UK-SCAPE Engagement

Public engagement at Climate Science Showcase | 6 November 2021 | Edinburgh

Over 250 people engaged with the UKCEH Team at the Dynamic Earth-hosted Climate Science Showcase during the Glasgow COP26 week. Highlights:

• Over 100 children and adults wrote a wish for the future on the Wishing Tree
• 70 children and adults discovered the carbon dioxide concentration in the air when they took their first breath
• 55 children and adults learned how scientists measure carbon dioxide in the air.

The following event report is available: Dick, J. Helfter, C., Raine, B., White S., Beel, G., Braban, C., Yeung, K. (2021). UKCEH at the Climate Science Showcase, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH Project: 06948; NERC National Capability LTS-S: UK-SCAPE; NE/R016429/1).  19p. (Unpublished)

Public engagement at Edinburgh Climate Festival | 14 August 2021 | Edinburgh

In total over 200 people engaged with the UKCEH team to discuss the science conducted at their local institution. The long-term monitoring conducted in the UK-SCAPE programme was highlighted. For more information see:

• Blog: UKCEH highlights science at the Edinburgh Climate Festival
• Report: Full report on the NERC Open Research Archive.

Survey to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on UK-SCAPE activities

The COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world in 2020 began to affect almost all aspects of life in the UK from March of that year. In order to build a picture of how UK-SCAPE was impacted, a short questionnaire was sent to UK-SCAPE activity leads in late 2020, many of whom sought input from their activity’s stakeholders. Several activities reported that, as a result of their contingency planning, disruption to their planned work was minimised. Some even reported positive impacts of the pandemic, for example, a shift to online events allowed more people to attend than if the event had been held in person. There were, however, many negative impacts, such as the curtailment of fieldwork leading to gaps in time series data.

Visual storytelling using National Capability data - training course & webinar | autumn/winter 2020–21 | Online

Presenting data and scientific concepts in engaging visual ways can greatly improve peoples’ understanding of often complex ideas. In this training course, we wanted to significantly improve the research community’s ability to tell engaging stories with data and analyses. The course aimed to increase skills in data visualisation and visual storytelling, raise awareness of UKCEH’s openly available datasets and improve our understanding of the limiting factors in data visualisation in environmental data science.

The course was aimed at both UKCEH staff and their collaborators from universities across the UK.

UK-SCAPE workshop: Underpinning Monitoring | 22–23 October 2019 | Lancaster

A UKCEH internal workshop for UK-SCAPE programme participants included a session entitled Maximising the impact of our national scale monitoring that included sessions on the benefits of effective stakeholder engagement, an exploration of approaches to community engagement and ways to record and measure engagement.

UK-SCAPE launch event | 5 December 2018 | London

Following an introduction to UK-SCAPE, we ran question and answer sessions during which we invited community members to express their opinions on co-design and explore opportunities for co-delivery and co-development of UK-SCAPE.

Stakeholder evaluation of modelled EMEP4UK gridded UK atmospheric composition data | On-line interviews | March-April 2021

The aim of the interviews was to understand from a user’s perspective the utility of the UKSCAPE modelled EMEP4UK gridded UK atmospheric composition data and enable co-production of improvements.

Dick, J, Vieno, M. 2021. Stakeholder evaluation of modelled EMEP4UK gridded UK atmospheric composition data. Wallingford, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, 21pp. (UKCEH Project no. 06948) (Unpublished)

Cumbrian Lakes Research Forum

The 8th Cumbrian Lakes Research Forum meeting took place in November as a hybrid event (online and at UKCEH Lancaster).

Cumbrian lakes: community engagement | Stakeholder meeting | 3 November 2020

The Cumbrian Lakes Monitoring Platform provides data and knowledge that contribute to our fundamental understanding of lake ecosystem function. To assess current levels of engagement, and to identify opportunities to build on this level of engagement, we held a virtual meeting in November 2020.

Mackay, E, Thackeray, S, Dick, J. 2020. Cumbrian lakes: community engagement. Stakeholder meeting 3rd Nov 2020. Lancaster, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, 19pp. (UKCEH Project no. 06948, 06953) (Unpublished)

UK-SCAPE at the British Ecological Society 2021 annual meeting

We staffed a stand at December 2021's BES meeting in Liverpool. Our aims were to:

• Advertise UK-SCAPE data and derived data products to the research community
• Promote previous research use of UK-SCAPE data and data products
• Demonstrate the Data Science Framework and seek opinions on community requirements
• Seek opinions from the research community on UK-SCAPE data and data products, delivery mechanisms, the Data Science Framework, our level of community co-dependency and future research needs in relation to UK-SCAPE deliverables.

Our stand focused on UK-SCAPE data discovery, data delivery and data use, and included demonstrating a Shiny App displaying customisable visualisations of biodiversity trends. During the event we spoke to about half of the in-person attendees (about 370 people), including conducting a roving survey that sought to gather information on UK-SCAPE data discovery, use and acknowledgement.

Data Science Framework workshop | 12 November 2019 | Manchester

The development of the UKCEH Data Science Framework (DSF) builds on community consultation over many years with members of both the UK and international long term monitoring communities. This open workshop was an opportunity to share progress on development of the DSF, explore community expectations and gather feedback and ideas from the participants. The event was extremely valuable in terms of shaping further development of the framework.

Spatially explicit data on a range of environmental resources; and the first steps towards data labs adoption by the community for specific issues pertinent to landscape decisions.​

Rennie, S, Watkins, J, Ball, L, Brown, M, Fry, M, Henrys, P, Hollaway, M, Quinn, J, Sier, A, Dick, J. 2020. Shaping the development of the UKCEH UK-SCAPE Data Science Framework. Workshop report. Lancaster, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, 26pp. (UKCEH Project no. 06948) (Unpublished)

ECN site manager views on the role of UK-SCAPE funding | 27–28 January 2020 | Lancaster

The Environmental Change Network (ECN) is a multi-agency programme. UKCEH provides central coordination and operates three of the eleven terrestrial long-term monitoring and research sites with funding from UK-SCAPE. During their annual meeting in 2020, we asked ECN site managers for their views on the role of UK-SCAPE in relation to ECN.

Dick, J, Andrews, C, Beaumont, D A, Benham, S, Bowmaker, V, Dodd, B, McKenna, C, Pallett, D, Parry, S, Rose, R, Scott, T, Schafer, S M, Taylor, C, Watson, H. 2020. UK Environmental Change Network stakeholder consultation. Wallingford, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, 18pp. (UKCEH Project no. 06948) (Unpublished)

SOC-D community engagement | a series of workshops

Community engagement is at the heart of UK-SCAPE’s Soil Organic Carbon Dynamics (SOC-D) project. A series of ongoing workshops has successfully brought together organisations involved in soils research and representatives from governmental agencies responsible for establishing soils policy. SOC-D Research Community Workshops focus on increased communication and capacity building within the UK soils research community. SOC-D National Soil Health Policy Workshops provide a forum to share thinking with respect to future soil protection policies across the UK.

To encourage open and innovative exchange of ideas, the workshops by design do not produce formal reports or recommendations. Rather, workshop outcomes are intended to foster new research collaborations, proposals and projects.

SPEED workshop on UK climate and socio-economic scenario data products | 29 April 2021 | Online

This workshop provided an opportunity to describe work conducted to date in SPEED aimed at developing a new set of climate and socio-economic scenario datasets and products for the UK, to support future research and policy on UK climate risk and resilience. The workshop was aimed at potential users of the new downscaled climate scenarios (based on the UK Climate Projections 2018, but covering a wider range of Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs)) and the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (UK-SSPs).

• Workshop videos

SPEED stakeholder workshop on co-creation of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways for the UK | 8–9 November 2018 | MacDonald Burlington Hotel, Birmingham

The SPEED project within UK-SCAPE has conducted an intensive participatory process to develop plausible future socioeconomic scenarios for the UK that can support actions to mitigate or adapt to climate change. The scenarios are based on the global Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which have been downscaled and extended for different regions (e.g. Europe) and countries, but until recently were not available for the UK. This workshop helped to create these UK-SSPs in a participatory environment. The work is reported in Pedde, et al. 2020.