The environment that most natural populations experience is changing. Not only as a result of global climate change, but also as a consequence of other anthropogenic activities including hunting, habitat modification and the introduction of alien species. Such environmental change has already been demonstrated to impact animal and plant populations and the ecosystems in which these populations are embedded. The speed of environmental change continues to accelerate with potentially catastrophic consequences. Unfortunately biologists do not have a good track record of accurately predicting how environmental change will impact natural populations. This is because populations and the environment they experience are complex. We have identified an approach that is likely to improve upon the predictions that biologists are able to make about how populations will respond to environment change. The types of response we are able to model include both short-term ecological ones and longer-term evolutionary responses. Our approach relies on a powerful, recently developed modelling framework that can be applied to the types of data that biologists often collect. We will apply the approach to construct a detailed model to a well-studied population of Yellowstone wolves. Analysis of this model will allow us to predict how the Yellowstone wolf population may respond to various environmental change scenarios. We will also construct simplified versions of the model for a wide range of animal data sets to identify more general patterns in ways that animal populations are likely to respond to environmental change. Our work has the potential to substantially improve our understanding of how environmental change is likely to impact natural populations in both the short and long term.

There is something hugely emotive about leaving or finding a footprint that provides a direct connection to the past and to past behaviour. White Sands National Park in New Mexico is a dried lake bed with literally thousands of footprints left by humans and extinct Ice Age megafauna such as mammoths. They tell of story of life on this dried lakebed (playa) during the ice age. The footprints are so extensive they allow us to track mammoths, camels, giant ground sloth and dire wolves across the lake bed and reveal their interaction with early human hunters. Like no other site they provide a unique window into the past. It is a truly amazing place for ichno-archaeology or put another way the study of track fossils a discipline called ichnology. In September 2021 we managed to date these footprints at one locality and the age surprised us and challenges conventional wisdom about the peopling of the Americas. They date from the height of the glacial cycle, referred to as the Last Glacial Maximum when ice sheets formed an impenetrable east-west barrier across North America. Traditional models have folk penned up in Alaska having walked from Asia waiting for this ice sheet barrier to melt before migrating south. Our work changes that with people confirmed at White Sands south of the ice sheet barrier over two millennia between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. Clearly, they must have arrived before the ice barrier, but how much before? What were these people doing in New Mexico? How did they survive? What were their lifeways? The footprints at White Sands can answer these question; we have written the headline but now need to mine the full potential of archaeological information that we can from this site. There is another hugely important dimension to this work. These footprints represent the ancestral footfall of indigenous peoples, yet scientific hegemony emasculates their voice, yet they have a right to tell their stories and for their footprint narratives to be heard alongside those of archaeologists. We propose to develop new ways of collaborative working based on respect and reciprocity which recognises and values multiple truths about the White Sands footprints. There is a need to develop methodologies that embrace indigenous methods since footprint discoveries are occurring around the world with increasing frequency. This research will train and equip a new generation of ichno-archaeologists for this brave new world of discovery while adding vital information to long debated questions around the peopling of the Americas.

Aeolian (wind-blown) sand dunes occupy 10% of the Earth's surface, both in vast desert sand seas and as important natural defences against flooding along coasts. While the environmental conditions that influence the shape, movement and patterns of fully grown dunes have been extensively studied, arguably the most enduring deficiency in our understanding of these landforms is also the most profound: how do wind-blown dunes initiate? Initiation is central to understanding dunes as major geological units, including the response of these landscapes to climatic drivers, environmental change and societal impact. The significance of dune initiation for the wider understanding of wind-blown sandy systems and their contexts, for which the discovery of extra-terrestrial dune fields has added a recent impetus, ensures that the question of initiation has remained prominent throughout the history of desert research. Despite this, existing ideas proposed to explain processes of dune origin have remained largely descriptive and uncorroborated. The persistence of the question regarding dune initiation is not due to an absence of appreciation of its importance but, rather, a lack of the means to tackle this fundamental issue. The critical obstacle to a fully developed understanding of dune initiation is that, until now, measurement of the necessary variables, at the ultra-high spatial and temporal resolutions required to detect small-scale variations in surface conditions and wind-blown sand transport, has been impossible. Recent technological advances in the geosciences both inspire and underpin this proposal, as they now provide the opportunity to meet the demanding requirements of process measurement. Surmounting the abiding problem of dune initiation requires novel approaches in research design and our proposal tackles the issues of measurement at small scales by forging complementary links between fieldwork and physical modelling, as well as an ability to widen the application of detailed process findings through computer modelling. Specifically, this proposal will for the first time examine the key inter-relationships between airflow, surface properties, changes in sand transport and bedform shape that lie behind a meaningful understanding of how nascent dunes emerge. Full measurement of controlling processes and bedform development will be achieved through field monitoring of surface properties and bedform change at extremely high resolution. A key novelty of the fieldwork is that it will be carried out at three carefully chosen locations of known dune development, with each location representing the 'type site' for three different drivers of dune initiation; surface roughness, surface moisture and sand bed instability. The fieldwork will inform experiments undertaken in a bespoke laboratory flume that is designed to enable accurate characterisation of flow very close to the 3D surface of modelled dunes using state-of-the-art imaging techniques. Our field and laboratory dataset will be used to drive a computer model that we will then run to test the sensitivity of dune initiation and growth to different controls in a range of environmental conditions in deserts, coasts and on other planets. Our proposal is built on a new capability to make field observations at the requisite exceptional levels of detail, augmented by closely coupled state-of-the-art laboratory flow simulations, plus the development and application of evidence-based modelling to examine drivers of dune initiation. In concert, this approach represents an unprecedented opportunity to overcome a truly enduring plateau for understanding the origins of one of the major terrestrial landform systems.

The Arctic is changing rapidly, and it is predicted that areas which are today tundra will become tree-covered as warming progresses, with, for example, forest spreading northwards to the coast of northern European Russia by 2100. In some parts of the Arctic, such as Alaska, this process, commonly referred to as "greening", has already been observed over the past few decades; woody shrubs are expanding their distribution northwards into tundra. Such vegetation changes influence nutrient cycling in soils, including carbon cycling, but the extent to which they will change the storage or release of carbon at a landscape scale is debated. Nor do we fully understand the role that lakes play in this system although it is known that many lakes in the tundra and northern forests are today releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere in significant amounts, and a proportion of this carbon comes into the lake from the vegetation and soils of the surrounding landscape. Lakes form an important part of arctic landscapes: there are many thousands of them in our study areas in Russia and west Greenland, and they act as focal points for carbon cycling within in the wider landscape. It is vital that we understand the interactions between plants, soils, nutrients, and lakes because there are massive carbon stores in the high northern latitudes, particularly in frozen soils, and if this carbon is transferred into the atmosphere (as carbon dioxide (CO2) or methane) it will create a positive feedback, driving further global warming. For this reason, the Arctic represents a critical component of the Earth System, and understanding how it will it respond to global environmental change is crucial. Lakes are a key link in this process. As lakes are tightly coupled with terrestrial carbon cycling, changes in the flows of carbon to a lake are faithfully recorded in lake sediment records, as are changes in the biological processing of that carbon within the lake. We also know that similar vegetation changes to those observed or predicted today occurred in the past when climate was warmer than today, and thus past events can provide an analogue for future changes. This project will examine lake sediment records, using techniques that extract a range of chemical signals and microscopic plant and animal remains, to see how vegetation changes associated with past natural climate warming, such as migration of the tree-line northwards, affected lake functioning in terms of the overall biological productivity, the species composition, and the types of carbon processing that were dominant. Depending upon the balance between different biological processes, which in turn are linked to surrounding vegetation and soils, lakes may have contributed mostly to carbon storage or mostly to carbon emissions ?at a landscape scale. Changes in vegetation type also influence decomposition of plant remains and soil development, and this is linked to nitrogen cycling and availability. Nitrogen is an important control over productivity and hence of carbon fixation and storage, and thus it is important to study the dynamics of nitrogen along with those of carbon. Due to the spatial variability of climate and geology, the pace of vegetation development (and of species immigration) and the types of plants involved have not been uniform around the Arctic. By examining several lakes in each of three regions (Alaska, Greenland, Russia) we will be able to describe a broad range of different vegetation transitions and the associated responses of the lakes. Our results can be used to inform our understanding of the likely pathways of recently initiated and future changes. They can also be up-scaled to the whole Arctic and so contribute to the broader scientific goal of understanding feedbacks to global warming.