The project will use multispecies storytelling to engage disadvantaged groups in the north west in decision making processes about landscape and land use. The project follows on from the successful AHRC 'Connecting disadvantaged young people with landscape through arts', 'Stories2Connect' and 'Multispecies Storytelling: More than human narratives about landscape' projects, all of which use storytelling in participatory ways. These projects have worked with disadvantaged and disabled young people, children, and diverse groups of community farm users. The methods and learning gained from previous projects are being brought together and synthesised to engage new audiences, collaborate with new stakeholder organisations and develop new themes of work. Specifically, the project will use multispecies storytelling to develop multisensory artefacts about landscape that capture the voices of marginalised communities and disadvantaged groups and respond to a variety of different ways of making sense of the world. Understanding a landscape from the 'memory' of an oak tree, 'seeing' the land as a bee might, experiencing a space as a soundscape or through touch or smell invites thinking about landscape and land use from different perspectives, through other timeframes and scales. Multispecies approaches have been effective in engaging people with issues related to biodiversity loss and climate change and can encourage identifications and connections with land, environments and other species who inhabit them. They also prompt consideration of whose stories about landscape are being told, and who is enabled to tell them. The follow on funding will be used to expand work with organisations linked to the existing projects and enhance the reach and impact of the projects with new stakeholder organisations. Connections with Burscough Community Farm, Rusland Horizons Trust, Blackpool Council, Art Gene, the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, local artists and professional storytellers will be maintained and new partnerships with the National Autistic Society, Natural England, Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Martin Mere, Williamson Art Gallery and Museum and The Chapel Gallery will be enabled by the follow on funding. Through the partners, the project will continue to work with community farm users and young people with disabilities and will also include young people with autism, facilitated by the National Autistic Society. The project will, through new and existing partners, expand the geographical coverage of the previous projects further across the north west to reach new audiences through the partner organisations that have agreed to provide venues for exhibitions and events. The project will utilise innovative participatory methodologies and resources developed in the previous projects which will be applied in the co-creation of a new series of multisensory artefacts that will be curated and exhibited at different indoor and outdoor sites across the north west. The multisensory artefacts and environments developed will use multispecies storytelling and, as well as visual aspects, may also employ, for example, sound, smell, space and touch to respond to the needs and understandings of a wide range of potential users, rather than prioritising traditional or limited sensory engagements with the world. The exhibitions will be accompanied by key events to which decision makers from stakeholder groups and those organisations with vested interests in landscape and land use will be invited.

Interest in the health and wellbeing impacts of wetlands has increased in the UK, in the context of both short and long term responses to extreme weather events and climate change. This is reflected in the UK Wetland Vision (Hume, 2008) that identifies a need to 'make wetlands more relevant to people's lives by better understanding and harnessing the benefits provided by naturally-functioning rivers and wetlands' (p.7). Expansion of wetlands can bring many benefits but it can also increase potential for mosquito-borne disease. There is a lack of knowledge about the consequences of wetland expansion for disease risk. This knowledge gap opens up space for speculation in the press and media about the perceived problems of 'killer' mosquitoes spreading across England, which can in turn fuel community unease and opposition to wetland creation and expansion. A key concern of the project is, therefore, to develop ecological interventions and guidance for diverse end-users to minimise mosquito-related problems, framed within and facilitated by a broader understanding of wetland value as impacted by mosquitoes. The potential contribution of wetland development to social and economic wellbeing envisaged in the UK Wetland Vision could be severely constrained by a failure to adequately address the risks imposed by mosquitoes and biting insects. The overall aim of this project will be to show how positive socio-cultural and ecological values of wetlands can be maximised for wellbeing and negative attitudes reduced. Management interventions for use by Public Health England and general guidelines will be developed to limit the damaging effects of mosquito populations and enhance appreciation of the ecological value of mosquitoes in wetland ecosystems. The project will result in an increase in our understanding of wetland environments and demonstrate how ecological interventions embedded in a broader understanding of wetland valuation can deliver wellbeing benefits to a broad range of stakeholders. There are four main objectives: 1) Development of a new conceptual place-based ecosystem services and wellbeing framework for understanding the impact of interventions and wetland values. 2) Exploration of the value of wetlands and mosquitoes in twelve case study locations. 3) Production of guidelines for valuing wetlands and managing mosquito populations to enhance the value of British wetlands for wellbeing. 4) Production of a place-based narrative on the socio-cultural, economic and ecological value of wetlands in British Society in the early years of the 21st Century. There are divergent views of wetlands among different stakeholders. This project is therefore designed to provide technical interventions and general guidelines in a range of wetland management contexts to maximise wellbeing benefits. A range of stakeholders are potential beneficiaries of this research including land managers, non-governmental organisations, conservation groups, local residents, visitors and tourists among others. This research will help implementation of the Wetland Vision by understanding the complex ways in which wetlands are valued and produce measures to maximise wellbeing benefits and minimise disvalue. Benefits include: a) production of a range of technical interventions for mosquito control by end users; b) raising the social and cultural value of wetlands to facilitate wetland expansion in response to extreme weather and climate change; c) enhanced opportunities for visitors to wetlands and local residence to experience health and wellbeing benefits; d) increased opportunities for tourism and leisure by reducing anxiety associated with wetlands. HUME, C. 2008. Wetland Vision Technical Document: overview and reporting of project philosophy and technical approach. The Wetland Vision Partnership.

Long distance migration in birds is one of the world's most astonishing wildlife spectacles and has puzzled humans for since the time of Aristotle. However despite this long standing interest and many years of study there are still huge gaps in our understanding of how variation in migratory behaviour influences the populations of birds that undertake these spectacular movements. For example why can some birds migrate earlier than others, why do different populations of the same species spend the winter or breed in different places, why do some birds manage to rear young while others do not? These are all very important questions, particularly with respect to the conservation of migratory birds, but they remain unanswered because of two problems. First, we now know that we cannot view the behaviour of a bird in a single season in isolation as events across all seasons as the two are inextricably linked to one another. For example if a bird settles on a poor wintering territory it may not gather the resources it needs to fuel spring migration in time and so would arrive late on the breeding grounds, and threrefore be less likely to get a mate. Second, to get an idea of what a bird is doing in more than one season, we need to be able to track it as it makes its annual migrations and this is very difficult. This type of cross seasonal effect may be very important in determining the productivity and survival of migratory species. Our study would use large amounts of data collected from individual swans and geese (that have been fitted uniquely identifiable coloured and lettered rings) over the last 30 years in order to investigate how events across different seasons influence their populations.

Sea-level rise is one of the most profound aspects of human-induced climate change and its steady but uncertain rate of rise will transform the world's coasts in the coming decades threatening millions of coastal and flood plain residents. While this is understood in a technical sense, wider society has not grasped the scale of change produced by expected rise in sea level over the next century. In the UK, with its large legacy of coastal defences, this issue is especially challenging. Many defences are uneconomic to maintain and renew, and widespread 'realignment' is planned within the strategic process of Shoreline Management Planning (SMP). Realignments reactivate natural sediment processes which enhances self-adjusting natural protection with both risk-reduction and aesthetic benefits. However, the transformation from a defended to a realigned coast is especially challenging to implement and will be an important focus of this research. There has been surprisingly little consideration of how the transition to a realigned coast can be facilitated and enabled across the full range of physical and social perspectives. Efforts to better understand the full range of adaptation options and their implementation, including realignment, offer potentially significant rewards in terms of tangible enhancement of coastal resilience. CoastalRes aims to develop and demonstrate prototype methods to assess realistic pathways for strategic coastal erosion and flood resilience in the light of climate change, including sea-level rise. We will accomplish this aim via three objectives. Objective 1. Co-produce a comprehensive set of representative coastal archetypes that describe the open and estuarine coasts of England and Wales in terms relevant to building coastal resilience, including present and future demography, hazards, sea-level rise, contrasting geomorphology, shoreline position, land use patterns and management legacy. This will include early and fully participatory engagement with stakeholders to consider their knowledge and experiences and define the full range of archetypes. Objective 2. Identify and evaluate a comprehensive range of strategic high level adaptation options, considering their physical suitability, economic efficiency, social acceptability and pathways of application (potential sequence in time) and impact on UK resilience. This will include a systematic literature-based review combined with two regional stakeholder workshops organised with the Coastal Group Network and the Environment Agency. Objective 3. Taking three common and representative coastal archetypes, design decision pathways to maintain and enhance resilience based on the menu of adaptation options. This will include consideration of a range of factors including policy choices, cost implications, risk trade-offs and public participation in problem specification and decision making. These adaptation pathways for resilience will be validated with representative real sites. The use of coastal archetypes for the analysis, rather than case studies, is novel and allows generalisation from individual cases to develop generic and transferable guidance. Crucially, our analysis considers all the open coasts and estuaries in England and Wales, as estuaries contain a large proportion of the assets and activities exposed to marine flooding. In contrast to previous work, which has tended to rely on consultation and 'outreach' to stakeholders, our research will have a genuinely participatory approach. This will allow us to achieve a consensus understanding with a large and diverse group of relevant Project Partners, including the key organisations the Environment Agency and Maritime District Authorities. The CoastalRes Project will provide a solid demonstration of a transition to a more balanced, resilient and sustainable portfolio of adaptive options on the UK coast and provide a foundation for further research in this area.

Constructed wetlands (CW) are considered to be an effective and environmentally friendly way of reducing the quantity of undesirable nutrients (P and N) discharged from point sources of pollution. Such discharges cause undesirable extra productivity i.e. eutrophication, in the receiving water body. In 1995 a CW was built at Slimbridge to treat waste water from the bird reserve before it is discharged into the adjacent River Severn. It consists of a settlement lagoon, a set of reed beds and a discharge pond. Initially not only were the nutrient discharges dramatically reduced but a new habitat for wild birds and otters was created. However recent data have shown that the CW is no longer working efficiently and that the sediments of the settlement lagoon in particular is now acting as a source of P (the critical limiting nutrient) particularly during summer, the period of greatest eutrophication risk. In organic rich sediments, labile organic P (POP) is broken down by microbial respiration, releasing phosphate. Commonly, P is also recycled by being adsorbed onto iron oxyhydroxides and released when those sediments become anaerobic. Recent studies have suggested the existence of a previously unconsidered and potentially important process, namely recycled of P by anaerobic bacteria themselves. Ingalls and co-workers, using ultrahigh resolution microscopic techniques, have seen polyphosphate granules within bacterial cells in organic rich surface sediments. High levels of P (up to 19% dry weight) have been shown to accumulate in biofilms of denitrifying bacteria and the phosphate is released when these cells become anaerobic. Furthermore it has been suggested that if dissolved calcium is present, these cells can act as sites for apatite precipitation, thus eliminating biologically available P from the system. Objectives and Hypotheses in this study: The aim of this study is to understand the seasonal nature of the biogeochemical processes occurring in the sediments of settlement lagoon including important processes previously not considered. This will not only develop new fundamental understandings of P cycling in such freshwater sediments but also enable us to develop an efficient and cheap method to fix the P within the CW and prevent unacceptable pollution downstream. We hypothesise that: (1) P from the waste stream at Slimbridge accumulates as labile organic P, some iron-bound P and polyphosphate granules within heterotrophic bacteria (including denitrifying bacteria) in the settlement pond in winter. (2) As the temperature warms up, the rate of bacterial respiration increases and phosphate is released into the pore waters by heterotrophic respiration. As the redox boundary migrates towards the sediment surface, P is released from ironbound-P and from polyphosphate granules. (3) It will be possible to fix this phosphate as non-bioavailable apatite by altering the chemical environment around the bacterial cells by increasing the calcium concentration. This alteration will be more effective (and expensive) than alternative systems, e.g. the limestone weir currently used, because it will utilize our knowledge of the chemistry in the immediate vicinity of the bacterial cells. Experimental design: We will carry out nutrient budgets of the lagoon together with detailed study of the sediment and its pore waters. We will use conventional and high resolution gel sampling & analysis and ultra-high resolution electron microscopy to understand seasonal changes in biogeochemical processes in the sediment of the settlement lagoon. A series of microcosm experiments will be carried out; a) to understand the exact nature of the seasonal release of P from the sediment b) to develop the optimum way of fixing P as apatite by adding calcium to the sediments in different forms and conditions c) to test this new treatment to fix P as non-bioavailable apatite within the sediment. by carrying out in-situ pilot experiments