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相关者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。这种更深入的理解也有助于制定更有基础的缓解和适应战略，以应对环境变化。这项奖学金将使我能够在兰开斯特建立一个丰富的跨学科研究计划，目标是在数字技术在制定此类战略中的作用方面开展世界领先的研究。该研究计划建立在三个关键支柱上：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远的影响，但其在管理环境变化方面的作用却严重不足。该方案将侧重于三个主要方面数字创新（和互补）领域，即物联网（IoT）、云计算和数据科学：物联网有潜力以前所未有的规模提供有关自然环境许多方面的丰富实时数据;云计算提供了弹性存储和计算能力，可以将各种数据汇集在一起，从不同的地理位置和不同的规模收集数据，并将其开放给一系列利益相关者;数据科学提供了丰富的分析技术，然后理解数据，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发挥着至关重要的作用，但至关重要的是，要实现这一目标，科学必须改变。该计划将研究技术如何支持科学的范式转变，以实现以下方法：i）通过云计算实现的开放数据哲学，（例如，包括支持公民科学）; ii）代表了一种更加综合的整体科学，不同的科学学科与社会，数据和计算机科学家一起工作，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理解（再次得到云计算的支持）; iii）采用复杂系统思维，从生态系统服务、复杂性科学和系统方法的系统研究中汲取投入; iv）认识到不确定性的重要性，并寻求技术解决方案，帮助管理所有方面的不确定性，并在不确定和复杂的世界中支持决策。数字经济计划的一个主要成功是发展了一个研究社区和一套强调利益相关者参与和对社会影响的方法。该方案以这一经验为基础，采用了一种实验性、灵活和迭代的方法，涉及与广泛的合作伙伴/利益攸关方密切合作。这一固有的参与性办法经过精心设计，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减缓和适应战略方面取得深刻见解和突破。

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.