Senior Fellowship in the Role of Digital Technology in Understanding, Mitigating and Adapting to Environmental Change

数字技术在帮助科学家和其他关键利益攸关方更深入地了解自然环境及其相互关联的复杂生态系统网络方面发挥着至关重要的作用。这种更深入的理解还有助于制定更扎实的缓解和适应战略，以应对环境变化。这笔奖学金将使我能够在兰开斯特大学建立一个丰富的跨学科研究方案，目标是在数字技术在制定这些战略中的作用方面进行世界领先的研究。该研究计划建立在三个关键支柱之上：将数字创新作为推动者。技术正在对数字经济和社会的许多领域产生深刻影响，但其在管理环境变化方面的作用明显落后。该计划将侧重于数字创新的三个主要(和互补的)领域，即物联网(IoT)、云计算和数据科学：物联网具有以以前无法想象的规模提供有关自然环境许多方面的丰富、实时数据的潜力；云计算提供弹性存储和计算能力，将来自不同地理位置和不同规模的不同数据集聚集在一起，并向一系列利益攸关方开放；数据科学提供丰富的分析技术，以便理解数据，从而为缓解战略和相关政策提供信息。科学在解释大数据方面起着至关重要的作用，但至关重要的是，要实现这一点，科学必须改变。该方案将调查技术如何支持科学范式向以下方法转变：i)通过云(例如，包括对公民科学的支持)的开放数据哲学，使其本质上更加开放和协作；ii)代表一种更综合、更全面的科学，使不同的科学学科与社会、数据和计算机科学家合作，促进对生态系统及其内在复杂性的更深入和更有意义的数据驱动的理解(同样得到云计算的支持)；iii)接受复杂的系统思维，从关于生态系统服务、复杂性科学和系统方法系统的研究中吸取意见；四)认识到不确定性的重要性，寻求技术解决方案，帮助管理所有方面的不确定性，并支持在不确定和复杂的世界中进行决策。数字经济计划的一个重大成功是发展了一个研究社区和一套方法，强调利益相关者的参与和对社会的影响。该方案以这一经验为基础，采用试验性、灵活和迭代的方法，与广泛的合作伙伴/利益攸关方密切合作。这一具有内在参与性的方法经过精心设计，以便在与水/粮食/能源安全、国家基础设施和生物多样性丧失有关的缓解和适应战略方面能够有洞察力和突破。

Digital technologies have a crucial role to play in helping scientists and other key stakeholders to more deeply understand the natural environment and its complex web of interconnected ecosystems. This deeper understanding also supports the development of more grounded mitigation and adaptation strategies in response to environmental change. This fellowship will enable myself to establish a rich, cross-disciplinary research programme at Lancaster with the goal of carrying out world leading research in the role of digital technologies in deriving such strategies. The research programme is built on three key pillars:Digital innovation as an enabler. Technology is having a profound impact on the digital economy and many areas of society, but its role in managing environmental change is significantly under-developed. This programme will focus on three major (and complementary) areas of digital innovation, namely the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and data science: IoT has the potential to provide rich, real-time data about many facets of the natural environment at a scale previously unimaginable; cloud computing offers elastic storage and computational capacity to bring together diverse data-sets from different geographical locations and at different scales and open this up to a range of stakeholders; data science provides an abundance of analysis techniques to then make sense of the data and hence to inform mitigation strategies and associated policies.Science as a conduit. Science has a crucial role in interpreting big data but, crucially, to achieve this, science must change. The programme will investigate how technology can support a paradigm shift in science towards an approach that: i) is more intrinsically open and collaborative through a philosophy of open data, as enabled by the cloud (e.g. including support for citizen science); ii) represents a more integrative, holistic science whereby different scientific disciplines work together, alongside social, data and computer scientists, to facilitate deeper and more meaningful data-driven understanding of ecosystems and their intrinsic complexities (again supported by cloud computing); iii) embraces complex systems thinking taking input from research on ecosystem services, complexity science and systems of systems approaches; iv) recognises the importance of uncertainty and seek technological solutions that help manage uncertainty in all its dimensions and support decision making in an uncertain and complex world.Impact as intrinsic. One major success of the Digital Economy programme was to develop a research community and set of approaches that emphasised stakeholder engagement and impact on society. This programme builds on this experience and adopts an experimental, agile and iterative methodology involving a close collaboration with a wide range of partners/stakeholders. This inherently participative approach is carefully designed to enable insights and breakthroughs in mitigation and adaptation strategies related to water/food/energy security, national infrastructure and biodiversity loss.