'Green health' and wellness may sound like 21st-century ideas; but medieval people believed strongly that having access to gardens and plants was an essential part of taking care of themselves and others. My research plan, to explore the gardens, plants, and green space of buildings like castles and monasteries and records left by medieval people as well as plants living in the landscape today, can trace the ways in which the 'green' environment was used to maintain health. This project will bring different areas of research together to understand, how, why and in what ways medieval people used plants and gardens to stay healthy. Medieval Green Lives will investigate the ways people maintained their health across aristocratic, ordinary and religious communities in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England during the later medieval period (1100 - 1600 AD). I want to look at the roles of gardens in medieval health care by examining how these spaces were used in monasteries, castles and ordinary homes. I will review these alongside the written records of garden design and plant sharing, as well as living plants. Bringing together different parts of social and scientific archaeology, history and botany, this project examines 40 case-study sites from the Atlantic Isles (of Ireland and Britain); whose shared historic past is indicated by common buildings, plants and documents, each of which retained distinct regional differences. Interestingly, humans needing care is widely perceived as a necessary part of life - yet it's rarely explored in stories of the past. However, evidence of this is readily available: people's lives (actions, relationships and experiences) can be accessed through surviving material from this time e.g. artefacts, buildings and historic documents. Like today, people in the past entered into relationships with other people, places, plants and things. Here, these actions are understood as practices - ways of doing things that mean something. I want to access this 'doing' in its material and spatial form to fully understand what a healthy life might have been like. Focussing on 'the traces of things people did' with plants and gardens, I will seek to offer a new way of thinking about health in ordinary, religious and lay households e.g. why particular plants were included in gardens, why some gardens were enclosed with masonry or how medieval people liked to look at beautiful flowers as part of their healthy regimen. Some of these plants survive in our landscapes today, though surprisingly, these plants from the medieval period (green heritage) are ignored or forgotten at heritage sites across the UK and Europe. Often it is the conservation of medieval buildings or the stories of famous past people that are prioritised, not the outdoors element of the lifestyle. At many sites, walls are cleared of vegetation and lawns are perfectly manicured. This is completely at odds with how these places may have looked, smelled or felt in the medieval period. This ordering reduces biodiversity which is now more than ever important to challenging climate change. The plants that do survive are under-appreciated in terms of their contribution to biodiversity as well as their genetic importance to their own species. Highlighting the value of these surviving plants known as relicts is an important part of protecting green heritage. Engaging with different organisations including Cadw, Museum Wales, Heritage Council and Transport Infrastructure Ireland we will demonstrate through detailed survey how medieval heritage sites are and can become 'beacons for biodiversity' which responds to our own understandings of the health benefits of green space and its touristic value. If greater care and attention is given to relict plants and green spaces, heritage sites can become spaces of refuge for flora and fauna as well as 21st century people who need access to green space for their own wellbeing, just like medieval people already knew.

Achieving a well integrated, optimal performing transport infrastructure network in Europe is a key element in the White Paper on Transport’s overall ambition for a single European Transport Area in 2050. As such it complements and supports the pillars on efficient and sustainable transport means and operations. The required integration and enhancement of the European transport infrastructure networks needs a shift towards next levels of governance capabilities that can adequately address the key societal challenges. In the framework of this CSA on a life cycle based asset management approach for transport infrastructure networks, these challenges are related to: An unprecedented call for network capacity and performance An unprecedented call for transparent, coherent and consistent decision making on cost-performance The (mostly public) financing of the transport infrastructure system has met with concrete fiscal limits. Already in many countries in the EU, this has led to a backlog in maintenance and replacement. Unless decisive actions are taken on network construction, maintenance and operations, this trend will result in mounting congestion losses in the economic powerhouses on the short term and to prohibitive obstructions in transport flows across the European transport network on the medium term. This calls for cross asset, cross modal and cross border decision making by the appropriate authorities, implying their close coordination and collaboration. The precondition for this is transparency to each other as well as to policy and society. This requires them to share a common vision and objectives, in a common language and from a common information base. The governance challenge is to provide the key stakeholders in the infrastructure governance with appropriate data, methods and tools in order to enable their decision making on cost-performance to be transparent, coherent and consistent across the assets, across the modes, and across the borders.

The development of the radiocarbon (14C) dating technique represents one of the most significant events in the history of archaeological thought; with this innovative method archaeology really started again in the 1950s. Identifying when things happened in time (as well as where things happened in space) is central to the archaeological endeavour. Since the 1950s millions of pounds/euro have been spent in Ireland and the UK producing 14C measurements in order to undertake archaeological research. These measurements have been funded by government heritage agencies, by academic researchers, by archaeologists in professional practice, by local societies, and by research agencies including the IRC and the AHRC. The numbers of these data have significantly increased in the UK with changes in central planning policy, from Planning Policy Guidance 16 onwards and with the development of professional archaeological practice as part of the construction industry. In the Republic of Ireland, the construction boom associated with the 'Celtic Tiger' economy had a similar impact on the scale of the production of 14C data. The rapid expansion in the numbers of 14C data also underlines how central they are to all forms of archaeology, produced from every type of archaeological site, from the whole 60,000 years of human history when the technique can be used. However, 14C data can only be used effectively in subsequent research if they are correctly reported (Bayliss 2015; Millard 2014); because of a lack of training across the sector essential data attributes are often not reported or made publuc by researchers. If these attributes are lost or removed from radiocarbon measurements their utility becomes compromised and their value lessened. Ironically, given the importance of these data, there has been a global failure to curate them effectively. Across the UK and Ireland, there is no single functioning 14C archive. Because of this, millions of euros/pounds of data are being made rogue - with inaccurate, incomplete, or otherwise compromised 14C attributes often present in research literature. Moreover, the absence of international digital archives for these essential data is a significant barrier to research that seeks to work across national historic environment agency jurisdictions. This has major issues globally for archaeological research, and is especially true for Ireland and the UK, where many research objectives exist across borders, with datasets that do not respect the confines of contemporary nation states. Further, reporting standards mean that many existing 14C data are not interoperable with existing historic environment data management systems. The result is that we are impoverishing vast quantities of data of huge value, and that our research into, analyses of, and curation of the historic environment are similarly compromised. This project will address this significant, international problem for all archaeological research periods by transforming available data from across Ireland and the UK, reconstituting the essential attributes, and safeguarding these data for the future. We will use these data to achieve innovative Big Data analyses into the management of the historic environment, and into archaeological research across all periods and regions of the UK and Ireland. Our lasting legacy will be making these data and our analyses discoverable, open access, sustainable and functional for researchers to come, providing a sector-wide training legacy, and developing schools resources to educate the next generation of digital humanities researchers in the historic environment. We are supported in this work by our historic environment partners in national government, and national heritage agencies, and the digital infrastructure provided by the Archaeology Data Service which will secure this invaluable resource for the future.

The main objectives of the BISON project are: ● To identify future research and innovation needs for a better integration of biodiversity with infrastructure planning, construction, operation and decommissioning. The project will develop a Strategic Research and Deployment Agenda (SRDA) which can be deployed at multiple scales, within the EU research framework programme, or by other regional, national or local programmes, in order to improve the knowledge-base on infrastructure and biodiversity. ● To make linear infrastructure more high performing and reliable while taking into account the specific needs of Western and Eastern Europe. In Western Europe, there is an increasing need to adapt existing long-lived infrastructure to new climate conditions, as well as finding innovative and sustainable solutions to reduce the impact of invasive species and support declining native species, while in Eastern Europe, there is significant land-use change and habitat fragmentation due to the surge in infrastructure developments to provide economic opportunities that are threatening the local, and very often endemic biodiversity. The project will identify the construction, maintenance and inspection methods and materials which are long-lasting and resilient and can be used by different transport modes to mitigate pressure on biodiversity. ● Support European Member States to fulfill their international commitments by engaging all stakeholders into biodiversity mainstreaming for infrastructure planning and development. It will do so by providing recommendations to minimise the impacts of infrastructure on biodiversity through supporting existing and developing projects. ● Support European Member States to become political leaders through collaboration and support of European research institutions and infrastructure operators, and providing more sustainability at the international level through jointly addressing biodiversity and infrastructure challenges.