It is widely recognised that ecosystems provide numerous services that are of benefit to humans but, in decisions regarding land and resource use, these tend to be overlooked. Within towns and cities this is particularly the case as nature is often considered to be absent in urban areas. However, as nearly 80% of the UK population live in urban areas there is considerable potential for improvements in ecosystem services to have a large impact on quality of life. As a result the Defra funded Ecosystem Services in the Urban Water Environment (ESUWE) project has begun to apply an ecosystem services approach to demonstrate the benefits that improvements in the urban water environment can have. It has also been recognised that a collaborative approach to decision making assists with the integrated planning that is required for sustainable catchment management. Therefore, the work of ESUWE also aims to provide tools to communicate and engage stakeholders in order to facilitate a participatory approach to catchment management. The ESUWE project has identified numerous ecosystem services provided in urban environments and developed metrics to quantify the costs and benefits associated with these. It is now working in four demonstration areas of varying sizes to map and evaluate ecosystem services and to pilot use in local catchment planning. It is hoped that by communicating information about benefits of environmental improvements, decisions can be better informed and that by mapping ecosystem services, areas where interventions will result in multiple-benefits can be identified and prioritised. Throughout the ESUWE project, Green Infrastructure (GI) has been highlighted as being important for delivering benefits to urban societies along with providing environmental and hydrological improvements. Therefore, the potential to expand the scope of the work beyond those directly involved with catchment planning has been identified. The Innovation Project will enable the application of the research conducted under the ESUWE project to meet the needs of a wider range of end users such as local nature partnership, local planning authorities and construction companies to be investigated so that the impact of the work can be increased. The Innovation Project will facilitate co-development of an ecosystem services mapping approach to the planning of GI with those responsible for land use decisions at local and national levels. This will ensure that the needs of end users are incorporated into the development of decision support tools that facilitate GI planning and help create standardised metrics that can express the benefits of GI for use in differing sectors. Work in four demonstration areas will explore the practical application of the ecosystem services approach, demonstrating the benefits provided by GI and identifying opportunities for these to be increased. This will improve strategic understanding so that the effects of potential land use decisions on levels of services provided in urban area can be explored. This will help to provide an evidence base that can inform decisions regarding trade-offs and promote interventions that provide increased and multiple benefits. The Innovation Project will also result in case studies quantifying the value of GI which can be used to promote the need for increased considerations of its provision in land use decision at both local and national levels. A partnership approach will also identify how mapping can aid integrated local decision making to support other place based initiatives. Finally, by considering how GI can be implemented in a way that delivers multiple benefits, best practice will be identified and promoted.

Flooding represents the most serious environmental threat to the UK today. It is a problem predicted to increase over the next few decades. The urgency with which collective responses must be found to this, and other climate-related challenges, is reflected in the recent shift in vocabulary: we no longer talk of a crisis but an emergency. Positive responses to the flood threat will require a unity of action between central government and local authorities, environmental agencies, academics, and the public. Key to future flood control will be the fundamental decisions now being taken over how the UK landscape can be best managed. Within many quarters there is a dawning realisation that if the country is to become more flood resilient, landscape change may have to be radical in conception and bold in undertaking. To be both practicable and deliverable, it is essential that the positive benefits deriving from new configurations of the landscape are communicated effectively to communities affected by change if the transition is not to be resisted and delayed. This Research Network, led by scholars from the Arts and Humanities, draws together those with interests in the historic and contemporary environment, with perspectives to offer on the past, present, and future shape of the British landscape and societal responses to flooding. This Network focuses, in the first instance, on those landscape decisions that are required to be taken to build greater flood resilience in England and Wales. Over time, the Network will look to broaden its remit to the whole of the UK and beyond. The Network aims to break down academic silos, and in particular collapse the Arts and Humanities-Science divide. Crucially, the Network will involve representatives from those agencies currently charged with building and delivering flood resilience across the country. It has the express ambition of contributing substantively to current discourse and debates surrounding the most appropriate and deliverable responses to the rising flood threat in the UK. In particular it looks to fully exploit the unique, and largely overlooked, contribution that Arts and Humanities readings of the long-term development of the British landscape and societal responses to flooding, might make in creating more flood resistant communities and landscapes into the future. Three questions, which can only be fully addressed through interdisciplinary treatment, have led to the creation of this Research Network and guide its agenda. First, can we or should we continue to rely on on hard engineered defences as the principal method for mitigating floods or should we be moving towards softer natural flood management strategies? Second, what lessons can be drawn from the ways in which communities have responded to flooding in the past and the land management practices they adopted to mitigate against floods: might these provide templates for the future? Thirdly, in recognising that landscape change will impact people's existing relationship with, and appreciation of, familiar landscapes, how, where, and in what ways might this required transformation be best and most sensitively achieved? The Network responds directly to those responsible for flood management and delivering these necessary landscape changes and what they desire from the academy in order to fill evidential gaps they have identified and which they want in order to enhance their current practice. It will establish a new research agenda in which Arts and Humanities research will play a central role in future proofing the UK landscape against the rising threat of flooding. Providing a research focus for the Network with the potential to deliver more immediate impact, the Network will work closely with the Environment Agency as they develop and deliver their plans for the future sustainable management of the low-lying, flood-protected landscape of Isle of Axholme in north Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire.

The water, energy and food systems (the WEF) of the planet are under strain, sometimes described as the "perfect storm". They are all intrinsically linked and inter-dependent (the nexus), and humanity needs to plot a course to ensure sustainability and in an ideal world, equity of access to resources. The WEFWEBs project will examine the data and evidence for the water, energy and food systems and their interactions and dependencies within the local, regional and national environment. We need to maintain a balance between the three sometimes opposing directions that our primary systems are moving in to ensure that we safeguard our ecosystems, while still being able to live sustainably, in a world where demands are increasing. To study these systems and their dependencies and interactions, we need to bring together a multitude of different disciplines from the physical, environmental computational and mathematical sciences, with economics, social science, psychology and policy. Each of the three systems needs to be studied through the data that exists concerning their flows, resources and impacts, but also through individual and civic understanding of the systems. We will collect, synthesise and assimilate existing data, and models with new data that will be collected using new sensing technology and social media. We will examine each of the multiple dimensions of the nexus in three place based studies where we can explore and examine the outputs from data analysis, process and network models, and social perceptions. This project delivers multiple dynamic WEF nexus maps with spatial level spanning the dimensions of the problem, reflecting current status and changes, and the interactions in the primary systems in space and time. There is currently no critically systemic, participatory, multi-stakeholder mapping of the entire multi-scale WEF nexus for the UK and this project offers innovation in terms of the multi-disciplinarity and variety of methods including systemic intervention, data analytics and crowd sourcing techniques to mapping the WEF nexus. Ultimately, WEFWEBs will provide a better understanding to citizens and policy makers alike of the effects of choices and decisions to be made.

LANDMARK (LAND MAnagement for flood RisK reduction in lowland catchments) will evaluate the effectiveness of realistic and scalable land-based NFM measures to reduce the risk from flooding from surface runoff, rivers and groundwater in groundwater-fed lowland catchments. We will study measures like crop choice, tillage practices and tree planting, that have been identified by people who own and manage land, to have the greatest realisable potential. NFM measures will be evaluated for their ability to increase infiltration, evaporative losses and/or below-ground water storage, thereby helping to store precipitation to reduce surface runoff and slow down the movement of water to reduce peak levels in groundwater and rivers. However, we need to carefully examine the balance between increased infiltration, soil water storage and evaporative losses under different types of NFM measures, because long-term increases in infiltration could actually increase groundwater and river flood risk if there is less capacity within the ground and in rivers to store excess precipitation from storm events. Also, following a review of the available research to date, other researchers (Dadson et al, 2017) came to the conclusion that land-based NFM measures would only provide effective protection against small flood events in small catchments. As the catchment size and flood events increase, the effectiveness of land-based NFM measures in reducing flood risk would decrease significantly. However, this idea needs to be tested further. Currently, there are many unanswered gaps in knowledge that make it hard to include land-based NFM measures in flood risk mitigation schemes. The Environment Agency tell us that there are no case studies on land-based NFM measures to support decision making, with most focusing on leaky barriers made from trees. Yet, land-based NFM measures have potential to do more than just reduce flood risk, including improving water quality, biodiversity and sustainable food and fibre production. So in LANDMARK, we will carry out research to help to fill this evidence gap, and test the ideas Dadson et al. proposed about land-based NFM using the West Thames River Basin as a case-study area. We will work at three spatial scales (field, catchment and large river basin) and explore modelling scenarios, developed with people who own and manage land and live at risk of flooding, to look at how land-based NFM could affect flooding. Scenarios will include experiences in the recent past in July 2007 and over the winter of 2013-14, and how future land use and management could affect flood risk in 2050 as the climate changes. We will consider how government policy could change after we leave the EU to support land-based NFM. Work will be carried out in five stages: (1) we will bring together available maps, data and local knowledge on current land use and management, and use this to create scenarios for modelling experiments to explore land use and management measures impact on events from the past and in the future; (2) we will make measurements to see how below-ground water storage and infiltration vary between different land-based NFM in fields where innovative land management is being practiced; (3) we will collect data from sensors sitting above the ground, flying on drones and on satellites to see how vegetation and soil moisture vary across large catchment areas; (4) we will use all the data collected from 1-3 to run modelling experiments across a range of scales, linking together models that capture soil and vegetation processes, overland and groundwater flows and catchment hydrology, exploring variation in model outputs; and (5) we will create web applications to display and explore the outputs from the modelling experiments. All this work will be supported by workshops, field visits, reports and resources to support people and their learning about how land-based NFM measures work and could be used to reduce flood risk.