Constructing the Digital Environment is a Strategic Priorities Fund programme being led by NERC, and supported by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council and Defra.
Alongside a programme board and steering group, the programme has a number of roles: ‘Champions’ who oversee the programme, a network of (environmental and informatics) experts working with the champions to identify research ideas / gaps, a number of funded feasibility studies and, following on from these, demonstrators.
The programme has two Champions; Professors Ron Corstanje and Steve Hallett of Cranfield University.
Ron Corstanje is Professor of Data Sciences and Head of the Centre for Environmental & Agricultural Informatics at Cranfield University. He specialises in the application of spatio-temporal models to understand the nature and behaviour of natural systems and their constituent processes. Environmental systems are complex, expressed in complex but determinable patterns. His research applies quantitative methods to unravel this complexity, identifying the underlying factors and developing novel quantitative techniques to describe this.
r.corstanje@cranfield.ac.uk
+44(0)1234 754817
Personal web page
Stephen Hallett is Professor in Applied Environmental Informatics at Cranfield University. He has long-standing expertise in the application of spatial decision-support systems, big data, GIS, remote sensing and informatics in environmental science, particularly with soil resource systems and the natural environment. Stephen’s research interests include agri-informatics; soil and land resource management; geohazards and urban infrastructure; and environmental risk mitigation and climate change impacts.
Stephen acted as Director of the NERC ESRC Centre of Doctoral Training (CDT) in Data Risk and Environmental Analytics Methods (DREAM) www.dream-cdt.ac.uk. He is also the Cranfield manager and point of contact for the NERC ‘CENTA2’ Doctoral Training Partnership www.centa.org.uk.
s.hallett@cranfield.ac.uk+44(0)1234 754287
Personal web page
Dr John Beale is a Postdoctoral researcher in the Cranfield University’s Environment Centre (CEC). Part of John’s role is assisting in the conduct and administration of the Constructing a Digital Environment project.
Dr Kriti Mukherjee is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Cranfield University’s Environment Centre (CEC). Part of Kriti’s role is assisting in the conduct and administration of the Constructing a Digital Environment project. Her wider research revolves around applications of geographic information science, photogrammetry, image processing, data science, and machine learning tools and associated techniques to understand and model various environmental changes and extreme events. In short, Kriti looks forward to using her knowledge and technical expertise to come up with new approaches to tackle issues related to climate change and contribute to building a society more resilient to such changes.
Kenisha is a Lecturer in Decision Science and acts as the Manager of the NERC ‘Constructing a Digital Environment’ Expert Network. Her current research is developing robust foresight methodologies that link evidence-based strategic risk with value judgements to assess the resilience and robustness of environment and food policies and strategies for policy actors in organisations across the UK, EU and Asia.
Kenisha’s research is combining scientific data with expert knowledge to inform futures analyses, using outputs to communicate future challenges and opportunities to policy makers. She has led the development of medium and large future scenarios projects and delivered a horizon scanning programme, focused on the long-term sustainability of environment and food systems, through a UK pan-government futures partnership, led by Defra (2011-2014).
Kenisha is currently leading development of a decision tool that examines the consequences of choices and trade-offs implicit in future plans for regional development: case of the Oxford-Cambridge Arc (SPF Research England, 2019-2020). She is the Cranfield lead implementing the EU foresight system for the environment (DG Environment, 2018-20); she served as an expert advisor to the European Food Safety Authority and provided a strategic direction for their work on emerging risks (2017-2018), and recently developed a foresight process to explore the long-term challenges in food and agriculture as part of a British Council Thailand-funded project (2019-2020).
k.garnett@cranfield.ac.uk+44 (0) 1234 754292
Personal web page
The programme is operated by the NERC team:
The Digital Environment team at NERC is responsible for managing the day to day administration of the SPF Constructing a Digital Environment Programme. Cameron Ross, Programme Manager, can be contacted via:
DigitalEnvironment@nerc.ukri.org
+44 (0)1793 411930 and +44(0)7892 700207 with any queries about the programme
Resources
A number of related online resources exist, associated with the Digital Environment Programme. These are:
https://twitter.com/SPFDigiEnv Follow us on twitter
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv8vRIuTxCP-DgNMCq9KxqA
https://www.kaggle.com/NERCSPFDigiEnv
Handles
When tweeting and on social media, we tend to use the following handles: