Predicting future cultural and natural heritage scenarios on common land.

Commoners on England's uplands are increasingly being asked to deliver public goods, i.e. ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, water quality regulation, maintaining biodiversity, and landscape aesthetics. Common land encompasses large tracts of our most well-loved and ecologically rich landscapes, as well as 20% of our SSSIs, and is key to ecosystem service provision and biodiversity conservation within England. Given the imminent introduction of ELMs, tenant farmers and owners of common land are faced with new management decisions that affect the natural and cultural heritage and livelihoods supported by the land. This PhD project investigates the consequences of individual and collective farmer decision-making for natural and cultural heritage across large upland commons landscapes. The PhD is interdisciplinary, developing an integrated understanding of how policy, social capital, environmental change, and digital technology incentivise farmer decision-making, and how decisions affect the ecosystem services and biodiversity supported by common upland. We focus on the Lake District UNESCO World Heritage Site, particularly the Buttermere Fells and Kinniside Common.
Aims: Co-develop management scenarios with commoners, investigating the impact of emerging policy and innovative technology on decision-making. Simulate future vegetation scenarios across Derwent and Kinniside based on management decisions and climate change. Model carbon sequestration under management scenarios. Model biodiversity consequences of management scenarios. Model impacts of ELM design for scheme take up on common land, to cover effect of property rights distribution, SSSI designation and farm business drivers. Explore how the predictions can be used by tenant farmers and other commoners to inform management decisions, by landowners to coordinate management strategically, and to inform the extension of the Farm Carbon Toolkit to common land.