People have been observing and recording information on the marine environment for hundreds of years. Historians - and fishers - thus have unique access to valuable knowledge directly applicable to conservation and sustainable management. Yet they - and the spheres of knowledge they command - remain underused by rigid modern quantitative scientific approaches, where 'long-term' data can mean just a few decades, risking 'shifting baseline syndrome'. Drawing on unconventional knowledge is therefore essential for the effective current and future management of our natural environments, especially in the context of policy aiming to restore ecosystems, and in a changing climate. Our research will ask: can historians and scientists effectively convert historical information into knowledge that directly and tangibly informs marine ecosystem management for today and tomorrow? We will demonstrate the synergistic value of bringing together these disciplines to unlock the potential of historical data on a marine ecosystem component of fundamental importance in the northeast Atlantic, herring Clupea harengus. The herring had vast fisheries around the UK until their collapse around the mid-20th century. Modern scientific surveys identifying the spawning grounds of herring - sensitive to human pressures and in need of protection - after this, in the 1970s. They may therefore overlook historically important spawning grounds, which can suddenly be recolonised by recovering stocks. Using historical sources from the 17th to early 20th centuries - such as writings of early modern naturalists and travellers, newspaper archives, and Government enquiries, and the memory of living fishers - we will identify ecologically important herring spawning areas and characterise the long-term century-scale variation in spawning activity in response to changing climate, while advancing our knowledge of the social, economic and cultural context in which this knowledge was recorded. Identifying these areas using a cross-disciplinary integration of knowledge therefore has the potential to contribute to the sustainable management of herring, and the economic activity (fisheries) and other species (top predators, e.g. seabirds, sharks) which depend on it.

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission will provide for the first time from space two-dimensional high-resolution maps of surface water levels globally over ocean and inland waters. If SWOT meets its performance targets, it will represent a major milestone in our ability to observe, study and understand the nature and evolution of the Earth's marine and land surface water systems, globally. The UK Space Agency invested in SWOT jointly with the US NASA, French CNES and Canadian Space Agency to enable the implementation and launch of this mission. The SWOT-UK project proposes a comprehensive programme of campaigns and multidisciplinary research centred on the Bristol Channel and River Severn region as the UK contribution to the international SWOT Science Team validation efforts. In accordance with the requirements of the NERC/UKSA SWOT CalVal call, SWOT-UK takes an open and inclusive approach, putting special emphasis on disseminating value-added SWOT validation datasets and engaging with the wider UK science and stakeholder communities to raise awareness of the SWOT capabilities.

Expansion of the tidal-stream marine renewable energy (MRE) sector is desirable but poses potential risks to the surrounding marine environment. One potential risk involves marine mammals and other species colliding with rotating tidal turbine blades. Concern about potential collision-driven mortality or injury of these charismatic protected species has led to regulators (including project partners Marine Scotland [MS], Scottish Natural Heritage [SNH] and Natural Resources Wales [NRW]) adopting a precautionary approach when considering consent applications, resulting in a slowdown in MRE site development. If animals are to avoid collision they will need sufficient warning of turbines' presence to take timely action. With water flow and swimming speeds significantly restricting visual detection ranges, long-range detection (i.e. warning) will be through acoustic means. However there is uncertainty over whether animals can hear turbines over naturally occurring ambient noise in these energetic sites (from water flow, bed load transport and turbulence). As a result, developers and regulators (incl. MS) are considering whether to add extra noise sources to their turbines to ensure animals can perceive and avoid them. Other industries such as aquaculture, fishing and construction use Acoustic Deterrent Devices (ADDs) to scare seals and other animals away from potentially dangerous areas by producing loud, aversive sounds. For this reason ADDs are currently being considered as a mitigation method to reduce potential collision risk among tidal turbines. However, concerns exist regarding potential undue long-term exclusion of animals from large areas, especially as tidal-stream MRE turbines are intended to operate for decades rather than short periods. Furthermore it is not clear over what range ADDs will be audible given the already noisy environments targeted for turbine placement, and how this might vary over the tidal cycle. There is therefore an urgent need to assess the detectability (or not) of ADDs in these environments. The overall project objective is to clarify how the detectability of commercially available ADDs in real tidal-stream environments varies across collision-relevant spatial scales (at least tens to hundreds of metres, but potentially further dependent on ambient noise levels) and across the ebb-flood and spring-neap tidal cycles. A detailed analysis of existing acoustic datasets from tidal-stream environments will allow us to understand how ambient noise levels vary across tidal cycles across frequencies relevant to marine mammal hearing. This will allow development of improved range-dependent sound propagation models describing ADD signal transmission in tidal-stream environments. The transmission of different ADD signals will then be experimentally tested under varying flow conditions to assess ranges of acoustic detectability, validate propagation models and consider likely impacts on marine mammals. This will improve our understanding of whether or not ADDs could provide a suitable mitigation technique to reduce potential collision rates of marine mammals with tidal turbines. The impact of the expected outcomes of this proposal will be to allow the regulatory project partners (Marine Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage and Natural Resources Wales) to develop long-term evidence-based policies concerning the use of ADDs as a practical and proportionate means to mitigate marine mammal collision risk potentially posed by tidal turbines. Such policies will contribute towards long-term environmental sustainability of the MRE sector and improve Scotland's and Wales' ability to fulfil their (inter-)national obligations in terms of conservation of marine mammals and other mobile marine species.

Despite increasing recognition of connections between natural environment and human health and wellbeing, these links are still poorly understood. There is a real need to develop methodological approaches to fully elucidate natural environments for health and wellbeing. To address this need the CoastWEB project aims to holistically value the contribution which coastal habitats make to human health and wellbeing, with a focus on the alleviation of coastal natural hazards and extreme events. The research is ambitious in its interdisciplinary scope, including art, social and environmental psychology, environmental economics, governance, policy, a suite of natural sciences, and non-academic stakeholders. It also covers a range of scales from local Welsh case study sites to UK national. We are proposing a circular 4 step process: 1. The proposed research begins with the definition of a set of "real world" future interventions for Welsh salt marsh ecosystems, with a particular focus on coastal defence, and set within a broader national policy context. It is critical that the outputs of this research are useful to end users, and not just academic, as such the definition of these options will be made in close collaboration with a broad range of stakeholders. 2. The impact of these interventions on saltmarsh coastal defence capacity will then be explored using natural science and modelling techniques, improving our understanding of the key ecosystem processes and attributes which influence this capacity. The impact on other ecosystem services will also be documented using existing literature. A key output of this step will be the production of Wales-wide maps of changes in salt marsh coastal defence services, under differing interventions. 3. The impact of these changes in coastal defence, and broader ecosystem service delivery, will be linked to changes in human health and wellbeing at both a local community and national scale. The local wellbeing impacts will be explored through the application of qualitative dialogue based techniques, whereas the national scale impacts will be explored through quantitative (monetary and non-monetary) survey techniques. 4. Through mapping and workshops, using both an interactive artistic approach (local) and the established modelling platform, TIM (national), the health and wellbeing results will then feed directly back into the stakeholder base and the management of the salt marsh, as they will provide a unique insight into the broader health and wellbeing aspects of salt marshes, under the future interventions proposed in step 1. The mixed methods approach proposed will provide a greater understanding examining health and wellbeing in different ways, enabling our ability to handle different understandings and interpretations of value. However, the aim is not to use different disciplines to translate for each other, or to combine results into one metric, but rather to embrace the differences in the approaches and outputs and to explore how they can complement each other. Using these complementary approaches and scales is beneficial in providing managers with a diverse array of information for making decisions.

In recent years environmental and social scientists working with economists have begun to understand the value that nature provides to society. These 'ecosystem services' (ES) include things like the provisioning of food and fuel, regulating water quality and quantity, reducing pollution, storing carbon and producing landscapes and features of cultural and aesthetic significance. Using a range of widely agreed methods it has been possible to put economic values on these services and the stock of ES is referred to as 'natural capital'. These ideas have allowed nature to be included in the way that organisations and societies plan and make decisions. Economic development, for example, that erodes natural capital might be considered undesirable, especially if the loss of natural capital outweighs the benefit of the development. Another term, 'green infrastructure' (GI) is used to describe the natural or semi-natural features such as hedgerows, parkland and street trees that make up part of human landscapes. GI can provide ecosystem services and therefore adds to natural capital. Urban trees, for example, regulate water flow, take in carbon dioxide, can reduce air pollution and have cultural significance. Although these ideas are well developed in theory, applying them in practice has proved more challenging because the data required to calculate ES valuations are not widely available and the methods used are complex. This is a barrier to governments and businesses understanding and using these important ideas in their planning and decision making, and more so for individual citizens, small organisations or community groups who might be interested in the real value of their environment. The VITAL project is made up of environmental scientists from the Open University with experience of running large citizen science projects, specialists in ES and trees from Forest Research, and Treeconomics a social enterprise which has been instrumental in engaging organisations in valuing their trees. We aim to develop a system that allows anyone from individual citizens to local authorities, businesses and large organisations to value the trees around them. We will significantly improve an existing OU citizen science tool: 'Treezilla' which allows users to map and gives ES valuations of trees, so that it links with the most widely used professional system for ES tree valuation: i-Tree Eco. These improvements will give all users access to powerful tools for valuing trees. We will engineer these systems such that data from one feeds into the other, and as more data are collected in Treezilla, it is used to refine the system further. The value of our tools will be in their use by large numbers of people and organisations, so we have partnered with key organisations with interests in the value of trees in their environment to deliver the project. We will work closely with the Parks Trust Milton Keynes who are responsible for GI in one of Britain's most wooded cities, to understand how organisations can use Treezilla, using what we learn to improve training and promotion of Treezilla to other users. We will then work closely with a major governmental organisation: Natural Resources Wales to deliver specific projects demonstrating the use of Treezilla to that organisation and others like it. Through a third partnership, with The Tree Council, which has tens of members made up of local authorities, community groups and small and large charities, and supports a national network of 8000 volunteer Tree Wardens, we will communicate our tools and what we have learned to a very large number of potential users. These, and all users of Treezilla, will have free and open access to tools for valuing trees and the same access to a massive and growing dataset of trees and tree valuations from across the UK.