Knowledge Exchange Fellowship: Bringing the data revolution to nature recovery

The recent rise in awareness of environmental issues has prompted a strong policy response from governments across the world. The UK and Devolved Governments' responses to this crisis include ambitious policies such as the 25 Year Environment Plan and Nature Recovery Network (for England), the Future Generations Act (in Wales), The Environment Strategy for Scotland and the Environment Strategy for Northern Ireland. These policies aim to halt biodiversity loss and restore healthy and productive ecosystems, by empowering devolved administrations and local communities to look after their environment for the benefit of nature and society.

Evaluating the success of these policies and initiatives requires monitoring data to establish a baseline and track progress towards environmental goals. However, despite the UK's long tradition of monitoring biodiversity through citizen science and various national and local wildlife monitoring schemes, it remains technically challenging to derive robust biodiversity trends from available data.

NERC funded science has tackled some of these challenges by developing novel analytical solutions. National Capability programmes, such as ASSIST and UK-SCAPE, and other funding initiatives, such as the Emerging Risks of Chemicals in the Environment and Constructing a Digital Environment programmes are actively contributing to the development of novel statistical methods to analyse citizen science data to derive robust biodiversity trends, as well as software to implement these methods and convert the results into national biodiversity indicators.

NERC funded research has generated a considerable amount of knowledge and expertise around biodiversity assessment. However, significant barriers to uptake have hampered the degree to which this knowledge has benefitted organisations responsible for the delivery of environmental policy. NERC-funded research has enormous potential to support the ambitious goals for nature recovery, at a range of scales. There is great demand for the analytical tools and expertise generated by NERC science among organisations that will deliver nature recovery (e.g. conservation agencies, wildlife trusts).

This KE project's main goal is to translate NERC funded methodological advances in biodiversity monitoring and analysis into a form that is directly accessible to data holders, land managers, policy makers and conservation practitioners. This goal will be achieved through a two-way knowledge flow: co-design, co-development and co-delivery with key stakeholders and representatives of the conservation community across the UK. This may include user narrative documentation or digital tools for the sharing of data and data analysis workflows. Once developed, these products will be promoted to a large audience of stakeholders through a series of workshops and events.

I will create a community of practice among the stakeholders and researchers in the field of data science for nature conservation in order for the knowledge flow to continue beyond the lifetime of this fellowship. I will organise a series of workshops and hackathons to stimulate new ideas, identify new and future opportunities for KE and provide training and support. This engagement space will encourage discussions, which will facilitate the co-development of new research and the quick uptake of any future analytical developments by the relevant end users.

There is great need for on-the-ground solutions to deliver national environmental policies at the local scale and this fellowship will meet this demand by making biodiversity data and data science tools more accessible. Ultimately, the fellowship will help national and local organisations to achieve their environmental policy targets by increasing the usability of biodiversity monitoring data and supporting an evidence-based approach to nature recovery planning.