IRESNewcastle UniversityCRE


SCoPE

Sustainable Cultivation of Productive Environments

aka:

Sustainable Cultivation of Upland Environments

An Intelligent Storyboard for Scenario Construction

The Questions and the Approach:

How do we articulate and communicate whole system assessments and inherently uncertain predictions of the causes and effects of environmental change?
How do we reconcile conflicting interests with common necessity and purpose?
How do we encourage interdisciplinary working, stakeholder engagement and knowledge exchange?
 
Engagement and participation are difficult because of the lack of a common format, framework, language and story which simultaneously capture both the scientific knowledge (and ignorance) of these complex socio-environmental systems with practitioner and stakeholder perceptions of and expertise with them. Communication between interested parties and those with the techical knowledge - which is clearly necessary to define and pursue common visions - is difficult, and often avoided or short-circuited.

Sophisticated and complex computer models have been built of these systems, but have had limited impact in answering these questions. Apart from the technical difficulties with these models, there are simply too many different interests and understandings about these systems to reflect all, or even a representative set of opinions and perceptions.  In short, those (few) who believe the model system are happy with the simplified representation, but hardly need the model. On the other hand, those who do not believe the model, for whatever reason, think that the model is irrelevant, however sophisticated. Nevertheless, the modelers themselves learn a lot about the environmental systems they model.

It ought to be possible to communicate our separate and different understandings about the ways in which these systems work without getting bogged down in technical detail or buried in sophisticated computer models. We believe we can identify the key systematic relationships between, for instance, land use, landscape appearance and environmental effects, and also identify the major differences of judgment and knowledge about the ways in which these key relationships work - what they mean for the management of the system. We will explore this approach with a number of stakeholders and practicing landscape managers, focusing on the Northumberland National Park in the first instance.

We expect to develop a set of mechanisms and procedures (a ‘scope’) to do this, with the primary purpose of helping articulate and communicate different perceptions and understandings of the major relationships and issues.  We will illustrate the use of the ‘scope’ to systematically and coherently identify and communicate future options and scenarios.



Technical details:
We suggest that a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) offers a real possibility for developing an intelligent framework for communicating and reflecting uncertainty and disputed knowledge about systematic relationships and potential outcomes, and about differences of judgement about underlying relationships and behaviours.
BBNs offer consistent semantics and mechanisms for representing uncertainty and an intuitive graphical representation of the interactions between various causes and effects. They are a very effective method of representing uncertain complexities that are believed to be essentially systematic, and of engaging differing perceptions and beliefs about such systems.

We will test this proposition by constructing a stylised representation of an upland region (the Northumberland National Park) as a BBN.
The first two research questions are:
  1. How complicated do we need to make the BBN representation to credibly capture the critical nodes and relationships as far as stakeholders are concerned?
  2. Is this credible simplification sufficiently manageable to be capable of systematic manipulation, communication and analysis? 
We will then calibrate the resulting BBN system to more accurately represent a particular case, such as the Peak District, already the subject of a major RELU project. With this calibrated BBN of a known case, we should be able to replicate the major findings of this previous research, without substantial reference to additional input or interpretation from the specific expertise employed in the original project. If so, then this represents a substantial test of the methodological approach.

Subsequently, we will augment the BBN representation with the additional insights and beliefs of the actual stakeholders in the original project, to identify the critical gaps in the BBN representation, hence refining and tuning the model image to reflect the specific understandings and beliefs of the real world participants about their specific system. Sensitivity analysis of this refined model will then reveal the critical areas of uncertainty, mis-communication or conflicting beliefs, and indicate priorities for both future research and for communication and negotiation, as well as demonstrating proof of concept.

Contact: Professor David Harvey to become a "fellowscope"!
Events:
July 1st. 2010 - RELU Phase IV Launch, Manchester (DRH, LF, JF and NT attending)
Monday October 18th. 2010:  Inaugural SCoPE Workshop: Newcastle. (Framing Workshop Brief for details and brief notes on our conclusions - more to follow)
Wednesday October 27th, 2010: "Strategic Land-Use: Crossing the Urban Rural Divide" Workshop (organised by Relu and the EPSRC Sustainable Urban Environment (SUE) Programmes), London - DRH and JF attending. (SCoPE Poster)

Project Documentation:
  1. Case for Support
  2. Management Plan
  3. Justification for Resources
Related documentation:
  1. Natural England:  Upland Ecosystem Services:  NECRO20 and NECRO28 - parts 1 and 2 of commisioned reports produced by Roy Haines-Young, Marion Potschin and associates, Centre for Environmental Management (CEM), School of Geography, University of Nottingham, essentially explore the use of BBNs as conceptual maps of the linkages for the delivery of four specific Ecosystem Services (carbon storage; water quality; flood mitigation; recreation), and find that they are useful, though subject to both considerable uncertainty and lack of data/knowledge.  These reports will prove a very useful starting point for SCoPE, and focus our attention on the 'nesting' of these conceptual maps (BBNs) and developing procedures through which they can be communicated and experimented with.
  2. Analysis of the structure, dynamics and diversity of upland communities,  CRE Report to CRC Uplands enquiry/evidence base, June, 2009, Nicola Thompson.
  3. ONE North East:  Rural Evidence Base.
  4. Defra:  Value of Nature page.

Useful/Relevant Links:

Northern Rural Network
Northumberland Uplands LAG - Chair: Roger Wilson.
Sustainable Uplands (RELU Phase 2 Project)
Hill Farm Economics, Landscapes and Biodiversity in the Peak District (RELU Phase 2 Project)
Commission for the Rural Communities
Natural England
Project Staff:
Prof. David Harvey, PI, NIReS, CRE, and AFRD, Newcastle
Prof. Stephen Rushton, Co-I NIReS. Biology, Newcastle
Prof. Les Firbank, Co-I, BBSRC, North Wyke (Head)
Prof. Nick Hanley, Co-I, Environmental Economics, Stirling
Dr. John Forrester, Co-I, Stockholm Environment Institute, York
Dr. Nicola Thompson, Co-I, CRE, Newcastle
Mr. Terry Carroll, Co-I, c/o CRE Newcastle, and NRN co-ordinator.
Dr. Aileen Mill, RA, IRES/NIrES & Biology, Newcastle.
Dr. Alasdair Blain, RA, IRES/NIrES & Biology, Newcastle.
Dr. Pia Schuchert, RA, IRES/NIrES & Biology, Newcastle
Dr. Elizabeth Stockdale, SAFRD, Newcastle.
Possible interpretations of SCoPE:
sustainable    cultivation    of    productive    environments
sensible    communication    of    possible    effects
simplified    civilisation    of    pleasing    ecosystems
strategic    conceptualisation    of    practical    efforts
Last update:  19.10.2010