Proposed project: The risks to UK forests from pests, disease and droughts are poorly understood as historical data is of limited use. This brings risk management and mitigation challenges for forest carbon projects, timber production and insurance. The original PURE project developed a model to assess the future risk from pests and diseases (P&D) for forest carbon projects under the UK's Woodland Carbon Code. In this project, we build this PURE work (NERC/PA 13-021), NERC research (NE/I022183/1, NE-J019720-1, NE/I019405/1), and well-established collaborations (see e.g. Forest-Risk Network) to: (a) embed our PURE P&D risk work within operational-decision making under the Woodland Carbon Code (WCC) (b) expand the operational use of this work from forest carbon to forest timber and (c) develop new insurance products. This process will then be replicated to adapt and operationalise a drought risk assessment model (Petr et al. 2014), which produces information inadequate for WCC and insurance purposes. The science from both models will then inform the development of best practice/guidance and decision support tools to meet the needs of the WCC, timber industry, insurance sector as well as the wider private and public forest sectors. The PURE Associate's risk management expertise (originally acquired in investment banking and developed and applied to natural hazard risks to forest finance projects through the NERC and PURE projects listed above) will be partnered with that of stakeholders from the Forestry Commission, Forest Research and ForestRe (an insurance organisation designing insurance and reinsurance products) to deliver these outcomes. The work is needed due to the critical importance of forests to the UK and the urgent need to reduce the threat from P&D and drought. Action is needed now due to the long timescales inherent in forest management. Woodland and forest cover about 13% of the total land area of Great Britain (Forestry Commission, 2013). The primary wood processing and forestry sectors contribute £1.92bn in Gross Value Added to the economy and generate employment for over 39,000 (Forestry Commission, 2013). The wider social and environmental benefits of woodlands are worth around £1.5bn annually (Willis et al., 2003). Forests provide important wildlife habitat and host 130 of the 400 species in the UK's 1994 Biodiversity Action Plan. They also play an important role in mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change e.g. carbon sequestration (Read et al., 2009). However, UK forests face significant threats from natural hazards such as wind, fire, pests, diseases (P&D) and drought. Whilst the risks from wind and fire are relatively well-understood - the future risks from P&D and drought are poorly understood and insurance is rarely provided primarily due to a lack of appropriate information. Historical data can provide some indication of the future risks to forests from fire and wind, but are less useful for predicting losses from P&D as new P&D can arise; existing ones can jump species; and vectors, such as shipping and imported saplings, can bring new P&D to a country at any time. Similarly, historical data are of little use to determine the risk of planting tree species in regions at the limit of the trees' climatic tolerances. This increases their vulnerability to drought. This lack of adequate risk measurement constrains risk management for forest carbon projects and mitigation by insurance. The project outputs will include a revised P&D model and a revised drought risk assessment, which will produce this missing information. The results will be used to support operationalisation into better risk management procedures under the WCC; development of new insurance products; and the revision of decision support tools for forest managers to support adaptive management against these risks. The results will be communicated and disseminated to the wider forest sector.

Woodlands provide a number of benefits to people, including timber production, areas for recreation, and the storage of carbon, which can help reduce the risk of climate change. Such benefits are referred to as 'ecosystem services'. Woodlands are also an important habitat for wildlife, including both tree species and the plants and animals that depend on them. However, woodlands in the UK, and in many other parts of the world, are currently at risk, because of the combined effects of climate change, aerial pollution, overgrazing and the spread of pests and diseases. These factors can interact with each other, leading to the collapse of wooded ecosystems and their replacement with other plant communities. Research is needed to identify which woodland areas are at risk of such collapse occurring, so that appropriate management responses can be identified. Information is also needed on the potential impacts of such "ecosystem thresholds", both on wildlife and on humans, through changes in the provision of ecosystem services. This project aims to provide this information, by studying woodlands in the New Forest National Park. Here, we will examine data that have been collected over a period of 50 years in a woodland in which many trees have recently died, but have not been replaced. We will use this information to see whether any indicators can be identified, which could be used to predict whether such collapses might occur in other woodlands in the future. We will also study the potential impacts of the loss of tree species, as might result from a pest or disease outbreak, both on wildlife and the provision of ecosystem services, throughout the New Forest landscape. We will also explore the possible impacts of other types of environmental change, including climate change, aerial pollution and overgrazing. We will examine impacts on nutrient cycling, carbon storage, timber production and the value of woodlands for recreation. This will be achieved using a combination of field data and computer models, which we will use to forecast how such impacts might occur at the landscape scale. The project will help increase understanding of how major ecological changes occur in woodlands, and their potential impacts. This information will be of value for identifying which woodlands are particularly at risk of ecological collapse, and how such problems may be averted in future, through the development of appropriate management and policy responses.

The proposed work builds on a project that aimed to encourage greater use of hospital grounds for health and well-being benefit. It will utilise materials produced within the project such as workshop frameworks, an engagement toolkit and greenspace intervention evaluation guidance to disseminate knolwedge to health services managers, clinical staff, other health care workers, environmental sector professionals and voluntary sector agencies about how to get staff, visitors and patients using healthcare buildings' grounds and adjacent 'public' greensapce for health and well-being benefit. The main activities will be: (i) Combined dissemination and training workshops for health service managers and clinical staff. (ii) Cross-sector (health, environment, public and voluntary) networking and exchange events. Each of these activities will be held at three sites within the NHS Forth Valley region; one in NHS Highalnd and an additional two sites in other Scottish health board areas. We will hold workshops at which NHS staff, environmental sector staff and voluntary sector staff can learn about the knowledge and materials generated in our original project. The workshops will involve training in tools and methods for encouraging greenspace use through participatory planning; leading conservation and other outdoor activities; and monitoring and measuring the benefits of outdoor activities. As a result of the workshops, the stakeholders will devise a plan for activities and small changes that could be made at their healthcare settings (e.g. healthcare centres) to encourage people to use the outdoors for health and well-being benefit. These plans will outline the roles that stakeholders such as the NHS, Forestry Commission, Local Authority and local voluntary sector will play in the future development of greenspace activities. Taking part in the workshops will equip stakeholders with the tools needed to plan and deliver greenspace activities at various types of healthcare setting. This work will help build relationships between the health, environment and community sectors for the management and use of outdoor spaces associated with, or adjacent to, healthcare buildings. The work aims to bring health and well-being benefits to staff, patients and community members through their increased use of such spaces.

Critical infrastructure in upland landscapes can be damaged by landslides and debris flows, and managing and mitigating the risks posed to this infrastructure is a key challenge for infrastructure owners. In addition, landslides and debris flows do not respect ownership boundaries, and third party landowners can find themselves liable for mass movements originating from their land, whereas infrastructure owners have to manage hazards from beyond their holdings. In addition, transport owners and maintaining agents must be able to plan on works to be delivered at the right time and in the right place. Planning efficient spending has a number of challenges, including persistent uncertainty in how changes in climate and land use affect future landslide susceptibility and limited capability to make effective use of high resolution digital datasets (e.g. LiDAR surveys) to model landslide scenarios. This project will develop software for producing landslide hazard maps at regional scales incorporating the highest resolution topographic and land use data. It builds on previous hazard research at the University of Edinburgh and the British Geological Survey, and is built to work in a mulitcore, supercomputing environment--the software can handle big data in the form of very high resolution LiDAR surveys that provide information on slopes at the sub-metre scale: the scale at which mass movements and the hydrology that drive them operate. In addition, the software will be designed to provide scenario modelling. In particular, one of the major drivers in changes in landslide hazard is changing root cohesion from different vegetation patterns along transport corridors. The project will assimilate forestry data from Forest Research so that we can investigate the planting and harvesting schedule that minimised landslide risk, and also determine the time at which transport corridors are most threatened by landsliding. The ultimate objective of the project is to provide a software tool that land owners, infrastructure owners and maintaining agents can use to better plan mitigation and spending strategies.

It is increasingly recognised in the UK (eg Making Space for Water, Defra, 2005), and internationally, that the management of land and water is strongly interdependent, and that integrated management approaches are needed. There are particular issues for floods, where there is evidence that agricultural land management can increase local flood risk, but no evidence-based quantification of downstream impacts at larger scales. If such effects exist, as the local evidence suggests, clearly there is potential for use of land management to mitigate flood risk. The basic scientific question to be addressed in this research is therefore: how do the effects of land use management propagate from the local scale (~ 1 ha, and below) to that of mesoscale catchments (~ 100 km2) and affect extreme floods? If an answer can be found, it will be possible to make useful predictions for the effects of future land use management changes on extreme floods. Such predictions would have wide use, including in preparing catchment flood management plans. Research like this demands high-quality long-term data sets, but there are relatively few data sets available. Modelling is essential to make the best use of the available data and to encapsulate and explore the understanding of the processes involved in the link between changes in land use management and flooding. Unfortunately, our current rainfall/runoff models are simply inadequate for this task, because they cannot adequately represent the underlying complexity associated with the effects of land use management on runoff generation, or the propagation of these effects downstream. The level of activity and interest in understanding and manipulating the link between land use management and flooding is very high, and recent mitigation works and investments in field research have resulted in new unique and important data sets being available to the Investigators: the FRMRC field sites at Pontbren in the upper Severn catchment; the CHASM multi-scale monitoring for the Eden catchment; and the SCAMP large-scale land use management changes currently underway in the Ribble catchment. There are also new relevant developments in modelling, including local-scale runoff generation modelling developed at Imperial College and network routing modelling and information tracking methods developed at Newcastle University. This data and modelling will be brought together to tackle the basic scientific question above, within the practical context of predicting the likely effects that given land use management mitigation and adaptation strategies would have in reducing flood risk in the Severn, Eden, and Ribble catchments, for a range of specified extreme flood return periods. This project will provide improved scientific understanding of the effects of land use management in extreme floods, and also provide results of the type required by those involved in decision-making, such as consultants and policy makers looking for answers to some of the general questions raised in Defra's Making Space for Water consultation. The results will include maps showing the application areas for any management interventions achieving effective downstream hydrograph attenuation, for the present and possible future climates. The project also represents a major contribution to the next generation of whole-catchment continuous simulation modelling, which will help improve its capability and reliability for predicting the effect of land use management change on extreme flooding. The EA/Defra have agreed to fund a parallel programme of experimental research in the upper Ribble (funding £200K), to provide the necessary data for the effects of afforestation and blocking of moorland grips.