. Access rights to results will be granted on a royalty-free basis for further research through publication in public repositories, ideally with creative commons 4.0.

VALOR is a fully interdisciplinary and multi-actor project that has been built from the ground up to engage with a wide range of audiences both within and outside of academic research. The systems-based approach adopted by the project requires a range of high-quality ecological, economic and social science data to be collected across all seven focal regions in a coordinated manner, early in the project. As such, VALOR's consortium has been deliberately limited to a few, well-funded partners with interdisciplinary expertise, to ensure that adequate resources are available for all relevant tasks in each focal region, with other partners bringing world-leading expertise to other key tasks. This approach allows us to maximise the quality and consistency of data collection and the breadth of stakeholder networks. The consortium members will conduct mutual training and development activities as part of the project's regular meeting cycle, in order to support cross-disciplinary skill development, particularly of early-career researchers. Female researchers are participating from 12 (86%) of the partners, and span a range of career stages from early and mid-career researchers to well-established research leaders. VALOR also has geographic balance across Northern (31%), Western (25%), Eastern (13%) and Southern Europe (13%), one of which (ULL) is based in an EU Overseas territory, as well as three third-country associated partners (18%). In addition to Universities, VALOR's consortium includes government (CSIC), commercial (PENSOFT), and practitioner (ELO) and NGO (UNEP-WCMC) partners, and the steering committee consists of businesses (ABP Foods, Arla, Bakker, Cargill, Maspex, Pangaia), non-government (Birdlife Europe) and policy (MINGOR) organisations that have contributed significant input to the project. The inputs of these non-academic partners and steering committee members have been key to developing VALOR's tools (WP7) and communication (WP8) tasks by providing a range of perspectives on what users may need from the project’s main outcomes and the kinds of barriers to adoption we are likely to encounter. This will ensure that these activities, and the research that underpins them, are developed in a manner that reflects the needs of different end users in a lasting and effective way. The partners are also members of several international, industry-facing networks such as the EIT Food network (UREAD, CSIC), Capitals Coalition (UNEP-WCMC) and UN One Planet Network (WU), who will be approached to support the dissemination of our key results to wider communities. The tasks to be undertaken in the focal regions have been formulated to reflect the varied circumstances and local stakeholder needs in each region and provide a diversity of ecological, economic, and cultural contexts. This plurality of perspectives will be used to shape our outputs, especially the tools and scenarios, in order to maximise the relevance and engagement with actors across Europe.

UREAD will act as the overall coordinator and will include a dedicated project administrator to support management activities (WP8). They bring leading expertise in agronomy (T4.1), business engagement (T7.1), science-policy engagement (T8.5), as well as a strong interdisciplinary team who will manage the UK focal region. The SLU team bring leading expertise on both larger-scale economics (T4.3, T5.3, T6.3), will lead on the policy and engagement activities (WP1), where they have built considerable expertise from the Horizon 2020 Safeguard project. UFR will bring expertise and datasets on key crop and non-crop pollination services and take overall leadership of WP2, and adding direct links with the Horizon Europe project RestPoll, which they coordinate. UJ brings expertise in environmental sociology and will lead on the social science data collection and synthesis tasks (T2.2, T4.4), as well as experience in the multiple drivers of pollinator declines(T3.5). CSIC brings significant modelling expertise and datasets on plant-pollinator networks (T3.2, T3.4) and will take overall leadership of WP3, and will contribute to social and economic tasks (WP4). WU brings world-leading expertise on both farm value chains and resilience (assuming leadership of WP5) and on pollinator management in intensive landscapes (T3.1, T3.5) and will bring direct links to the Horizon 2020 SURE-Farm and Showcase projects. ULUND are leading experts in the development of spatially explicit models for both pollinators (T3.3) and land management decision making (T6.2, T6.4) and have substantial experience working on wider food webs (T3.2) and with policy, business and other stakeholders. ULL will contribute experience in the unique ecology of pollinators in island biogeographical regions (T2.3) and the activity-based farming systems found in smallholder systems (T4.2, T4.5). BOKU are leading researchers in agro-economic farming research, particularly from the perspectives of performance and resilience, and will lead the overall implementation of WP4. UH brings pioneering expertise in the interlinkages and impacts of environmental shifts on diet and environmental sustainability and will lead T5.4, one of the most complex tasks in VALOR. PENSOFT are leading science communications experts with a strong track record of engagement in pollinator-related projects (e.g., PoshBee, Safeguard, WildPosh, PollinERA). They will drive VALOR's communication, dissemination (WP8) and tool development activities (WP7), including integration of tools in the SafeHub online knowledge hub, to create a lasting legacy for the project across a wide range of audiences. UNEP-WCMC operates in collaboration with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) at the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC). All outputs of UNEP-WCMC are delivered under the collaboration arrangements between UNEP-WCMC and UNEP, and are therefore subject to approval by UNEP. UNEP-WCMC brings specialist expertise in science-business and science-policy engagement, which they will leverage to lead our stakeholder needs assessment (T1.4) and incorporate VALOR's outputs into their world-leading decision support tool ENCORE (T7.2). ELO is an international federation of land owners who work with members to foster engagement between science, policy and practice. They will support the collaboration with focal region stakeholders and provide continuous access to their user base for wider stakeholder recruitment and tool testing throughout the project's lifespan.

VALOR also includes in-kind contributions from several substantial national and international businesses (Cargill, Maspex, Pangaia, Bakker, ABP Foods, Arla) as part of our stakeholder steering committee who will bring both primary data for value chain case studies (WP5) and their professional expertise into user needs for our tool and scenario development (WP1), participate in scenarios (WP6) and tool testing (WP7) and, where appropriate, dissemination activities (WP8). Each of these partners brings unique insights into different markets, scales and demands. ABP Food works with a network of over 45,000 farmers, specialising in beef and lamb products and are pushing to be world leaders in traceable, fair and sustainable meat products. Arla is a co-operative of owner farmers spanning seven countries across Europe that specialises in dairy products and has a focus on forward-thinking, sustainable management. Bakker is one of the largest fruit and vegetable companies in the Netherlands, servicing the global market with fresh, freeze-dried and prepared fruits, vegetables and flowers. Cargill are a US-based global commodity trading corporation with interests across the world in crops such as palm, soy, sunflower and cotton. Situated at the heart of the supply chain, Cargill are actively working to reduce the environmental impacts of their activities through initiatives such as zero deforestation. Maspex are one of the largest food-producing groups in Central and Eastern Europe, and includes many internationally recognised brands of fruit drinks and preserves. Pangaia is a material science company dedicated to developing novel, sustainable clothes and other material products with a fair and transparent business model. Each of these businesses is dedicated to improved sustainability and proactive engagement with biodiversity management throughout their supply chains and will help refine VALOR’s approaches from concept to impact. VALOR is also supported by Pensoft Publishers, who have over a decade of EU-level science-communication experience and a particular expertise around biodiversity and pollinators. They will assume co-leadership of WP7 and WP8, but also host much of VALOR's outputs through open repositories. ELO are an organisation at the heart of European land management and will provide key linkages from VALOR to the wider land owner community.

VALOR is fortunate to engage with three third-country partners who will each contribute to key tasks within the project on an in-kind basis. UNE will contribute existing datasets to the synthesis work, developing datasets for pollination services. They will also pursue opportunities to source Australian funding to apply VALOR's systems-based approach in Australia, and contribute to the dissemination activities of the project. BFU will contribute to the value chain (WP5) and policy work (WP1), providing key insights from one of the EU’s largest trading partners, and CWNU will support data gathering and quality control from Chinese-language research literature in WP2. UNE and CWNU researchers have participated in the IPBES pollinator assessment, and all have strong local business and policy links.

CWNU and BFU will also apply for funding from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology under the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology’s collaborative funding programme of ~4m Yuan RMB, to support a Chinese co-operation project (VALOR in China). If VALOR in China is funded, CWNU will establish four Chinese focal regions (Gansu, Sichuan and Shanxi provinces) and contribute to WP3 (T3.1, T3.2, T3.3) and WP4 (T4.1, T4.2, T4.4) and WP1 (T1.5) following VALORs multi-actor approach, and BFU will expand their contribution to WP5 through deeper analyses of four important value chains for the Chinese export market (Sunflower in Inner Mongolia, honey in Sichuan, apple in Shandong and medicinal plants in Gansu: T5.1 and T5.2) and conduct scenario modelling in WP6 (T6.2, T6.4). Both will participate with user needs testing and translation for the VALOR handbook of methods (T7.4), provide Chinese Demonstration Case studies for SafeHub (T7.5) and collaborate on dissemination materials (T8.5). The proposal will include support for bilateral meetings between Chinese partners and other members of the consortium, and the coordinator will be an associate partner on this proposal, having existing collaborations with CWNU. VALOR in China will be developed through a multi-actor partnership of local businesses to provide complete policy recommendations and decision support for central and provincial governments, and a range of local actors, building on many existing connections between these Universities and stakeholders.