Climate change represents a challenge to conservation because the species, habitats and other benefits (e.g., soil retention, maintenance of water quality, landscape value) associated with particular nature reserves and other protected areas (e.g. SSSIs) will change. Furthermore, this may undermine the legislative basis of some protected areas that have been designated as important because they support particular species or contain large numbers of individuals of certain species. Government, conservation agencies and volunteers (often through conservation charities) - stakeholders - need to meet this challenge so as to ensure that the limited resources available for conservation are deployed most efficiently. This Knowledge Exchange programme will bring together researchers and stakeholders to identify the questions that stakeholders most require answering to develop conservation strategies that are relevant under climate change, and then to bring together appropriate scientific and other information to answer the key questions identified by the stakeholders. The focus will be on the role of protected areas within conservation strategies. The project will be achieved via networking, workshops and literature / evidence gathering work. The answers will then be disseminated widely through a jointly-produced report, journal article and accounts in stakeholder magazines and web sites; as well as by oral presentations at a launch event and at stakeholder meetings. We will also identify stakeholder requirements for further research and for further Knowledge Exchange activities. The network formed through this programme will be well-placed to drive further integration of science into policy development and conservation action. The network will include researchers at the University of York and NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Knowledge Exchange specialists, and a variety of stakeholders and policy makers from, e.g., The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Botanical Society of the British Isles, Butterfly Conservation, from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Countryside Council for Wales, Natural England and Scottish Natural Heritage, and also from Defra.

Recent satellite measurements of the Earth's polar ice sheets highlight that changes in ice extent and thickness are occurring at rates far higher than expected. The challenge for researchers is to place these observations into a longer-term context and produce computer models ('ice sheet forecasts') that reliably predict the fate of ice sheets over this century and beyond. Although remote from habitation, the polar ice sheets influence global sea level. Retreat by increased melting and iceberg calving produces higher sea levels and concerns exist that sea level may rise by metres displacing many millions of people, and their livelihoods, from their coastal homes. At this point in time, it is not possible to study the full life cycle of the present Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets as they are still evolving and undergoing large-scale changes. Instead, we will use an ice sheet that has now fully retreated; the ice sheet that covered most of Britain, Ireland and the North Sea during the last ice age. The last British-Irish ice sheet covered up to 1,000,000 km2 at its maximum size, around 25,000 yrs ago, and was relatively small by global standards. However, its character, setting and behaviour have striking parallels with both the modern West Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets. Large parts of the British-Irish Ice Sheet were marine-influenced just like in west Antarctica today; and numerous fast-flowing ice streams carried much of its mass, just like in the Greenland Ice Sheet today. All three are or were highly dynamic, in climatically sensitive regions, with marine sectors, ocean-terminating margins and land-based glaciers. All these common factors make the British-Irish Ice Sheet a powerful analogue for understanding ice sheet dynamics on a range of timescales, operating now and in the future. Recent work by members of this consortium has revealed the pattern of ice sheet retreat that once covered the British Isles, as recorded by end moraines and other glacial landforms. Other work by members of this consortium has used sophisticated computer models to simulate the ice sheet's response to climate change at the end of the last Ice Age. However, these models can only be as good as the geological data on which they are based, and the pattern is poorly constrained in time. We need to know more about the style, rate and timing of ice sheet decay in response to past climate change. Such knowledge allows us to further refine computer modelling so that better predictions can be made. The main focus of the project therefore, is to collect sediments and rocks deposited by the last ice sheet that covered the British Isles, and use these, along with organic remains, to date (e.g. by radiocarbon analyses) the retreat of the ice sheet margins. The project will use over 200 carefully chosen sites, dating some 800 samples in order to achieve this. Offshore, samples will be extracted using coring devices lowered from a research ship to the seabed, and onshore by manual sampling and by use of small drilling rigs. Once the samples are dated and added to the pattern information provided by the landforms, maps of the shrinking ice sheet will be produced. These will provide crucial information on the timing and rates of change across the whole ice sheet. The British-Irish Ice Sheet will become the best constrained anywhere in the world and be the benchmark against which ice sheet models are improved and tested in the future. Knowledge on the character and age of the seafloor sediments surrounding the British Isles is also useful for many industrial, archaeological and heritage applications. Accordingly, the project is closely linked to partners interested for example in locating offshore windfarms, electricity cables between Britain and Ireland, and heritage bodies aiming to preserve offshore archaeological remains.

It is critically important to provide social science insights to support the transition to a sustainable and biodiverse environment and a net zero society. We are in a biodiversity crisis, with profound implications for humanity and nonhuman nature. Severe cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are urgently needed to restrict global temperature increases. This multi-faceted crisis, alongside disruptions such as COVID-19, demands the skills, insights and leadership of social scientists in relation to research, policy-making and action. However, environmental solutions are often framed as technological or ecological fixes, underestimating social dimensions of policy and practice interventions. Social science research is rarely agile and responsive to societal needs in very short time frames, and there is an urgent need for stronger community organisation and coordination. We need to increase the accessibility, agility and use of social science, as well as to further develop the skills necessary to contribute to interdisciplinary research, enabling the co-production of knowledge and action. Advancing Capacity for Climate and Environment Social Science (ACCESS) is a team of world-leading social science and interdisciplinary experts led by the Universities of Exeter and Surrey with the Universities of Bath, Leeds & Sussex and the Natural Environment Social Research Network (Natural Resources Wales, NatureScot, Natural England, Environment Agency and Forest Research). The ACCESS core team is complemented by a wider network of expertise drawn from academic and stakeholder partners across UK devolved nations and internationally: Strathclyde University, Queens University Belfast, Cardiff University, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Manchester University, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, University of Sydney and stakeholder partners including the Welsh Government, Scottish and Southern Energy, the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management, National Trust, Academy for Social Sciences, Community Energy England, Winchester Science Centre and Devon and Surrey County Councils. ACCESS is structured around three cross-cutting themes (Co-production; Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; Sustainability and Net Zero) that underpin four work packages: 1. Map, assess and learn from the past experiences of social scientists in climate and environment training, research, policy and practice; to develop and test new resources to impact interdisciplinary education, research and knowledge mobilisation, catalysing change in policy culture, institutions, businesses and civil society (Work Package (WP)1); 2. Empower environmental social scientists at different learning and career stages by providing training and capacity building, including masterclasses, placements, mentoring and collegiate networks to enhance leadership and knowledge exchange skills (WP2); 3. Innovate by creating new ideas and testing new approaches; scope future transformative social science and enable rapid and timely deployment of social science capacity in response to key events or emergencies (WP3); 4. Champion and coordinate environmental social scientists across the UK and internationally by providing an accessible knowledge/data hub and innovative public engagement tracker; building new networks, enabling coordination and collaboration; supporting policy and decision-making (WP4). ACCESS' depth and breadth of expertise coupled with the range of innovative resources produced will deliver transformational leadership and coordination of environmental social science. ACCESS will become the key trusted source of environmental social science for UK governmental and non-governmental agencies, business and civil society. In so doing, ACCESS will ensure that social science insights become more visible, valued and used by non-social science academics and stakeholders, supporting the transition to a sustainable and biodiverse environment and a low carbon society.

With the UK's water valued at £200 billion p.a., Britain's 389,000 km of river ecosystems are arguably our most important. In addition to providing water, they supply other major ecosystem services such as the regulation of flooding and water quality; support to adjacent ecosystems by supplying energy and nutrients; and large cultural value for charismatic organisms, recreation, and education. However, the ways in which organisms and ecosystem functions maintain these services in rivers are extremely poorly understood. This is despite large ongoing effects on river organisms from changing catchment land use, and increasingly also from climate change. Cost implications are large and result, for example, from impacts on recreational fisheries, water treatment costs, and high value river biodiversity. By contrast, opportunities to use management positively to increase the ecosystem service value of rivers by enhancing beneficial in-river organisms have barely been considered. In this project, we will focus on four examples of river ecosystem services chosen to be explicitly biodiversity-mediated: the regulation of water quality; the regulation of decomposition; fisheries and recreational fishing; and river birds as culturally valued biodiversity. Each is at risk from climate/land use change, illustrating their sensitivity to disturbance thresholds over different time scales. These services vary in attributable market values, and all require an integrated physical, biogeochemical, ecological and socio-economic science perspective that none of the project partners could deliver alone. Using river microbes, invertebrates, fish and river birds at levels of organisation from genes to food webs, we will test the overarching hypothesis that: "Biodiversity is central to the sustainable delivery of upland river ecosystem services under changing land-use and climate". Specifically, we will ask: 1. What is the range of services delivered by upland rivers, and which are biologically mediated? 2. What are the links between biodiversity (from genes to food webs) and service delivery? 3. How does river biodiversity affect the rate or resilience of ecosystem service delivery through time? 4. How do changes in catchment land use/ management and climate affect river biota? 5. How should river biodiversity be managed to sustain ecosystem services? At spatial scales ranging from small experimental catchments to the whole region, and at temporal scales from sub-annual to over three decades, the work will be carried out in upland Wales as a well-defined geographical area of the UK that is particularly rich in the spatially extensive and long-term data required for the project.

Counting animals - and the number of habitats occupied by animals - is fundamental to conservation decision-making. Despite recent advances in survey design and analysis, population assessments of amphibians and reptiles almost entirely rely on simple counts that usually bear little relationship to actual population sizes, densities or the number of habitats occupied. This is because simple counts fail to take into account variations in the detectability of animals between habitats, time periods or observers. Consequently, the quality of data collected on amphibian and reptile populations is extremely variable. We have been developing and testing survey methods for assessing the population status of a variety of amphibian and reptile species, that use designs and analytical tools that take account of variations in detectability. Because of the recent growth in interest in assessing the status of protected amphibians and reptiles, we believe that the time is right to make such tools more widely available to professional end-users. We therefore seek funds from NERC to make this happen, and put amphibian and reptile population assessment on a par with other taxa that have well-defined survey standards. The stakeholders involved with the project will be statutory agencies that provide advice and licensing for protected species; local authorities responsible for planning decisions and managing local nature reserves; ecological consultants who carry out surveys and mitigation projects on behalf of developers; and conservation organisations that provide advice, training and site management on amphibian and reptile issues. The project will be divided into three phases which will be overseen by a steering group that includes principal stakeholders. Phase I will comprise a series of regional workshops that will: (1) brief regional end-users on recent developments in tools to design and analyse survey data, available software, and how these might be applied to amphibian and reptile data; and (2) seek feedback on what the current pressing issues are in population assessments, the range of methods used and their advantages and disadvantages, and potential obstacles to applying new methodologies and analyses. From these workshops we will draft new standard protocols for survey design and analysis. In Phase II of the project the draft protocols will be 'road-tested' on real survey projects being carried out by end-users. We will provide a design and analysis service for a number of such projects, and in return the end-users will provide feedback on the performance of the draft protocols. In this way, end-users will gain hands-on experience of using statistical models and new protocols. In Phase III of the project, feedback from the road-tests will lead to revised, final survey protocols that will then be disseminated via the project partner network. In addition, we will run a training workshop that will ensure that more tightly defined best practice guidelines are adopted. We therefore intend the whole process to be one of knowledge exchange - rather than just knowledge transfer. The economic impact of the project will be widespread. With several million pounds being spent on development mitigation for amphibians and reptiles, debate rages over the cost-effectiveness of such actions. The protocols that will emerge from this project will therefore allow ecological consultants to produce much more effective mitigation plans for their clients. Equally, it will strengthen the decision-making processes involved with licensing by the statutory agencies, and local authorities will be better-informed when it comes to planning issues. Managers of nature reserves will also be able to carry out more effective surveys of amphibians and reptiles which will enhance our knowledge of the regional and national status of these animals.