Targeted management of the UK's fire prone landscapes will be crucial in enabling the country to achieve its commitments both to reach net zero by 2050 and to halt species decline by 2030. Many of our fire prone landscapes represent nationally significant carbon (C) stores. They also provide key habitats for unique species including many on the UK BAP Priority Species listing and are of strategic conservation value. But these typically shrub and grass dominated ecosystems are threatened both by the changing UK wildfire regime and some management tools aimed to mitigate this risk. Critical trade-offs therefore exist between the impact of episodic severe wildfire events and ongoing long term management practises, as well as between the positive and negative impacts of management tools on different prioritised ecosystem services; notably between C storage, habitat management and biodiversity provision. These trade-offs and the associated best management practises will vary between landscapes that have different management history, vegetation composition, legacy soil C stores and natural environmental conditions. Thus selection of the appropriate land management from the diverse toolkit available needs to be very carefully considered; the right tool to address the right priorities at the right location. The evidence base to make this complex choice, however, is currently weak. This undermines the ability of decision makers locally and nationally to assess the consequences of different wildfire management tools. IDEAL UK FIRE will address this urgent need, by determining the environmental costs and benefits of widely applied fuel management tools (burning, cutting, rewetting and managed succession) on habitat quality, biodiversity and the carbon balance in fire prone UK landscapes. We will directly contrast those medium-/long-term responses against the initial impact of the fuel management interventions and potential wildfires of varying severity. Through i) observations and collation of extensive historical monitoring, ii) experimental burns and wider management intervention and iii) the adaptation and application of the JULES land surface model, FlamMap fire analysis system and the Rangeshifter eco-evolutionary modelling platform, the project will: - Quantify carbon consumption and charcoal production across a range of (wild)fire and management intensities in different landscapes and under different land management strategies. - Determine the medium-term trajectories of biodiversity and carbon balance post intervention through a national chronosequence of management tools. - Develop next generation models to simulate the national long-term consequences of land management strategies to the UK ecosystem carbon balance, carbon climate feedbacks, habitat quality and biodiversity. We embed all this knowledge into a newly developed accredited training module for the land management sector. The module supports land managers to understand the consequences of different management tools, supporting them to make informed decisions in their landscapes to best meet both national and local management goals. The training programme will provide a generalisable frame-work to evaluate land management practices and a knowledge platform to inform government policy on the costs and benefits of wildfire management tools.

The UK faces serious strategic challenges with the future supply of aggregates, critical minerals and elements. At the same time, the UK must sustainably manage multimillion tonne annual arisings of industrial, mining and mineral wastes (IMMWs). The amount of these wastes generated is projected to increase over the coming years, particularly (i) ash from the combustion of biomass and municipal solid waste, and (ii) contaminated dredgings. These wastes will continue to be landfilled despite often containing valuable resources such as high concentrations of critical metals, soil macronutrients and useful mineral components, some of which actively drawdown atmospheric CO2. The fundamental aim of the ASPIRE (Accelerated Supergene Processes In Repository Engineering) research project is to develop a sustainable method by which ashes, contaminated dredgings and other IMMWs can be stripped of any valuable elements. These stripped elements would then be concentrated in an ore zone for later retrieval and the cleaned residues also returned to use, for example as aggregates, cement additives, or agricultural amendments (including those for carbon sequestration through enhanced mineral weathering). It is a very challenging problem to devise a truly sustainable method to achieve this is an economically viable way, and almost all processes suggested so far in the literature for leaching wastes are themselves carbon and chemical intensive and thus non-sustainable. We are proposing research that comprises the first steps in developing the "ASPIRE waste repository" concept with accelerated analogues of ore-forming "supergene" processes engineered in, such that the dormant waste undergoes processes to (i) concentrate valuable components (e.g. critical metals, phosphate) as an anthropogenic ore to facilitate their future recovery, and (ii) concurrently decontaminate residual mineral material so as to make it available as a bank of material to drawdown for "soft" uses in agriculture, silviculture, greenspace, landscaping in new developments, habitat creation and/or as a cement/concrete additive or replacement aggregate. The processes investigated rely on rainwater passing through a vegetated surface layer which releases naturally occurring compounds from the plant roots and/or other natural organic matter which then pass through and strip valuable elements from the IMMW. The mobilised elements will then pass into a capture zone where they will be stripped from solution and concentrated to form an artificial ore. The research project will seek to engineer the internal processes of the temporary storage waste repository to optimise this. At the same time the upper vegetated surface of the waste repository will serve as greenspace with commensurate ecological and amenity value for local populations. Among the key research challenges is in how to engineer the internal ASPIRE waste repository processes which rely on complex biogeochemical interactions and flow behaviour. Another critical research challenge is to develop an understanding of stakeholder and wider acceptability of this concept which does not fit with current legislation on waste management. With this project we seek to provide a circular technology solution for how we can sustainably manage the future multimillion tonne arisings of IMMW at a critical time as the UK government develops strategies and supporting regulation for the transition to a circular economy.

Climate change is a world problem. The effects of climate change are clear from the latest natural disasters in the world (e.g. summer droughts in Europe, Antarctica ice melting, and floods in India and Pakistan, among others). Arguably, the general public lacks accessible scientific information at a local level that can help them make informed decisions on how to adapt to everyday life and contribute to the future national adaptation to climate change. Forest loss or deforestation is one of the causes of contemporary climate change. Similar to weather observatories, there exist forest observatories that produce vast amounts of environmental data that require analysis and interpretation by expert scientists, usually in a way not easily digestible by the general public. Much of the scientific research on the impact of climate change on forests focuses on a limited number of intensively monitored areas. This lacks wide geographical variability, increasing the uncertainty when upscaling to a regional or national level for policy-making. We believe that offering artistic and simplified graphical/sonic interpretation of complex data and the ability to monitor nearby trees can help raise awareness of relevant issues caused by climate change to our forest ecosystem and contribute to a wider geographic data variability. The project will bring the attention of the general public to the forest changes caused by climate change. This project contributes to community building of artists, scientists and forest aficionados by debating the potentially devastating effects of climate change on forests. We hope to make a positive impact on people's opinions that can turn into policy change. The overarching research question is, how can the use of artistic and community science research methods help to inform and educate people about climate change? In particular, what can we learn from using artistic and community science research methods employing the Internet of Things (IoT), Acoustic Ecology and Creative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in relation to monitoring forest behaviour and raising awareness about climate change? The project aims to raise awareness among forest visitors/aficionados, artists, scientists, and the general public about the connection between forests and climate change. Community building will centre on looking at a better understanding of forest behaviour using complex scientific data in creative and artistic ways. The project has three key objectives: (1) To make a one-year on-site and online artistic intervention in a UK-based forest using live scientific data and fostering acoustic ecology experiences. (2) To develop an in-house Internet of Things (IoT) prototype to measure variables related to tree stress, such as sap flow, air temperature, humidity and soil moisture to be piloted using community/citizen science methodologies connected to web applications for data analysis, visualisation and sonification. (3) To provide and disseminate tools, online resources, and pedagogic activities as well as to promote a discussion environment to foster awareness and engagement among the general public. We envision the combination of artistic and techno-scientific research methods to accomplish the project's objectives. Our methodologies are interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on finding new artistic, acoustic and audiovisual methods to understand environmental forest data. The project is novel because it brings an interdisciplinary team of artists and scientists together to work on a timely issue using an original approach to gaining knowledge about the connection between forests and climate change that can have a local, national and global impact. Both academics and non-specialists can benefit from this research. Academic fields include SMC/musicology, Human-Computer Interaction, Sonic Arts and Ecology.

This research project is a collaboration between Forestry England and design-researcher Liam Healy (based at Goldsmiths, University of London), that will work in conversation with those who visit and dwell in forests to design forms of access to them. We will explore how the design of paths and trails might be harnessed to contribute to woodland health, sustainability and expansion. We see the fun and joyous experiences of being, playing, and moving through the woods as an excellent opportunity to bring diverse groups into conversations and actions around the future of forests. Spending time in and providing access to woodlands is increasingly recognised as important for physical and mental human wellbeing, but this needs to be done carefully to protect and maintain those natural places; we need to tread lightly. Since the COVID-19 pandemic Forestry England have found that visits to their woodlands have dramatically increased, and in some cases, this has brought about conflicts and new challenges. At the same time, expanding forests and woodlands has become an increasingly important means for addressing the climate emergency, and in the UK tree planting has become a key governmental policy. However, researchers have pointed out the importance of involving local communities in the process of woodland creation, planning and planting to ensure the long-term support, sustainability and care of trees. This research will investigate the ways these two factors might be harnessed so that increasing interest in access to forests can contribute to re-foresting and forest health, produce more resilient and culturally rich environments, and at the same time improve the health of visitors and forest dwellers. The research will work with local communities to design alternative forms of paths and trails that work with the health and expansion of woodlands in mind. We aim to make paths that contribute to the forest instead of destroying it by thinking about how different materials, route design, features and planting can improve and work with the environment. We will do this by running a series of design workshops over the course of three years in sites around the Southwest of England, that local communities are warmly invited to participate in alongside stakeholders and decision makers. The workshops will involve a broad cross section of woodland communities, including walkers, foresters, trees, conservation groups, cyclists, animals, horse-riders, landowners, fungi, and plants (what we call more-than-human forest communities). In these workshops we will imagine different possible futures for the UK's forests, and look for ways to make them more culturally rich, bio-diverse, and inclusive (to both humans and non-humans). We will work with several design methods during these sessions, including speculative and participatory design, sketching and prototyping, as well as working on the ground to build new trails and features with nature in mind. By the end of the project, we will have worked with several local communities and forestry experts to dream up, design, and prototype a series of trails and features, observed and evaluated how they get used, published our findings in various conferences, and reported our results back to the local communities through a series of inclusive exhibitions.

Floods and landslides affect the UK every year, both inland and along the coast, causing disruption, occasional fatalities and severe economic loss. An increase in storminess under climate change and population pressure are resulting in an increase in landslide and flood hazards in the UK and globally and threatening the defences put in place to manage these hazards. Monitoring of unstable hillslopes and flood-prone rivers as well as defences designed to manage these is increasingly vital. Landslides and floods are both triggered by heavy rainfall, often occur at the same time, and may interact to generate a chain reaction of knock-on hazardous effects. SENSUM proposes a new integrated way to tackle these 'hydrogeological' hazards, taking advantage of advances in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, microelectronics and machine learning. Those exciting new tools will be used to monitor the stability of defences, provide warnings of hazard events, and improve mathematical models and visualisation of hazardous phenomena. Landslides and floods have traditionally been monitored using a combination of satellite-based remote-sensing techniques and wired ground-based instruments to measure factors that control the related hazard, such as river flow level, displacement and soil moisture. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) show great potential for monitoring and early warning of these hazards. Their main advantage is their use of easily deployable, low-power sensors enabling continuous, long-term, low-cost monitoring of the environment. For landslides and floods, which occur infrequently and unpredictably, this is an important technological advance. SENSUM proposes to develop innovative smart tracking devices, embedded in boulders and woody debris on hillslopes and in rivers to give real-time warning of movement related to landslide and flood processes. Collaborating closely with external partners, the team of experts in the SENSUM project will develop and test the tracking devices both in dedicated laboratory experiments and in the field, with the deployment of trial networks of smart boulders and woody debris in different localities in the UK and abroad. The large set of data obtained from sites and experiments will be used to improve mathematical models, to develop innovative early warning systems and in 3D digital visualisations. This integrated approach will enable us to establish a comprehensive understanding of landslide and flood processes which will significantly reduce risk to society. The SENSUM team is a diverse, interdisciplinary and multinational team made up of a range of environmental scientists and engineers, computer scientists and science communication specialists from three leading UK universities: University of Exeter, University of East Anglia and University of Plymouth and will involve several project partners including the Environment Agency, Forest England, Natural England and AECOM. It will work closely with these project partners to design an effective digital environment for monitoring and managing landslide and flood hazards in the UK, and to target applied risk management challenges. For example, in the UK, the Environment Agency is tasked with giving a 2-hour warning to the population affected by floods. However, these warnings are lacking in the upland areas of the UK's landscape due to a lack of instruments to monitor river flow. The smart tracking devices embedded within boulder and woody debris in landslides and river channels proposed by SENSUM will help address that limitation, and therefore will significantly improve early warning of movement and consequently the assessment of potential high-risk natural events. The team will also engage stakeholders and the general public through the creation of compelling visualizations of landslide and flood hazards and through project workshops and outreach activities.