'Future Treescapes in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty' is a collaborative project that brings together the work of agricultural researchers, landscape professionals, national agencies, and local stakeholders to focus on a distinctive protected landscape: the Chiltern Hills. As in other UK AONBs, one of the area's defining features is its treescape, which is made up most characteristically of beech woodland, but includes the UK's largest coverage of native box. 88% of the Chilterns' designated priority habitats are deciduous woodland, and of the 17,588 woodland hectares within its boundaries 9,830ha (59%) are ancient. There are immediate opportunities to support the expansion of these woodlands through the planned extension of the AONB's boundaries (Natural England statutory consultation, 2024). 'Future of UK Treescapes' has three key themes: understanding holistically the form, value and function of UK woodland; exploring barriers and pathways towards its expansion; increasing the resilience of UK treescapes to global pressures. All three are currently of urgent significance to the Chilterns. For FTAONB, treescape investigators from the University of Reading have joined with the Chilterns Conservation Board to co-design a programme of knowledge exchange around these pressing challenges and opportunities. Their plan centres on a series of workshops at which both partners will introduce their wider circles of collaborators to a newly extended network of treescape researchers, landscape practitioners, and conservation/NGO professionals. The exchange of knowledge at these workshops will be broadened further, crucially, through FTAONB's consultation with hard-to-reach professionals in the agricultural and land management sectors, upon whose involvement the larger agendas of the project ultimately depend. The project is designed, furthermore, so that its landscape-specific identification of knowledge requirements and research provisions can be scaled up from the local context of the Chilterns to the larger, national context of the other 45 UK AONBs. The FTAONB project team will produce a series of statement documents and information tools at each of its collaborative stages, using an iterative process of composition, consultation and revision. Stage 1 will produce an initial research needs statement, followed by practice notes from the first workshop, elaborated into an attractive and impactful infographic document. At Stage 2 we will deploy the infographic practice notes in consultations with local stakeholders (facilitated by the CCB through their farm cluster programme), and seek to revise and extend them in the light of these conversations. At Stage 3 we will assess the scope for scaling up the practice notes to more general UK treescape contexts, finally prototyping a toolkit document of UK Treescape research applications. This toolkit will form the centrepiece of a searchable, online knowledge hub, containing educational materials on the expansion and preservation of UK treescapes, to be hosted on the Tree Council website. For the CCB, the legacy of its work on FTAONB is the material that it will feed into the Chilterns AONB 2025-2030 management plan, and the foundations it will lay for a new Chilterns Woodland Strategy document.

Marl lakes have been designated a priority habitat within the EU Habitats Directive for their nutrient-poor waters with benthic vegetation of charophytes (stoneworts). However, it is thought that the ecological status of several English marl lakes, including Semerwater and Malham Tarn, has been adversely affected by eutrophication including an increase in algae and a decline in the diversity of the submerged plant community. In the absence of long-term records the nature of these changes are poorly understood and hence the information needed to successfully conserve and manage these unique waters is lacking. This project seeks to combine contemporary limnological and biological investigation with palaeoecological analysis to elucidate the nature, timescales and magnitude of changes in ecological and limnological processes involved in the response of marl lakes to nutrient enrichment. The study will address three main hypotheses: 1. In the absence of enrichment, marl lakes exist in a stable, clear water state, dominated by a species-rich community of charophytes 2. In response to eutrophication, marl lakes exhibit a gradual (>100 years) transition from macrophyte to phytoplankton dominance. A decline in charophyte species richness leads to an encroachment of elodeid macrophytes, characterised by sub-decadal oscillations between charophyte and elodeid dominance. These changes occur in conjunction with a reduction in marl precipitation. Finally, submerged macrophytes are displaced by phytoplankton populations concomitant with the total cessation of carbonate precipitation. 3. On a shorter timescale, reductions in plant species richness result in a progressive decrease in the seasonal duration of plant cover with associated alterations in zooplankton, invertebrate and fish populations. It is expected that the main findings of the work will be incorporated into management plans for the three study lakes, specifically assisting Natural England in setting conservation objectives for marl lakes as required by the EU Habitats Directive, and providing information to the Environment Agency on reference conditions and ecological data as required by the EU Water Framework Directive.

It is widely recognised that anthropogenic activities have resulted in significant changes to the hydromorphology (flow characteristics and fluvial geomorphology) and ecology of riverine ecosystems globally and that to reinstate morphological diversity physical river restoration may be required in many instances. However, significant questions remain regarding the nature and number of riverine flora and fauna that have been lost or disadvantaged by historic channel modifications across much of lowland England. Many of these rivers have been extensively modified for many centuries for a variety of purposes. Some of the most significant modification took place in the decades following World War II, in a drive to increase food security through improved land drainage and associated flood management. Channelisation, involving straightening, deepening, widening and reprofiling resulted in greatly reduced habitat heterogeneity, with serious implications for riverine and floodplain biodiversity. A better understanding of the geomorphological, hydrological and particularly the biodiversity elements that have been compromised or lost is required in order to characterise the benefits of planned measures to restore and reinstate channel form and function. To generate this understanding in an environment where natural processes have been impacted over large spatial scales, an innovative palaeoecological approach is proposed that will provide a window on past riverine conditions so that the contemporary channel and community inhabiting it can be gauged prior to restoration. This project will combine analysis of contemporary river morphology and ecology with palaeoecological techniques (via examination of instream and floodplain deposits associated with the river) to explore the recent history of selected lowland rivers in England. We hypothesise that natural elements of channel morphology and the instream faunal community have been lost or compromised due to historic management practices. The project will characterise some of the critical habitat features that have suffered from modifications and through the use of palaeoecological techniques characterise the changes in the faunal community through examination of fossil and contemporary Trichoptera (caddis fly larvae) and aquatic Coleoptera (beetles) assemblages. Study sites have been selected from the English network of rivers designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs). This network includes representative examples of different river types found in England and research will focus on six rivers comprising: the River Beult (Kent), R. Eye (Leicestershire), R. Hull (EastYorkshire) and R. Wensum (Norfolk) all exhibiting straightening and over-widening to varying degrees, and the R. Mease (Staffordshire) with significantly less modification and the R. Blythe (W. Mids.) which has a largely unmodified channel form. Potential palaeochannel localities have been identified dating from the post-war era of channel modification. These include old channel features (including meanders cut off following channel straightening or natural ox-bows) or sediments within largely modified channels that have escaped disturbance. Detailed site identification will involve examination of historical maps, geomorphological appraisals of the rivers, study of aerial photos and consultation with local Natural England and Environment Agency staff. Sediment cores and/or sections will be collected and analysed for sub-fossil macroinvertebrates (Trichoptera and Coleoptera) following the procedures developed at Loughborough University. This data will be compared with the communities recorded in the contemporary modified channel, in order to directly evaluate changes likely to have resulted from the altered geomorphology.

On 23 March, the UK went into lockdown in response to the Covid-19 threat. As a result, people's engagement with natural environments may have changed significantly which is likely to have had significant impact on their wellbeing. We will work with Natural England to understand changes in nature engagement and wellbeing in the UK before, during and after lockdown and help understand what Government and Statutory Bodies can do to ameliorate the impact of Covid-19 on wellbeing now and as part of the UK Government Green Recovery strategy from Covid-19. We will examine what lessons can be learned from this period of disruption for theory development and practice, and for the provision and management of natural places for human wellbeing by: 1) providing an in depth understanding of how wellbeing during and post lock-down has changed across the UK as a result of changes in access to- and engagement with different natural environments. 2) creating a mapping of different wellbeing outcomes associated with different types of natural environments and the use of these environments for different activities. 3) contributing to theory development through improving the measurement and examination of a key concept in nature-wellbeing studies "a sense of being away". Four studies will be conducted analysing data on nature-engagement and wellbeing in: (1) a longitudinal survey study with a representative sample of (1500) UK households (June 2020-21) studying (changes in) wellbeing and engagement with different natural environments, (2) an analysis of social media images and comments posted during lockdown, (3) an ethnographic study with up to 30 families from different socio-demographic backgrounds to provide an in-depth insight into experiences during and post lockdown, and (4) secondary data analyses of data collected by Natural England over the last ten years to provide a broad perspective of nature engagement pre-, during and post lockdown.

Human impacts on the natural environment have reached unprecedented levels. One of the consequences of this has been world-wide declines in biodiversity. However, although many of the services we rely on ecosystems to provide are underpinned by biodiversity we know little about the consequences of biodiversity loss for ecosystem service provision. This project will investigate the extent to which provision in ecosystem services from grassland ecosystems has changed over time focussing on a critical period of human impact, the last fifty years. We will do this by repeating an extensive vegetation survey conducted in the Pennine region, northern England, in 1965. We will also utilise data from a partial resurvey in 1990. The focus of this survey will be calcareous grasslands. This species-rich habitat forms an important part of a multifunctional landscape providing provisioning services through agriculture whilst at the same time being important for supporting, regulating and cultural services. We will revisit sites surveyed in 1965 and record them using the same methods. We will also incorporate results from a repeat of the acid grassland component of the survey which was completed in summer 2012. We will use a range of indicators of stocks and flows of natural capital, some of which we will measure directly such as bee nectar sources (an indicator of the regulating service pollination), and others, such as annual above-ground net primary productivity (an indicator of the supporting service primary productivity), which we will infer using plant traits We will also use out data to contribute to and test ecosystem service indicators in development in the Wessex BESS project. These will be focussed on greenhouse gas fluxes, pollination and natural pest enemies. We will analyse the data collected to examine how provision of ecosystem services has is likely to have changed since 1965 given changes in associated natural capital. We will also collate data on drivers of change during this period such as climate, air pollution and land use intensity. By quantitatively linking drivers and ecological responses we will identify drivers of change in ecosystem service delivery. Using multivariate statistics we will also assess spatial and temporal patterns in the dataset to test the validity of using space-for-time substitutions when assessing ecosystem service delivery. We will use the data generated in this project to create a tool where sites can be plotted passively within an ordination space using data on vegetation species composition to identify the level of ecosystem service delivery. This tool will be useful to conservation managers and policy makers to assess the ecosystem service provision from sites of conservation interest. This project will provide valuable information on ecosystem services in upland and lowland grassland habitats and how they have changed over time. We anticipate the project will be of considerable interest to academics in the field of ecology as well as policy makers concerned with the conservation and status of grassland habitats.