PhD Studentship - Valuing the cultural benefits that coastal ecosystems provide to people using citizen science.

A joint PhD studentship between The Natural History Museum, London and the University of Southampton.

Supervisors: Dr Felix Eigenbrod, Dr Martin Solan, Dr Jasmin Godbold (all FNES, UoS), Dr John Tweddle (NHM).

Project Start Date: October 2013. Interviews of short-listed candidates will be in June 2013.

Rationale: There is now widespread recognition of the importance of ecosystem services (ES) – the benefits humans obtain from nature. However, a major hurdle to managing ES is lack of data for most services in most places. The most common approach to overcome data limitations has been to use proxies such as benefits transfer to map ES. However, our work suggests that errors associated with the commonly used global proxies are likely to be substantial. Our own work has also shown that cultural services are the most valued benefits in coastal areas, in particular recreational activities and the enhancement of human wellbeing through a sense of belonging. However, many of these benefits are not recognised or well protected by legislation because of a paucity of relevant data. Citizen science offers a promising way to fill these data gaps, particularly for cultural ecosystem services (e.g. enjoyment of the landscape, spiritual value of biodiversity). This is because cultural services are highly subjective and what the public perceives them to be is arguably their value. Despite the increasing profile of citizen science, to date there has been little work on using volunteer-based approaches for mapping ES, and no attempt has been made to compare such an approach to more traditional science-based approaches.

Aims and objectives: The overarching aim of this project is to make use of mobile internet devices (i.e. smart phones) and the Internet (including crowd sourcing, peer development) to develop portable components for identifying and quantifying (frequency, timing, geo-reference, environmental data) coastal ES using a citizen-science based methodology. Collection of such data is underpinned by evidence that people like to share information, contribute to societal well-being and satisfy their own curiosity about their local environment. There is growing evidence that participation in citizen science is unevenly spread across geographic regions and between different social and ethnic groups. We will tackle this problem and test the effectiveness of the citizen science approach for two coastal wetlands of national importance – the Essex Marshes and Morecombe Bay. Particular emphasis will be placed on the utility of the approach to identify cultural ES. We will focus on these two test sites as Drs Solan and Godbold are both investigators on the £2.1 million NERC-funded CBESS project (http://synergy.st-andrews.ac.uk/cbess/) that is quantifying the linkages between biodiversity and ES –including cultural services – in these wetlands. As such, we will be able to quantify the overlaps between valuing these systems through a citizen-science-based approach (achieved with this studentship) with a more traditional, resource-intensive scientific approach (achieved by the CBESS project). Building on our findings, the final stage of the PhD will be to develop and use a citizen science approach that minimises bias in data collection to value coastal derived cultural benefits for the whole of the UK.

Training elements of the project. Whilst at the NHM, the student will be based within the innovative Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity. They will gain general workplace skills, practical skills in citizen science project development and evaluation, and interact with other national and international practitioners. Science communication skills suitable for diverse audiences will be gained through training and participation in a wide spectrum of public-facing events: from Nature Live to festivals and Bioblitzes. The student will have full access to the NHM’s postgraduate training programme.

Whilst at Southampton the student will undergo both generic and specialist research training in both the Institute of Life Sciences (Eigenbrod) and the Graduate School of the National Oceanography Centre (Solan and Godbold) In combination, this training will equip the student with key transferable skills as outlined by the NERC led “Review of Skills Needs in the Environment Sector” (on behalf of the Environment research Funder’s Forum (ERFF)). These include: Multidisciplinarity (working within multi-disciplinary teams), Data Management (working with large data sets on field and experimental, and historical data), Translating Research (science to policy), Fieldwork, Statistical Analysis; Modelling (particularly the use of GIS and spatial analyses). We will also actively encourage take up of placement schemes.