The Breeding Ecology of Homed Puffins Fratercula comiculata in Alaska.

The Horned Puffin {Fratercula corniculata) is one of three North Pacific puffin species. Horned Puffins almost always nest amongst boulders and in rock crevices. This makes access to nest-sites and chicks difficult and, as a result, sample sizes are small for many their breeding parameters. I studied the breeding ecology of Homed Puffins at Duck Island, Alaska, over a period of five years (1995-1999) in order to improve our baseline knowledge of this species and the variability in its breeding ecology. Adults fed their chicks primarily on sandlance {Ammodytes hexapterus), which comprised over 90% of the diet. Chick survival to fledging was generally high (83-97%), and there was no apparent difference among years in breeding success, despite evidence of poor food availability in 1998. There was, however, a large range of chick growth rates and fledging ages. Chick mass growth rate was lowest in 1998, and chicks also fledged at youngest ages in that year. The impacts of reduced food supply on growth differed between different body components, suggesting differential allocation of energy and nutrients into the growth of different body structures. There was no difference among years in either chick diet or the mass of food loads bought to the colony by adults. Daily counts of Homed Puffins attending the colony were made throughout the breeding season in three consecutive years in order to examine the diurnal, seasonal and annual variation in colony attendance, and the implications of this variation for population monitoring. Peak diurnal attendance occurred between 2030-2130. Despite high seasonal and annual variation in colony attendance, overall mean numbers of birds present at the colony during both incubation and chick-rearing did not differ among years. There was greater variability in attendance during chick- rearing than during incubation, indicating that counts conducted during incubation may provide the better index of breeding population size

Tree resources and environmental policy: A stakeholder approach

Past attempts at environmental resource management have often failed because policy-makers have given insufficient attention to the different interests of the various groups of stakeholders. Stakeholders are defined as those who have an interest in the exploitation and management of a resource; in the case of forest resources, they may include small farmers, logging companies, government departments, institutions and conservationists. Following a brief review of the benefits provided by tree resources, the concept of stakeholder analysis is explored in detail with specific reference to case studies carried out in Cameroon and Thailand. The conflicts of interest which may arise between stakeholder groups, and the trade-offs which may have to be made between the objectives of a particular stakeholder group, are classified and discussed. Finally, the implications of the stakeholder approach for environmental planning and future research are considered

Transition in the hills? Placing farmer identity and cultural landscapes at the heart of climate and nature friendly farming

University of Cumbria's Professor of Practice Julia Aglionby was invited to contribute to this conference, held by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, Mark Leonard Trust, and Aurora Trust, at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Cambridge and Downing College, Cambridge. The conference explored emerging practice and soil health in regenerative agriculture and how plant science can help address knowledge gaps for farmers. Julia joined researchers, farmers, farming advisors to foster new connections and explore what type of further research is required, how it should be undertaken, funded, and communicated. Regenerative farming offers the potential to produce healthy, affordable food, help us mitigate and adapt to climate change, protect nature, and secure farmer livelihoods. However, more research is needed to support farmers to adopt and maintain regenerative farming systems. Professor Julia Aglionby was Executive Director of the Foundation for Common Land for 10 years, chaired the Uplands Alliance and sat on the board of Natural England. At the University of Cumbria, she continues her research interests in commons and uplands. In 2024, she will be a candidate for Penrith & Solway’s next MP

The governance of commons in national parks :plurality and purpose

PhD ThesisEffective governance is key to the successful management of national parks and is particularly critical for commons in protected areas. This research explores how governance can be strengthened on commons in national parks to improve the delivery of multiple ecosystem services. Empirical data is presented from two case studies; Danau Sentarum, Indonesia and The Lake District, England. Appreciative Inquiry is used to discover commoners’ stories, design future options and consider them in the context of the plural legal and other normative orders in force. These highlight the strong motivation of commoners to govern for the purpose of delivering provisioning services that provide them with financial benefits and for which they have a cultural connection. The cases studies both reveal the difficult task of delivering conservation outcomes when no beneficial interest accrues to the provider, when property rights are uncertain or when there is no positive correlation between the provisioning service and biodiversity. The analysis uses three frameworks; Tamanaha’s typology of Legal Pluralism, Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis of Common Property Resources and Armitage et al’s Criteria for Adaptive Co-management. This tri-faceted process assesses these complex socio-ecological systems demonstrating that in neither case study will current governance structures deliver the full breadth of public and private ecosystem services society seeks. Three opportunities for strengthening governance are identified; 1) enhance linkages between the plural normative orders for the effective enforcement of rules, 2) manage access to common property resources to provide legal certainty regarding rights and responsibilities and 3) ensure the Ecosystem Approach incorporates property rights to harness the motivation of commoners as primary managers.Natural England: H&H Bowe Limited: The Royal Geographical Society Slawson Award

Farming with Nature 2021 event report

University of Cumbria’s Centre for National Parks and Protected Areas (CNPPA) hosted the online conference Farming with Nature in May 2021, with support from the Food, Farming & Countryside Commission. The event set out to explore two of the recommendations from Defra’s 2019 Landscapes Review, these being: (i) that our national landscapes should form the backbone of nature recovery networks and, (ii) that national landscapes should have a central place in forthcoming Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes. Contributions by guest speakers and the active participation of all attendees at the conference workshops provided substantial insight into the opportunities and challenges ahead. Attendees, mainly from a spread of geographical regions in England, held a range of job roles relevant to land management in protected landscapes. In the report, rich qualitative data arising from the conference sessions is analysed. Actions to facilitate ELM and to develop nature recovery networks in farmed landscapes are identified. Recordings of the conference sessions are available on the @CNPPA_UoC YouTube channel at https://bit.ly/3r4NHb

CAMsterdam at SemEval-2019 task 6: Neural and graph-based feature extraction for the identification of offensive tweets

We describe the CAMsterdam team entry to the SemEval-2019 Shared Task 6 on offen-sive language identification in Twitter data.Our proposed model learns to extract tex-tual features using a multi-layer recurrent net-work, and then performs text classification us-ing gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT). A self-attention architecture enables the model to focus on the most relevant areas in the text.We additionally learn globally optimised em-beddings for hashtags using node2vec, which are given as additional tweet features to the GBDT classifier.Our best model obtains78.79% macro F1-score on detecting offensive language (subtask A), 66.32% on categorising offence types (targeted/untargeted; subtask B),and 55.36% on identifying the target of of-fence (subtask C)

The Early Royal Society and Visual Culture

Recent studies have fruitfully examined the intersection between early modern science and visual culture by elucidating the functions of images in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge. Given its rich archival sources, it is possible to extend this line of research in the case of the Royal Society to an examination of attitudes towards images as artefacts –manufactured objects worth commissioning, collecting and studying. Drawing on existing scholarship and material from the Royal Society Archives, I discuss Fellows’ interests in prints, drawings, varnishes, colorants, images made out of unusual materials, and methods of identifying the painter from a painting. Knowledge of production processes of images was important to members of the Royal Society, not only as connoisseurs and collectors, but also as those interested in a Baconian mastery of material processes, including a “history of trades”. Their antiquarian interests led to discussion of painters’ styles, and they gradually developed a visual memorial to an institution through portraits and other visual records.AH/M001938/1 (AHRC

Debate: Is food production holding back nature recovery?

Four speakers took part in the OFC Oxford Union Debate with the motion: "This house believes that farming for food is holding back nature recovery in protected landscapes”. Ben Goldsmith, Chair of the Conservative Environment Network and Sarah Dickins, Sustainable Economics Adviser proposed the motion and Will Cockbain, a Lake District farmer, and Julia Aglionby, Professor in Practice at the University of Cumbria, opposed the motion. Julia made the case that while there is much more to do to enhance nature in our protected areas - and across the other 76% of England - it is the failure of government policy that is holding back nature recovery not 'a drive' for food production

Farming and conservation: pathways to coexistence

Julia Aglionby, Professor of Practice, Centre for National Parks & Protected Areas, University of Cumbria, UK, was one of three guest speakers (alongside Professor Amy Dickman, University of Oxford and Iain Tolhurst MBE, Tolhurst Organic) at this seminar, part of the Grand Challenges Seminars 2024, which seeks to explore the challenges encountered by farmers and conservationists who may be seeking very different outcomes from areas of land. The seminar will attempt to examine these challenges and hear potential solutions from both academics and practitioners from different contexts. Core topics to be discussed include: traditional agricultural practices and how much they relate to current practices; economically feasible routes for sustainable farming and conflict mitigation strategies; farming requirements for populations and the negative effects of farming; how we change and develop policy to reflect sustainable practice; and nature based solutions that reflect biodiversity and conservation requirements. Julia is a Professor in Practice and focuses on the governance of common land and legal pluralism. She is also the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Candidate for Penrith and Solway

Rewilding and farming: could the relationship be improved through adopting a three compartment approach to land use?

What would a positive relationship between rewilding and farming look like in England? Do terms matter? When is extensive farming better categorised as rewilding and when is rewilding really farming with nature? Can farming and rewilding co-exist and complement each other to meet national ambitions to produce sufficient high-quality food, and address the interconnected biodiversity, climate, and health crises? This chapter explores these questions digging beneath the binary polarisation that has in recent years characterised much conversation, social media, and writing in this space. Barriers to land use change are explored and ideas to address them provided. The chapter focuses on England, which is currently facing a number of policy and funding challenges and opportunities, but it is recognised that many of these issues will have resonance in other countries and contexts. The analytical framework adopted is the three-compartment approach to land use as recommended by the National Food Strategy (Dimbleby, 2021). Could this framework better enable the co-existence of farming and rewilding when partnered with appropriate government levers and delivery mechanisms including the Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes