Flood risk is an increasing challenge in the UK, with 2.4 million properties being susceptible to fluvial flooding. This type of flooding is caused by the quantity of runoff being discharged by a river exceeding the capacity of the river channel. This results in water being transferred to the floodplain, which can have severe economic and social impacts. The quantity and speed of runoff from the landscape into rivers is a major factor in generating flooding. The way in which the landscape is managed therefore can have a significant impact on this process. The intensification of agriculture, through increasing the number of animals in pasture, and the use of larger, heavier machinery for arable farming, over the past 50 years or so is hypothesised to have had an impact on the severity and frequency of flooding. These land management practices cause soil compaction, which reduces the rate of rainfall infiltration and the volume of water that can be stored within the sub-surface. This results in more rainfall being partitioned into the faster surface runoff pathway into rivers and potentially causing flooding downstream. However, the level of soil compaction is highly heterogeneous over space and time. This is because different animals i.e. cattle, sheep and horses, exert different loads on the soil and are kept at different densities. Furthermore, farm animals are known to exhibit behaviour whereby certain parts of the field are moved over more frequently than others. The same is the case in arable farming practices, whereby ploughing forms tramlines or wheelings, which are more compacted. Different forms of management practice ranging from zero-tillage to conventional cultivation exert different pressures on the soil at different times of year. However, very little is known about this variability of soil compaction levels at the sub-field level and land under different management practices. This research aims to quantify this sub-field variation in compaction severity and depths through using novel Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) technology, and assess the impact on the physical soil properties, how water interacts with the soil and ultimately how important this effect is on catchment scale flood risk. This will be achieved through using a multi-methods approach combining field experiments, laboratory tests on soil samples and numerical hydrological modelling. First areas of high and low compaction will be identified using GPR and validated using traditional field based approaches. These will be related to loadings through GPS spatial data on where animals and machinery have moved over. A wide range of field and laboratory tests will then be carried out to quantify properties such as bulk density, porosity, saturated hydraulic conductivity, and particle size. Furthermore, X-Ray CT scanning will reveal the fine scale impacts of compaction on soil structure. This data will form the input to a physically based, reduced complexity, spatially distributed hydrological model, CRUM3. Feasible "what if?" scenarios will be co-produced with the project partners, including the Environment Agency, Trent Rivers Trust, Sustainable Land Trust, Natural England, and National Farmers Union through the Soar Catchment Partnership. This will upscale local changes in land management and soil characteristics to catchment scale flooding. This research will be undertaken with a group of catchment managers, land owners and local residents. This will both benefit the research scope and impacts of the findings. Recommendations and dissemination for industry, regulators, governmental bodies, charities and local land owners and residents will inform evidence based policy on Natural Flood Management. This will be achieved through steering group meetings, a British Hydrological Society national meeting, Project Away day, end of project riverside picnic, and the use of social media. Dissemination will also occur through more traditional academic routes.

This fellowship programme will take a circular economy (CE) approach and unlock the huge potential of renewable biomass, which can be easily sourced from agriculture/aquaculture/food industry as byproducts or wastes. The biomass contains biopolymers cellulose, chitin/chitosan, starch, protein, alginate and lignin, which are valuable resources for making environmentally friendly materials. Moreover, these biopolymers have unique properties and functions, which make them highly potential in important, rapidly growing applications such as therapeutic agent delivery, tissue engineering scaffolds, biological devices, green electronics, sensing, dye and heavy metal removal, oil/water separation, and optics. However, enormous challenges exist to process biopolymers and achieve desired properties/functions cost-effectively; these valuable biomass resources have long been underutilised. This proposed ambitious and adventurous research will focus on the smart design of materials formulation and engineering process from an interdisciplinary perspective to realise the assembly of biopolymer composite materials under a single flow process. This will eventually lead to a reinvented, cost-effective engineering technology based on 3D printing to produce a diverse range of robust, biopolymer composite materials with tailored structure, properties and functionality. Due to the versatile chemistry of biopolymers for modification, the bespoke 'green' materials are expected to outperform many synthetic polymers and composites for specific applications such as tissue engineering and controlled release. The outcomes of this transformative project will not only provide fundamental knowledge leading to a completely new line of research, but also deliver ground-breaking technologies that will impact the UK's plastic industry by providing truly sustainable and high-performance options for high-end technological areas (e.g. healthcare and agriculture).

This fellowship programme will take a circular economy (CE) approach and unlock the huge potential of renewable biomass, which can be easily sourced from agriculture/aquaculture/food industry as byproducts or wastes. The biomass contains biopolymers cellulose, chitin/chitosan, starch, protein, alginate and lignin, which are valuable resources for making environmentally friendly materials. Moreover, these biopolymers have unique properties and functions, which make them highly potential in important, rapidly growing applications such as therapeutic agent delivery, tissue engineering scaffolds, biological devices, green electronics, sensing, dye and heavy metal removal, oil/water separation, and optics. However, enormous challenges exist to process biopolymers and achieve desired properties/functions cost-effectively; these valuable biomass resources have long been underutilised. This proposed ambitious and adventurous research will focus on the smart design of materials formulation and engineering process from an interdisciplinary perspective to realise the assembly of biopolymer composite materials under a single flow process. This will eventually lead to a reinvented, cost-effective engineering technology based on 3D printing to produce a diverse range of robust, biopolymer composite materials with tailored structure, properties and functionality. Due to the versatile chemistry of biopolymers for modification, the bespoke 'green' materials are expected to outperform many synthetic polymers and composites for specific applications such as tissue engineering and controlled release. The outcomes of this transformative project will not only provide fundamental knowledge leading to a completely new line of research, but also deliver ground-breaking technologies that will impact the UK's plastic industry by providing truly sustainable and high-performance options for high-end technological areas (e.g. healthcare and agriculture).

Making land-use decisions is complicated because there are many competing demands (environmental, social and economic) placed on our landscapes. The decisions we make at small scales can have much larger and longer-term consequences. For instance, in arable landscapes, converting field margins to crop to maximise crop yield in a given field (economic benefit), will reduce pedestrian access beside crops (social benefit) and reduce resources supporting landscape-scale biodiversity (environmental benefit). Lower biodiversity can in turn reduce pollination service and therefore crop yield, not only in the original field, but also in surrounding fields. The consequences of a land-use choice in one field can therefore spread far beyond that field and affect many different benefits. This means that it is essential to assess the impacts of land-use decisions on all of these benefits simultaneously, in order to make the most informed land-use decisions at the landscape scale. Although many statistical models allow us to measure individual benefits in great detail across the landscape, very few combine multiple benefits, and those that do, typically do not consider the feedbacks between different benefits due to their additive model structure. Furthermore, these existing combined models rarely account for the time-dependent aspects of benefits derived, which can be significant for land-use choices such as woodland creation, which takes decades to reach their full biodiversity benefits. Our project will combine physical science expertise in building spatially-explicit time-dependent computer models with expertise in ecology, sociology and economics to develop the first modelling framework that combines multiple interacting landscape-scale benefit models, to identify land-use choices that maximise the ecological, social and economic benefits provided by the landscape over time. The project will use pollinators and the benefits they provide in agricultural landscapes as a case study for model development, because agricultural land-use interventions for supporting pollinators affect environmental (by supporting biodiversity), social (by affecting the scenic quality of farmland), and economic (by determining pollination service to crops) benefits simultaneously. Our model will therefore combine and interlink three individual benefit models - a pollinator abundance biodiversity-benefit model, an aesthetic value social-benefit model and a monetary crop value economic-benefit model - into a single cohesive whole. It will also account for how the benefits provided by interventions such as flower strips and hedgerow creation can change over time. We will test the model on a series of real agricultural landscapes incorporating varying amounts of pollinator interventions to identify the optimum proportions of interventions required to maximise the environmental, social and economic benefits provided by the landscapes over time. The outcomes of this project are directly relevant to designing future UK agri-environment schemes, and we will work with project partners to demonstrate the potential of the combined model framework to inform real-world land-use decisions. The modelling framework can then be expanded in future to include other benefits (e.g. abundance of other species, water quality/quantity etc.) and identify optimum solutions for other land-use systems with competing environmental, social and economic demands (e.g. new developments balancing housing needs with green infrastructure).

Recovery of appropriate waste and waste-derived materials, including biosolids, to land is an important source of nutrients and soil improvers, reducing costs to both industry and land managers, while improving resource efficiency. This is an increasing market, with a widening diversity of source materials being used to create these products, but they may also present challenges in relation to their composition, for instance by containing potentially toxic elements. It is thus important that the landspreading of these materials does not lead to unacceptable risks to human health and the environment. The chemical composition of soils varies greatly due to inputs from both natural (geological) and contaminant (anthropogenic) sources of elements. Therefore, there are substantial concentration variations over the landscape, as demonstrated by the large systematic national soil geochemistry datasets held in BGS, from NERC funded science programmes. These highlight how some rock formations give rise, entirely naturally, to soils with elevated concentrations of elements such as lead, cadmium and nickel in specific areas. There are also clear anthropogenic influences, with urban centres and historical mining areas often having elevated concentrations of these elements, amongst others. We have established, with project partners, that the soil data present opportunity to support informed decision making at multiple scales, through mapping predicted of soil chemical composition between the sampled sites. Being able to predict at unsampled locations is important to consider what the likely soil composition may be at a candidate site for application of these organic materials. This approach would provide information not only on predicted concentrations, but an indication of the confidence that any given prediction has attached to it (using the science of geostatistics). We will demonstrate this for England, using selected chemical elements. This methodology is particularly applicable to the regulator (Environment Agency (EA), where a paucity of this type of information is currently creating a policy challenge. The soil predictions will be examined at a local scale to support EA decisions on licence applications, but can also be used by farming businesses, and sellers, to make a preliminary assessment to help inform their decisions on the likely suitability of land to receive a given material, and more general protection of soil quality. The National Farmers Union are also project partners, to help produce outputs which will help farmers. On a regional/national scale these maps will benefit the EA and the Food Standards Agency in making strategic, regional, assessments of soil chemical quality and any risks these may present to human and environmental health, now or under plausible scenarios which can be tested with these mapped outputs. Sustained inter-organisational and inter-personal communication will ensure successful project progress and these effective networks will be continued post-funding. We will ensure wide visibility and uptake through engaging with relevant bodies within our project partners, and with other representative bodies with which they have links. Integration of feedback from both those with regulatory responsibilities and representatives of the farming sector will support outputs which are comprehensible to farming stakeholders. We have ensured sustainable web-hosting of outputs beyond project funding, and outputs will be available free-of-charge. The methodology will serve as an exemplar across the UK's devolved administrations and beyond, as well as for other contaminants which are of concern and for which data becomes available. KEYWORDS: soil; biosolids; contaminants; regulation; farming.