Supporting practitioners and decision makers in achieving more ecologically sustainable infrastructure development

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NERC
NERC
NERC
NERC
NERC

£457,915

Feb. 1, 2019

May 31, 2021

This Fellowship will help resolve ongoing conflicts between two national priorities: the need for new infrastructure, and the safeguarding of protected species and their habitats. Improving national infrastructure is one of the 5 key pillars of the UK's Industrial Strategy. Alongside major enhancements to the transport networks and energy security, the National Infrastructure Delivery Plan includes the large-scale supply of housing, with the ambition to build 300,000 new homes per year. Yet the sustainable management of natural resources, including biodiversity, is also fundamental to the UK's long-term economic and social well-being. Ensuring the ecological sustainability of projected growth in the built environment is, for this reason, a pressing challenge. NERC science can help to meet this challenge only if it is readily accessible, in suitable formats, and accompanied by two-way dialogue between users and researchers. This Fellowship will help practitioners and decision makers to understand and mitigate more effectively for the impacts of major infrastructure developments on protected wildlife and habitats. It will therefore allow the Statutory Nature Conservation Bodies (SNCBs), as well as other stakeholders, to achieve their stated objectives of more strategic environmental protection and more robust and transparent decision-making.

I will build on a highly successful track record of end-user engagement to summarise and communicate evidence on the ecological impacts of major infrastructure (e.g. Mathews et al. 2015; Fensome et al. 2016; Lintott et al. 2016). Working with partners including the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management and the SNCBs, I will develop new Good Practice Guidelines. Evidence gaps will be co-identified and prioritised with stakeholders, and strategies will be developed to address them. Approaches will include the tailored analysis of existing data, the development of collaborative grant applications for new research, and the improvement of monitoring strategies used by industry. For example, one of my PhD students is about to go on secondment to Natural England's Reform Team, exploring how new modelling approaches can be used to minimise the impacts of built developments on greater horseshoe bats. This involves transposing research models built for this species to a new, larger, geographical area. In this Fellowship, I will assess and pilot the feasibility of extending the approach to other species. I will also explore how the modelling approach could be aligned with stakeholder's existing computing and modelling capabilities, enabling its future use 'in house' without continual dependency on academic partner input. Responding to users' needs, and aligning with Defra's strategic aim (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/defragroup- areas-of-research-interest) to "make more effective use of observations, data and processes to better understand risk, uncertainties and complexities in decision making", I will also support the development of rigorous ecological monitoring and mitigation schemes. Whilst ecological field surveys at development sites frequently utilise techniques developed by research scientists, limited understanding of statistical principles and of alternative techniques (e.g. theoretical modelling, population genetics) means that many schemes are currently open to legal challenge for being either disproportionate in terms of cost and time, or for failing to provide the required evidence. Improved monitoring strategies will also help to fill the evidence gaps identified in this Fellowship.