Socially engaged photography and wellbeing: reflections on a case study in the northwest of England

This paper describes a 9-month project commissioned by Halton Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and Liverpool photography organisation, Open Eye Gallery. Socially engaged photographers worked with local residents from the Windmill Hill estate in Runcorn to describe healthy and unhealthy aspects of the area. Six women were trained to use cameras to document everyday things that mattered to them. Through focus groups they discussed what these photographs revealed about the health and ill-health of the area. The resulting exhibition, As and When, told their story. Despite being a deprived area with more than average incidence of illness, they identified many positive things that enhanced their sense of wellbeing and resilience. The benefits of the project included increased social engagement and participation, an improved sense of vitality and rejuvenation, emotional benefits, a feeling of greater political agency and increased visual literacy. This paper outlines the model of practice developed with the support of CCG and in collaboration with local stakeholders. It makes a case for the value and the ways in which clusters of general practices could develop links and work with health assets in their local communities

Breaking Functional Connectivity into Components: A Novel Approach Using an Individual-Based Model, and First Outcomes

Landscape connectivity is a key factor determining the viability of populations in fragmented landscapes. Predicting ‘functional connectivity’, namely whether a patch or a landscape functions as connected from the perspective of a focal species, poses various challenges. First, empirical data on the movement behaviour of species is often scarce. Second, animal-landscape interactions are bound to yield complex patterns. Lastly, functional connectivity involves various components that are rarely assessed separately. We introduce the spatially explicit, individual-based model FunCon as means to distinguish between components of functional connectivity and to assess how each of them affects the sensitivity of species and communities to landscape structures. We then present the results of exploratory simulations over six landscapes of different fragmentation levels and across a range of hypothetical bird species that differ in their response to habitat edges. i) Our results demonstrate that estimations of functional connectivity depend not only on the response of species to edges (avoidance versus penetration into the matrix), the movement mode investigated (home range movements versus dispersal), and the way in which the matrix is being crossed (random walk versus gap crossing), but also on the choice of connectivity measure (in this case, the model output examined). ii) We further show a strong effect of the mortality scenario applied, indicating that movement decisions that do not fully match the mortality risks are likely to reduce connectivity and enhance sensitivity to fragmentation. iii) Despite these complexities, some consistent patterns emerged. For instance, the ranking order of landscapes in terms of functional connectivity was mostly consistent across the entire range of hypothetical species, indicating that simple landscape indices can potentially serve as valuable surrogates for functional connectivity. Yet such simplifications must be carefully evaluated in terms of the components of functional connectivity they actually predict