Gaining new knowledge from historic data: an approach to ecological data rescue, with special reference to UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) long-term land use monitoring data sets

Abstract

The overarching theme of my collection of work comprises a unique synthesis of environmental informatics and long-term ecological monitoring, set in a context of a period of rapid developments in field survey methodology and environmental change. It concerns ecological data from a regional to national scale, charting the development of the repeatable long-term ecological monitoring undertaken by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) (formerly the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, ITE). My submission consists of six peer-reviewed first author papers (plus an additional second author paper) representing a major exercise, led and largely undertaken by myself, in data rescue, management, analysis and publication of a series of nationally important ecological data sets. Each of my published papers explores a major ecological survey, describes the methodology, available data and findings, and places each survey into a national, and international, context. My collection of work demonstrates my technical expertise in the sphere of ecological data management and has been pioneering in the field of data publication and open data. There is an increasing movement, encouraged by the UK Research Councils, towards making publicly funded research data openly accessible in a data repository. In recent years, several journals have been set up to encourage the sharing and re-use of scientific data. Publishing my work in such journals has meant that nationally valuable data are openly available and described to the wider research community and the wider public ensuring data transferability and re-use. Without my vital work concerning the environmental data described, the quality assured data would not be secured safely for long-term storage and use. Indeed, some of the data sets were already on the verge of being lost before the work in question was undertaken. My papers cover a period beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before which sampling techniques for ecological survey tended to be subjective and non-repeatable. Thanks to the ground-breaking work undertaken at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology’s research station at Merlewood, Cumbria, statistically robust, standardised, repeatable sampling methods have been developed for producing figures for large areas. My papers explore how these methodological techniques began to evolve in the first two surveys examined, concerning two habitat specific woodland surveys undertaken in 1971 (across the whole of Great Britain and in Scottish Pinewoods). These were followed by a regional survey of Shetland (1974), during which the idea of a statistical sampling framework using stratified random sampling was first tested. This led to the initiation of the first national ecological survey of Great Britain in 1978, now arguably the largest long-term ecological monitoring project in the country, known as the Countryside Survey (CS). This national survey has now been repeated in 1984, 1990, 1998 and 2007 and is covered in the final three papers. An additional paper describes how the techniques were utilised in an associated survey of targeted ‘Key Habitats’ in England in the 1990s, one of several surveys associated with Countryside Survey. The countryside of Great Britain and its associated habitats and ecological features have changed considerably over the last 50 years, for a variety of reasons. My collection of work providesthe unique opportunity to explore the changes and drivers of change that have taken place in the British countryside. The published data enable links between different disciplines to be made, furthering a range of research on many aspects of land use and land use change such as evolving farming and forestry practices, climate change and atmospheric pollution and providing evidence for national policy makers. The final paper included in my submission is a specific example of how this type of data may be applied, in this case in relation to the British uplands. This document should form essential reading for all scientists planning a major ecological project involving repeatable measurements