NEC06094 Effective Management of National Trust Freshwater Assets

The National Trust (NT) has an ambitious plan to halt biodiversity loss and restore the parts of the natural environment that are in its care, including freshwater lakes and ornamental ponds. NERC funded research has indicated that UK lakes and ponds are sensitive to climate change, nutrient pollution and the ingress of non-native species. To safeguard NT sites, they rely on access to cutting-edge scientific evidence on environmental management as well as income to support on-the-ground land and water management measures. The relationship between NT members (about 4.5 million) and visitors (about 20 million paying visitors per year) and the quality of the 250,000 ha of land under NT care is clear - as the quality of the NT environment increases so the number of visitors and the income generated will also increase, in turn, providing increased resource for environmental management. This challenge seems logical, but NT staff are struggling to achieve it, especially for freshwaters, as a result of poor access to current scientific evidence (e.g. date data, decision support tools, expertise and guidance) with which best-practice management measures can be identified and implemented. This increases the likelihood of ineffective and costly management. This project will accelerate the translation of NERC funded research (~£20m) in freshwater ecology and lake restoration to address this problem by delivering a series of co-developed outputs and outcomes that will transform the management of freshwater ecosystems by NT staff at the national scale.

We propose a NERC Innovation Internship to be embedded for 100% of the project duration within NT to act as a conduit between CEH staff and the knowledge exchange network and NT staff. By building new relationships and building on existing ones the internship will deliver a series of tasks and outputs, and will measure the success of the project using data on NT interests.

Our project will construct a knowledge exchange network of experts that will outlast the life time of this project to provide evidence across a wide range of fields (e.g. regulation, academia, industry, policy, and public bodies). Existing NT guidance and policies on lake and pond management will be reviewed and revised to ensure that NT staff have access to easy-to-understand and up-to-date guidance notes on management of freshwater resources. To accompany this, a peer reviewed publication will be produced outlining the conceptual approach of managing freshwaters to achieve both conservation and amenity value, this representing a novel approach. Relevant data on NT interests (e.g. cost of current management measures, visitor numbers, public perception of water quality etc.) and site attributes (e.g. including catchment types, species distributions etc.) will be compiled into a common data base and handed over to NT as an ArcGIS data layer with which management and site attributes can be interrogated. Lessons will be learned from specific case studies through dialogue with NT regional staff to provide a dossier of evidence to inform guidance. The information and outputs gathered throughout the project will be communicated through knowledge exchange activities. These will include internal NT training workshops as well as increasing public awareness of the causes and solutions of biodiversity loss in NT waterbodies and actions (including citizen's science monitoring plan) that can be taken to redress this through educational films and web based outputs through NT publications.

This project represents the start of a long and exciting partnership between NERC CEH and the NT. Using data on NT site interests, we will assess the success of the project and compile an Innovation Project Highlight case study report for NERC.