We will build an international partnership of experts in natural resource management, fauna, flora, anthropology, sociology, language documentation & community archiving to examine the relationship between Language & Nature in Southern & Eastern Arabia, an area with significant, rapidly depleting biocultural diversity, but one for which biocultural diversity is little recognised (cf. http://www.unep.org/pdf/Cultural_Spiritual_thebible.pdf). We will focus initially on areas for which most language data is available to the team: Yemen, Dhofar, Jiddat al-Harasis & Musandam (Oman), and exploit the case study to create an interdisciplinary methodology applicable in other areas where both local languages and the environment are threatened. The work is timely because both local languages and ecosystems of the region are at imminent risk, and because of the increasingly fragile political situation in the Middle East. We will assess quantity & quality of our available language & ecosystem data and identify data gaps for future work, to be conducted as far as possible by local community members & academics, & begin comparative investigations further within SE Arabia. Documentation of the Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL) & Kumzari shows that local language and nature enjoy a tight symbiotic relationship. Our earlier work suggests the domains of use in these languages which are disappearing the fastest are those closely bound to the environment and related facets of the economy. Conversely, linguistic knowledge has successfully been used to revive endangered aspects of the ecosystem: the Harasis' indigenous knowledge of the oryx was used to revive the endangered population in Oman. In our area, orientation & direction terms are geocentric, based on topographic terms differing according to both language variety & region. Quantification terms are frequently nature-based: time is described by sun position, verbs of movement differ by time of day, & expressions of animal herd sizes depend on object of description. Figurative language is closely related to nature: in Mehri (MSAL), a tall man with a shock of hair may be described as xaheh simar 'he looks like a simar [tree]'. A brave man may have the epithet KayZar 'leopard'. Kumzari personal name derivations reflect the natural environment, as in: Has Qabobo 'Hassan tuna.fish.species'. Poetry is especially rich in nature-figurative language: the Shahri (MSAL) line hEz min garb / Sarif d-irHasEn 'wind from west, stones he licks' refers to a man from the west, so poor he has to lick stones, who takes another man's wife; Mehri hZawr 'grue [colour]' has the poetic sense 'sea'. Terms are often introduced by semantic extension: Kalifot 'bark [tree]' in Mehri & Bathari (MSAL) has the secondary sense 'spoon'. Its original sense & knowledge that bark was once used as an eating tool is lost on many younger speakers, who are increasingly sedentary and no longer enjoy the close human-nature relationship of their forebears. Scholars will meet through annual workshops, video conferences, Skype & email. Training in research methods & analysis will be shared through academic visits between Leeds & Qatar participants. Collaboration has already been established with several team members: MOOC on Language & Nature at Leeds (2015, Lovett PI), Documentation & Ethnolinguistic Analysis of Modern South Arabian (2013-2016, Watson PI), Endangered Languages workshops Leeds & SOAS (2014, 2015, Seyfeddinipur, Watson), Seasonal navigation & time telling in the Arab Gulf (Varisco PI), interdisciplinary workshops at QU (2015, 2016, Al-Ghanim PI). Representatives of local mobile social groups provide insider perspectives on local languages & ecosystems in their regions. This is the first time all members come together to investigate the complex relationship of Language & Nature in SE Arabia, and the first time such an interdisciplinary team collaborate to address the complex relationship of Language & Nature.

Urban communities are particularly vulnerable to the future demand of food, water and energy, and this is further acerbated by the onset of climate change. A solution needs to be found for a FEW nexus. This internationally diverse project, based around urban design practice, sees urban agriculture (and localised energy production) as a key facilitator of the Nexus, needing water and energy to become productive. Working directly with living labs in some of the most vulnerable communities in the partner cities (Tokyo, Belfast, Amsterdam, Dohar, Detroit and Sydney), the team aims to co-design new food futures with stakeholders that leave them less vulnerable to forces disturbing the nexus. The lessons learned from these stakeholder workshops will be shared outside the team, so that lessons learned locally can be applied globally. This project will develop innovative and practical design solutions through stakeholder-engaged living labs in six different bioregions around the world to translate current FEW-nexus research towards implementation. Through this effort, three integrated knowledge platforms on Design, Evaluation and Participation capture inter-disciplinary approaches to feed into participatory workshops, and thereby to the moveable nexus (M-NEX). The outputs and lessons learned will be publically disseminated via the open M-NEX platform. The first four international workshops investigate holistic themes (technology, people, geography and climate), which will then be integrated in the final two workshops on multiple-scales (from buildings to city level). The production and consumption of healthy food is ensured by addressing future climate change impacts and demographic and cultural changes, spanning scales from a single rooftop to an entire metropolitan region. The design outputs are the cornerstones of the entire field of possible solutions and are used to inspire individuals to undertake informed actions using the M-NEX platform. The decision support platform at the local governments level will be a powerful tool for integrating nexus thinking in FEW management.

In the last decade, the role of software engineering has changed rapidly and radically. Globalisation and mobility of people and services, pervasive computing, and ubiquitous connectivity through the Internet have disrupted traditional software engineering boundaries and practices. People and services are no longer bound by physical locations. Computational devices are no longer bound to the devices that host them. Communication, in its broadest sense, is no longer bounded in time or place. The Software Engineering & Design (SEAD) group at the Open University (OU) is leading software engineering research in this new reality that requires a paradigm shift in the way software is developed and used. This platform grant will grow and sustain strategic, multi-disciplinary, crosscutting research activities that underpin the advances in software engineering required to build the pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems that will be tightly woven into the fabric of a complex and changing socio-technical world. In addition to sustaining and growing the SEAD group at the OU and supporting its continued collaboration with the Social Psychology research group at the University of Exeter, the SAUSE platform will also enable the group to have lasting impact across several application domains such as healthcare, aviation, policing, and sustainability. The grant will allow the team to enhance the existing partner networks in these areas and to develop impact pathways for their research, going beyond the scope and lifetime of individual research projects.