Water networks have been integral to the expansion of urban centres and the development and expansion of trade, thus also interacting with flood control strategies and the construction and maintenance of rural landscapes. There has been a long history of artistic and cultural representation of these waterways, and the life that they have brought to their surrounding landscapes. This is in danger of being lost. In this post-industrial age it is therefore necessary to develop new, more coordinated, strategies to promote memory and identity of river cultures, linking institutional activities and encouraging the exchange of experiences. The presence in many European countries of artificial waterways and connected natural hydrography can thus be considered a significant cultural heritage. Characterized by an intrinsic hydraulic complexity, this heritage goes back far in time at least to the Middle Ages, develops further during the Renaissance and reaches its maturity during the industrial era. In some cases, this hydraulic network is already a tourist attraction; in other cases, it has a hidden potential for sustainable development. Such a precious, historic heritage deserves today a renewed, coordinated commitment to its re-evaluation, by considering both the structural heritage of the waterways (canals, bridges, locks, shipyards, mills, quays) and the artistic and cultural artefacts that are now in peril (artistic and cultural interpretations of river life, traditional wooden boats and other crafts). The research will be undertaken from a multi-disciplinary perspective, involving teams from the University of Brighton (UK), University Ca Foscari Venice (Italy), the University of Leiden and the Free University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and the University of Gerona (Spain). The project will bring cultural geography into conversation with art history, oral history, digital media and design. In the contexts of geography and spatial planning, discourses about the cultural-historical dimensions of landscape are elaborate and on-going, particularly in the field of cultural geography. At the same time, in the humanities - for example in the research field of 'ecocriticism' - a growing interest in ecological concerns is being expressed by artists and writers. From the diverse disciplines of geography, spatial planning and the humanities, there is thus clearly a need to research how (both historical and contemporary) cultural heritage can contribute to our knowledge about land and waterscapes. Allied to this is a broad wish to explore the new opportunities offered by digital media to record, represent and interpret cultural heritage, particularly where it engages with often hidden secondary and essentially local communities and their environments. This project aims to develop these theoretical discussions and to elaborate - beyond theory and at the same time developing theory further - concrete tools in which both oral history and cultural heritage information are linked to geospatial information that can be shared with the communities that created the content, as well as the wider public, government agencies and other bodies who share a stake in the future of Europe's rich heritage of secondary waterways and associated waterscapes.

The proposed project seeks to change current asset management practice with an economically viable monitoring and early warning system, PRIME, that produces near-real-time information to provide decision support and 'solutions' for a range of infrastructure earthwork instability problems. In particular, this project aims to demonstrate and validate newly developed geophysical monitoring technology as a means of improving the resilience of vulnerable rail and water transportation earthworks infrastructure to environmental risks, such as extreme weather and flooding. The new technology could stream near-real-time information on the internal condition of earthworks direct to geotechnical asset owners - thereby allowing slope failure processes to be identified at an early stage so low cost preventative intervention can be planned with minimal disruption to infrastructure (rather than high-cost renewal and remediation of catastrophic earthwork failures, which can be highly disruptive - particularly for the rail industry due to financial penalties associated with delays). In response to guidance by the industrial partners we aim to further demonstrate and validate the PRIME concept by testing the approach in a greater range of operational settings, including a railway embankment and a water retaining structure on the canal network. This will allow the project team (asset owners, managers and research providers) to consider a range of practical deployment options, demonstrate an adaptive intelligent monitoring approach, undertake a cost benefit analysis, and formally assess the Technology Readiness Level of PRIME by drawing upon the outcomes of the case studies developed under this project and the study undertaken during the related Innovation B project. The overarching aim of the project is to provide the necessary evidence to the stakeholders that PRIME is applicable as an economically viable monitoring, early warning and decision support system (i.e. a 'solution') for a range of infrastructure earthwork instability problems.

Partners: Environment Agency, Canal & River Trust, Northern Ireland Water/Aecom, RSK Challenge: Our partners collectively own over 10,000km of water retaining earthworks (embankments/dams), which protect large areas of the UK from flooding. Recent effects of extreme weather on UK earthworks have highlighted their vulnerability to climate change with numerous failures reported across a range of infrastructure networks. Given that climatic variations are projected to become more extreme, developing and maintaining resilient infrastructure is essential to our partners and all UK geotechnical asset owners. Early identification of poor/deteriorating earthwork condition is essential for cost effective maintenance and prevention of hazardous and expensive failures. Current earthwork condition assessment practice is, however, usually based on visual observations with little/no information available on their underlying internal condition. This project will demonstrate an innovative geophysical approach, using seismic surface waves (SW), for non-invasively assessing internal earthwork condition, while also adapting the outputs to ensure compatibility with our partner's management systems. This approach will support asset management decisions, including, for example, maintenance prioritisation; selection/configuration of monitoring works and selection/targeting of interventions. The speed of SW data acquisition, high spatial coverage and relative low-cost of these measurements will remove key barriers to preventative management. Aims/Objectives: This project aims to translate the findings from a recent EPSRC project "GEOCARE" to asset owners/managers of water retaining earthworks that protect the UK from flooding. The objectives (O) and supporting activities (A) are: O) Demonstrate an innovative approach for assessing internal earthwork condition. A) SW data will be acquired at selected partner sites and will be used to derive 2D/3D asset condition models. O) Adapt this technology to ensure compatibility with our partners' management systems. A) Project staff will be seconded to each partner organisation for short periods in order to better understand their condition assessment practices, databases, and to optimise survey outputs to their requirements. Regular stakeholder meetings with our partners' will also ensure that scientific, engineering and information delivery developments are appropriate. O) Permanently embed this knowledge and capability within our project partners. A) In addition to secondments and stakeholder meetings, guidelines on the integration of SW into asset ranking, prioritisation and intervention planning will be written. O) Widely disseminate the project's technological outcomes. A) A workshop will be organised to showcase the project's technological outcomes to a wide audience. Results and recommendations will be further disseminated through a project website, articles in industry magazines and via a case study with CIRIA. Main Deliverables: 2D/3D voxelated condition models will be developed for each partner's site, to showcase SW technology (D1). This will enable early informed decisions on maintenance and remediation to be made, thereby removing a barrier to preventative management. These models will be integrated within our partner's management systems (D2) following consultation and secondments at each organisation. Guidelines on the use of SW outputs in condition assessment practice (D3) will be developed for each partner to further embed the knowledge. A workshop will be organised to showcase the project's technological outcomes and benefits to proactive asset management to a wide stakeholder audience (D4). Results and recommendations will be further disseminated through a project website (D5), articles in industry magazines (D6) and via publication of a case study with CIRIA (D7). Duration: 12 months Total cost: £139,866

Green and blue spaces (GI) can directly and indirectly influence human health and wellbeing. However, access to health and wellbeing benefits is not shared equally amongst the population, particularly in urban areas. Research shows that people aged 65 and over are most likely to suffer from poor health, yet this group may be the least likely to benefit from GI. Although good health and wellbeing in an ageing population might be promoted through access to GI, using GI may not always be beneficial particularly as older people can be more susceptible to environmental stressors. Understanding how GI is valued in the context of the health and wellbeing of older people is one such unknown. This value might include the monetary value of preventing ill-health but also broader interpretations, such as the historical, heritage or wildlife value that influences whether older people actively seek experiences in green and blue spaces. The GHIA research project; 'Green Infrastructure and the Health and Wellbeing Influences on an Ageing Population' aims to better understand the benefits and values of urban GI for older people and how GI and specific 'greening projects' can be best used to support healthy ageing in urban areas. The proposed case-study area is Greater Manchester (GM). GM is the first northern city to adopt a devolutionary settlement including control of health and social care spending. The research team are partnering with organisations involved in improving the health and wellbeing of older people and the design and management of GI across GM, including GM's Red Rose Forest, Public Health Manchester, Manchester City Council and Manchester Arts and Galleries Partnership. A core part of the research will look at how the research findings can be translated into policy and practice and the transferability of findings to other cities, potentially with similarly devolved powers. It will do this by involving older people as 'co-producers' of the research to better understand thoughts, experiences and values that are associated with green and blue spaces. This will have a particular arts focus, including storytelling, sensory engagement and offering new experiences for engaging with green and blue spaces. Different types of urban GI will be used, including green 'patches' within the city (e.g. urban parks), green and blue 'corridors' (e.g. canals and waterways) and green spaces within the wider urban fabric or 'matrix' (e.g. private gardens). This co-production of research findings will be linked to all the other areas of work undertaken in the project. Other aspects of research will be conducted on the potential benefits and disbenefits of green spaces on ageing health and wellbeing and the value that this provides. This will include looking for relationships between health data and the occurrence of GI across space, 'before and after studies' exploring the influence that different greening projects have on the physical activity of older people, measuring how GI may affect older people's exposure to environmental hazards (such as air pollution and extreme temperature) and working with people with early-onset dementia to understand how they appreciate the urban landscape through different 'sensory' perceptions. The findings from the other components of the research will then be used to explore the values applied to the GI benefits and how these can help guide policy and practice. This will include evaluating existing measures of valuing greenspace, including monetary valuation and then work with older people to understand broader interpretations of value, such as culture, heritage, history and the natural or 'biodiversity' value. These findings will be used to develop online mapping tools that demonstrate the needs, provision and value of GI for older people. The team will then work to explore how these findings relate to other locations and communicate findings to urban areas across the UK.

Methane is a greenhouse gas with 86 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period - the timescale in which global action to reduce carbon emissions and limit catastrophic climate change is needed. Atmospheric methane concentrations have increased by 0.5% per year since 2010, yet to achieve the Paris Climate target limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius it needs to decrease by 0.9% per year between 2010 and 2050. Roughly half the methane currently in the atmosphere comes from human activity, so addressing human-driven methane emissions is crucial to achieving climate targets. This fellowship will allow me to build a team to help address the global rise in methane emissions. This will be achieved via three work packages (WPs) that deliver technical solutions to key challenges standing in the way of a reduction in human-driven methane emissions. These technical solutions will be developed and applied in urban waterways (city rivers and canals) because these systems can act as conduits for human-driven methane emissions to the atmosphere. Urban waterways can receive a wide range of methane inputs, such as leaky gas and wastewater pipes, and will come under increasing human pressure with more than 5 billion people predicted to live in cities by 2030. WP1. How do we accurately measure methane emissions? Methane emissions can vary substantially over short spatial (meters) and temporal (hours) scales. The fellowship will deliver instrumentation that can measure methane emissions at spatial and temporal resolutions far surpassing current capabilities, and use it to quantify the contribution of urban waterways to city-scale methane inventories across globally representative locations (UK, Europe, USA, China, Bangladesh). WP2. Where do methane emissions originate? Methane emissions can be driven directly by human activity, such as leaky pipes, or indirectly by increasing the production of methane in waterways. The techniques used in this fellowship will distinguish natural from human-driven methane by measuring methane/ethane ratios and methane stable (C-13) isotopes at the same high resolutions as in WP1. This will be coupled with targeted methane radio- (C-14) and stable (H-2) isotopes, and geochemical and microbial characterisation of urban waterways. Methane emissions and origin will be mapped out for entire urban waterway networks to determine the key controls of methane release to the atmosphere. WP3. How do we reduce methane emissions? The mapping of controls on methane release, coupled to detailed microbial characterisation through in-situ and lab incubations, will be used to deliver techniques to a) detect methane leaks, even ones hidden underground, and b) prevent the emission of human-driven methane to the atmosphere by developing bioremediation strategies. For example, how do urban waterway microbes respond to methane leaks, and can we utilise these microbes to rapidly oxidise leaking methane before it reaches the atmosphere? With a wide range of potential human-driven methane sources, urban waterways provide a strong testbed for the proposed techniques. These techniques will be delivered as a toolbox for research, industry and policy end-users. The toolbox will be developed in collaboration with project partners such as Shell and the UK Environment Agency via a research and industry-led steering committee (see letters of support). This fellowship provides the flexibility, training and time required to deliver a user-focused toolbox containing: 1) instrumentation to capture the spatial and temporal variability of methane emissions 2) a freely available reference database of methane isotopes and associated geochemical and microbial signatures to identify methane origins 3) tangible solutions to detect and reduce human-driven methane emissions to the atmosphere, developed in collaboration with industry and policy focused partners.