Predicting future cultural and natural heritage scenarios on common land. NERC RENEW PhD Studentship 2022/23Project Information:

Commoners on England's upland systems 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 therefore 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 will investigate the consequences of individual and collective farmer decision-making for natural and cultural heritage across large upland commons landscapes. The PhD will be interdisciplinary, developing an integrated understanding of how policy, social capital, environmental change, and digital technology incentivise farmer decision-making, and how the decisions affect the ecosystem services and biodiversity supported by common upland. We will focus on the Lake District UNESCO World Heritage Site, particularly the Buttermere Fells and Kinniside Common. Our partners are working with farmers in these areas to understand how best to incentivise heritage improvement. We will both leverage this growing knowledge and feed back into the farming community and partners.Aims: Co-develop possible 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 a key ecosystem service (likely carbon sequestration) under management scenarios Model biodiversity consequences (breeding bird and rare plant distributions) 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 (i.e. the National Trust) to coordinate management strategically, and to inform the extension of the Farm Carbon Toolkit to common land.The PhD would be supervised jointly between the University of Exeter, the National Trust (NT), the Foundation for Common Land (FCL) / Centre for National Parks and Protected Areas at the University of Cumbria, and be initially supported by the Our Upland Commons project. The student would be based primarily at U. Exeter's Penryn campus, but would spend time embedded within the FCL team on the University of Cumbria's Ambleside campus.