Senior Fellowship in the Role of Digital Technology in Understanding, Mitigating and Adapting to Environmental Change

Digital technologies have a crucial role to play in helping scientists and other key stakeholders to more deeply understand the natural environment and its complex web of interconnected ecosystems. This deeper understanding also supports the development of more grounded mitigation and adaptation strategies in response to environmental change. This fellowship will enable myself to establish a rich, cross-disciplinary research programme at Lancaster with the goal of carrying out world leading research in the role of digital technologies in deriving such strategies. The research programme is built on three key pillars:

Digital innovation as an enabler. Technology is having a profound impact on the digital economy and many areas of society, but its role in managing environmental change is significantly under-developed. This programme will focus on three major (and complementary) areas of digital innovation, namely the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and data science: IoT has the potential to provide rich, real-time data about many facets of the natural environment at a scale previously unimaginable; cloud computing offers elastic storage and computational capacity to bring together diverse data-sets from different geographical locations and at different scales and open this up to a range of stakeholders; data science provides an abundance of analysis techniques to then make sense of the data and hence to inform mitigation strategies and associated policies.

Science as a conduit. Science has a crucial role in interpreting big data but, crucially, to achieve this, science must change. The programme will investigate how technology can support a paradigm shift in science towards an approach that: i) is more intrinsically open and collaborative through a philosophy of open data, as enabled by the cloud (e.g. including support for citizen science); ii) represents a more integrative, holistic science whereby different scientific disciplines work together, alongside social, data and computer scientists, to facilitate deeper and more meaningful data-driven understanding of ecosystems and their intrinsic complexities (again supported by cloud computing); iii) embraces complex systems thinking taking input from research on ecosystem services, complexity science and systems of systems approaches; iv) recognises the importance of uncertainty and seek technological solutions that help manage uncertainty in all its dimensions and support decision making in an uncertain and complex world.

Impact as intrinsic. One major success of the Digital Economy programme was to develop a research community and set of approaches that emphasised stakeholder engagement and impact on society. This programme builds on this experience and adopts an experimental, agile and iterative methodology involving a close collaboration with a wide range of partners/stakeholders. This inherently participative approach is carefully designed to enable insights and breakthroughs in mitigation and adaptation strategies related to water/food/energy security, national infrastructure and biodiversity loss.

This is an ambitious programme both in terms of the targeted scientific and technological discovery and also in terms of its intended impact. The impact strategy involves five strands: i) to influencing future research and funding agendas in digital technology and environmental change; ii) to support a paradigm shift in science towards an approach that more intrinsically open and collaborative, integrative, that is data-driven, and that deals intrinsically with complexity and uncertainty; iii) to support the development of well-informed policy policies and strategies for mitigation and adaptation in the face of environmental change; iv) to seek pathways to innovation based on the research results and insights; v) to use a range of novel means, including digital media, to communicate with the general public.

These all require the deep involvement of a range of stakeholders, and having a vibrant community underpins the whole impact strategy. The programme of work therefore emphasises community building and engagement.

One major success of the Digital Economy programme was to develop a research community and set of approaches that emphasised stakeholder engagement and impact on society. This proposed programme builds on this experience and adopts a methodology, called Speedplay developed in the CaTalyST project. Speedplay combines elements of agile, iterative development with principles drawn from action research and participatory design. The former allow experimental projects to be built rapidly with limited resources; the latter allow for a proper understanding of the societal context and needs of stakeholders. Developing this further, in the approach stakeholders are not simply 'involved' in the software development process but they jointly set the research agenda and pro-actively engage in the design and development process.

A range of other mechanisms are also planned to enhance community building and engagement, and the impact of the work, including: i) the organisation of facilitated community events, for information exchange and sharing but also to explore equipping the community to enhance its impact and influence policy; ii) the organisation of a high profile summit focusing on digital technology and LWEC; iii) the production of a set of policy and production notes for the associated LWEC series; iv) the running of an open competition offering five small grants of £10,000 as seed-corn funding for potentially impactful innovations in this space (hence drawing in other parties); v) the production of a series of short films (available through a youtube channel) to communicate results (mirroring an impact strategy used successfully in CaTalyST); vi) the pro-active offering of seminars nationally/internationally on the topic of the research. The PI will also exploit existing links, particularly with research councils and the Belmont Forum to further disseminate the results.

Research collaborations and partnerships are crucial to our mode of working and to our impact strategy, and organisations involved include the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), Small World Consulting, JBA Trust, Microsoft Research, the Alan Turing Institute, the JRC Science Hub, the Environment Agency and the Digital Catapult. The LWEC network is also very important to the project and is strongly encouraged to participate in sprints and events (the PI has links with at least eleven of the members).


The programme of research will be overseen by a Steering Committee and its membership and terms of reference will be established in close cooperation with the LWEC and DE programmes. This steering committee will ensure the relevance of the research to the funding bodies and greater LWEC community.