There is a wealth of data available to marine scientists to study the environment. These include measurements made from samples collected by boats, data from marine moorings, buoys and unmanned vessels as well as satellite data. For satellite data, this is now available at very high resolution so that a range of parameters and the intricate details of these in rivers, estuaries and the coast can be easily seen from space. Having all of these different sources of data available, makes it hard to analyse in a coherent, consistent and easily findable format. Data Cubes have been invented which are gridded and stacked arrays of different data sets, that can be interrogated easily and efficiently by scientists. The scientific organisation CSIRO in Australia has developed open data cubes, called AquaWatch Data Integration and Analysis System or ADIAS, that allows multiple users to easily interact with large archives of data. Through this platform, computer code, known as machine learning, can be used to turn some of the data sets into water quality parameters, to allow the assessment of whether coastal water is 'clean' or 'poor' quality. In both the western English Channel and eastern Australia, periodic flooding as a result of heavy rainfall is becoming more frequent. This is because the heating of inland water and the sea is causing more evapo-transpiration which results in high rainfall and then flooding. These flooding events can carry agricultural fertilisers, sewage effluent and, in some locations, heavy metals from mining tailing ponds from the rivers to the coast. This poses a risk to human health and to the environment through the deposition of high nutrients, suspended material, viruses and bacteria to the coast. This in turn can be deleterious to Seagrass beds and mud flats are important areas for depositing and drawing down CO2 from the atmosphere. These flooding events can be harmful to both seagrass beds and mud flats by blocking light that is normally available to seagrasses to photosynthesize and by introducing toxic material that disrupt mud flats. The project will measure the effect of flooding on seagrass beds and mud flats in Plymouth Sound, UK and the Fitzeroy River and adjacent coast of Australia. It will also provide maps of areas that are not effected by flooding to allow conservation groups to regenerate Seagrass beds. The information generated by the project will be a freely available to end-users to help the monitoring and management of water quality in the Plymouth Sound catchment. The project data and results will be showcased to interested parties through an end of project stakeholder event. The following groups will be invited to the event: Marine managers (FSA, DEFRA, CEFAS,), Fishery and Shellfishery end users (regional IFCA groups, OS-UK), Marine policy makers (DG-ENV, DG-MARE, OSPAR, ICES, OSPAR ICG COBAM Pelagic Habitats Expert Group), tourism and recreation groups (SAS, Sailing clubs, local anglers, SUP clubs) and Wildlife conservation and Environmental protection groups (UK Wildlife Trusts). Due to Brexit, collaboration with other European scientists is now restricted due to lack of funds. This project will facilitate knowledge and technology exchange between UK and Australia, now that EU collaboration is reduced.

The UK is committed to a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% before 2050. With over 40% of fossil fuels used for low temperature heating and 16% of electricity used for cooling these are key areas that must be addressed. The vision of our interdisciplinary centre is to develop a portfolio of technologies that will deliver heat and cold cost-effectively and with such high efficiency as to enable the target to be met, and to create well planned and robust Business, Infrastructure and Technology Roadmaps to implementation. Features of our approach to meeting the challenge are: a) Integration of economic, behavioural, policy and capability/skills factors together with the science/technology research to produce solutions that are technically excellent, compatible with and appealing to business, end-users, manufacturers and installers. b) Managing our research efforts in Delivery Temperature Work Packages (DTWPs) (freezing/cooling, space heating, process heat) so that exemplar study solutions will be applicable in more than one sector (e.g. Commercial/Residential, Commercial/Industrial). c) The sub-tasks (projects) of the DTWPs will be assigned to distinct phases: 1st Wave technologies or products will become operational in a 5-10 year timescale, 2nd Wave ideas and concepts for application in the longer term and an important part of the 2050 energy landscape. 1st Wave projects will lead to a demonstration or field trial with an end user and 2nd Wave projects will lead to a proof-of-concept (PoC) assessment. d) Being market and emission-target driven, research will focus on needs and high volume markets that offer large emission reduction potential to maximise impact. Phase 1 (near term) activities must promise high impact in terms of CO2 emissions reduction and technologies that have short turnaround times/high rates of churn will be prioritised. e) A major dissemination network that engages with core industry stakeholders, end users, contractors and SMEs in regular workshops and also works towards a Skills Capability Development Programme to identify the new skills needed by the installers and operators of the future. The SIRACH (Sustainable Innovation in Refrigeration Air Conditioning and Heating) Network will operate at national and international levels to maximise impact and findings will be included in teaching material aimed at the development of tomorrow's engineering professionals. f) To allow the balance and timing of projects to evolve as results are delivered/analysed and to maximise overall value for money and impact of the centre only 50% of requested resources are earmarked in advance. g) Each DTWP will generally involve the complete multidisciplinary team in screening different solutions, then pursuing one or two chosen options to realisation and test. Our consortium brings together four partners: Warwick, Loughborough, Ulster and London South Bank Universities with proven track records in electric and gas heat pumps, refrigeration technology, heat storage as well as policy / regulation, end-user behaviour and business modelling. Industrial, commercial, NGO and regulatory resources and advice will come from major stakeholders such as DECC, Energy Technologies Institute, National Grid, British Gas, Asda, Co-operative Group, Hewlett Packard, Institute of Refrigeration, Northern Ireland Housing Executive. An Advisory Board with representatives from Industry, Government, Commerce, and Energy Providers as well as international representation from centres of excellence in Germany, Italy and Australia will provide guidance. Collaboration (staff/student exchange, sharing of results etc.) with government-funded thermal energy centres in Germany (at Fraunhofer ISE), Italy (PoliMi, Milan) and Australia (CSIRO) clearly demonstrate the international relevance and importance of the topic and will enhance the effectiveness of the international effort to combat climate change.

Australia

Economic development and population growth in Peninsular India have resulted in rapid changes to land-use, land-management and water demand which together are seriously impacting and degrading water resources. Urbanization, deforestation, agricultural intensification, shifts between irrigated agriculture and rain-fed crops, increased groundwater use, and the proliferation of small-scale surface water storage interventions, such as farm-level bunds (usually to conserve soil moisture in fields) and check-dams (to replenish local aquifers) all have contributed to significant changes in the hydrological functioning of catchments. The impact of such changes and interventions on local hydrological processes, such as streamflow, groundwater recharge and evapotranspiration, are poorly constrained, and our understanding of how these diverse local changes cumulatively impact water availability at the broader basin-scale is very limited. Focussing on the highly contentious inter-state Cauvery River basin (with an area of c.80,000 km2, the Cauvery is one of India's largest river basins) our study addresses the key scientific challenge of representing the many local, small-scale interventions in Peninsular India at larger scales. Using observations from established experimental catchments in both rural and urban settings, the project will first explore how changes in land-use, land-cover, irrigation practices and small-scale water management interventions locally affect hydrological processes. In tandem we will then develop novel upscaling methods to represent the improved process-understanding in models at the larger sub-basin (Kabini, ~10,000 km2) and basin (Cauvery) scales. In so doing, the project will demonstrate the capability to generically represent the cumulative impact of abundant small-scale changes in basin-wide integrated water resources management models. The impact of local-scale interventions will further be modelled alongside projections of population growth, climate- and land-use-change and water demand to assess future impacts on water security across the basin. Key stakeholders are involved throughout the different stages of the project to ensure that project outputs reflect their interests and concerns and provide useful input to their decision making.

Communities of plants, insect herbivores, and their insect parasitoid enemies provide most of the known species on Earth. These communities include interactions that lead to economic damage, such as pests of crops, and others that benefit human societies, such as biocontrol agents. Despite their importance, we still know little about what determines which species eat, or are eaten by, other species. We know most about links between plants and herbivores, less about herbivores and parasitoids, and less again about patterns over all three levels combined. A key question is the extent to which such three level (tritrophic) species associations are structured from the 'bottom-up' by plant traits, from the 'top-down' by parasitoids, or some combination of these. The 'bottom-up' view regards herbivore-parasitoid interactions as structured by processes happening a trophic level lower, via the effects of plants on herbivores. In contrast, the 'top-down' view sees parasitoid-herbivore interactions as driving the evolution of herbivore defences, and these traits as more important for structuring parasitoid communities than the host plants on which they are found. This project assesses the evidence for these alternative models, and their combinations, using state of the art statistical methods that require three types of data: (i) an interaction matrix, summarising links between species in one trophic level and those in another; (ii) herbivore defence trait data and (iii) complete species-level phylogenies for plants, herbivores and their parasitoids. Finding that plant phylogeny is a strong predictor of both plant-herbivore and herbivore-parasitoid interactions would support the bottom-up view. In contrast, finding that herbivore-parasitoid interactions are strongly predicted by herbivore defensive traits would support a top-down view. First, we will estimate the effects of species identity and traits on plant-herbivore and herbivore-parasitoid interactions, providing the first test of the relative importance of bottom-up versus top-down processes. We will use over 50,000 records of specific plant-herbivore-parasitoid interactions for natural communities comprising trees, gallwasp herbivores, and chalcid parasitoids, sampled from three regional datasets that span the Northern Hemisphere. These communities have evolved independently for long enough to provide largely independent tests of our hypotheses. Second, we ask whether herbivores in our three regional communities have independently evolved similar sets of defences. If top-down effects are strong, and herbivore defences target fundamental aspects of parasitoid attack behaviour, then selection should favour the repeated evolution of similar sets of defensive traits. Gallwasp herbivores live inside galls, complex novel plant tissues whose development the larval wasps induce. Parasitoids all attack gallwasps by drilling through gall tissues, and previous work suggests that some gall traits (such as coatings of spines or sticky resins) have evolved to make this more difficult. Our hypothesis is that such gall traits will both structure parasitoid communities and have evolved repeatedly. Finally, we will assess how well our statistical models predict which parasitoids attack a novel or unsampled gallwasp herbivore when all we know about it are which plant it is on, which gall traits it has, and how it is related to other gallwasps. Our approach involves making model-based predictions for gallwasp-parasitoid interactions for which we have real data, so that via cross-validation we can assess the accuracy (i.e. whether predictions are unbiased) and precision (i.e. whether predictions are made with high confidence) of our model. This approach could be of particular value in predicting the natural enemies of emerging pests and the non-target victims of natural enemies, and we will apply it to predicting the enemies attacking oriental chestnut gallwasp, a global pest species.