This project will provide a novel citizen science approach to collecting and interpreting data about domestic gardens in order to co-develop an action plan with project partners to prioritise greening solutions within and beyond domestic gardens. Domestic gardens offer a valuable source of green infrastructure (GI) within an urban environment. They are important patches of greenspace that can provide connectivity between larger areas of GI (parks, recreation grounds etc), therefore improving the functioning of ecosystems and the services they provide, such as reducing surface water runoff thereby reducing flood risk, and lowering urban temperatures. While individually, a domestic garden may appear insignificant, collectively domestic gardens contribute up to 30% of greenspace within the urban matrix, which becomes especially important at the city scale. In spite of this, the quantity and quality of green infrastructure provision by domestic gardens is not well-evidenced. This has implications for the future resilience of an urban environment and the health and well-being of its citizens. Current data over-estimates the amount of vegetation within private gardens, which leads to subsequent inaccuracies in environmental model outputs (e.g. surface water runoff in an extreme rainfall event), and in the identification and prioritisation of areas of GI need, inhibiting effective action on-the-ground. Furthermore, the general public are often unaware of the environmental value of their own private garden and how they can improve it. This project will address these issues directly by: 1. Inviting city residents to complete an online survey about their own garden, the results of which will be amalgamated to create maps of domestic garden greenspace both in terms of quantity and quality. Survey respondents will be given a score for the environmental quality of their garden based on their responses to the survey, together with some information as to how their garden could be improved in relation to biodiversity, climate regulation and improving air quality. 2. Validating the survey responses using high resolution satellite data. The combination of the satellite data with the survey responses will be used to establish a classification scheme for different garden types, which can then be extrapolated to the wider city area. 3. Modelling how the vegetation within a domestic garden impacts surface runoff, temperature reduction and air quality. This will be done across multiple scales, from an individual garden to the neighbourhood-level and eventually at the city-scale. 4. Developing an action plan for GI solutions within the city based on the findings from the previous objectives and existing, larger-scale, green infrastructure datasets. Manchester is the test city for this project; the proposal has been developed in partnership with Manchester City Council, Red Rose Forest, Southway Housing, Lancashire Wildlife Trust and additional members of the Manchester a Certain Future Green Infrastructure Strategy Group (Environment Agency, BDP, Groundwork, National Trust). The project outputs will allow these end-users to develop a more robust plan for GI under current and future climate scenarios. Consequently, project outputs will contribute to enhancing the quality of life for the local population and to improving the resilience of the Manchester City environment. Further impact will occur at the individual level (improving individual gardens based on the survey feedback, strengthening community cohesion), neighbourhood-level (the evidence created can be used for biodiversity/GI/ES offsetting for new housing developments, housing associations will use the project outputs for improving neighbourhoods and access to green space) and stakeholder-level (private developers can use the outputs to add value to residential areas and development, third sector organisations can use the maps for developing policy recommendations and actions).

This project will provide a novel citizen science approach to collecting and interpreting data about domestic gardens in order to co-develop an action plan with project partners to prioritise greening solutions within and beyond domestic gardens. Domestic gardens offer a valuable source of green infrastructure (GI) within an urban environment. They are important patches of greenspace that can provide connectivity between larger areas of GI (parks, recreation grounds etc), therefore improving the functioning of ecosystems and the services they provide, such as reducing surface water runoff thereby reducing flood risk, and lowering urban temperatures. While individually, a domestic garden may appear insignificant, collectively domestic gardens contribute up to 30% of greenspace within the urban matrix, which becomes especially important at the city scale. In spite of this, the quantity and quality of green infrastructure provision by domestic gardens is not well-evidenced. This has implications for the future resilience of an urban environment and the health and well-being of its citizens. Current data over-estimates the amount of vegetation within private gardens, which leads to subsequent inaccuracies in environmental model outputs (e.g. surface water runoff in an extreme rainfall event), and in the identification and prioritisation of areas of GI need, inhibiting effective action on-the-ground. Furthermore, the general public are often unaware of the environmental value of their own private garden and how they can improve it. This project will address these issues directly by: 1. Inviting city residents to complete an online survey about their own garden, the results of which will be amalgamated to create maps of domestic garden greenspace both in terms of quantity and quality. Survey respondents will be given a score for the environmental quality of their garden based on their responses to the survey, together with some information as to how their garden could be improved in relation to biodiversity, climate regulation and improving air quality. 2. Validating the survey responses using high resolution satellite data. The combination of the satellite data with the survey responses will be used to establish a classification scheme for different garden types, which can then be extrapolated to the wider city area. 3. Modelling how the vegetation within a domestic garden impacts surface runoff, temperature reduction and air quality. This will be done across multiple scales, from an individual garden to the neighbourhood-level and eventually at the city-scale. 4. Developing an action plan for GI solutions within the city based on the findings from the previous objectives and existing, larger-scale, green infrastructure datasets. Manchester is the test city for this project; the proposal has been developed in partnership with Manchester City Council, Red Rose Forest, Southway Housing, Lancashire Wildlife Trust and additional members of the Manchester a Certain Future Green Infrastructure Strategy Group (Environment Agency, BDP, Groundwork, National Trust). The project outputs will allow these end-users to develop a more robust plan for GI under current and future climate scenarios. Consequently, project outputs will contribute to enhancing the quality of life for the local population and to improving the resilience of the Manchester City environment. Further impact will occur at the individual level (improving individual gardens based on the survey feedback, strengthening community cohesion), neighbourhood-level (the evidence created can be used for biodiversity/GI/ES offsetting for new housing developments, housing associations will use the project outputs for improving neighbourhoods and access to green space) and stakeholder-level (private developers can use the outputs to add value to residential areas and development, third sector organisations can use the maps for developing policy recommendations and actions).

Working with industrial and third sector partners, this project will support the development of the world's first biodiversity credit standard (i.e. core environmental, social and governance requirements biodiversity projects must meet to become certified). Recent and upcoming legislation in the UK, EU and elsewhere is introducing greater requirements for organisations of many types to report on the effects of their activities on both carbon and nature. There is also rapidly increasing private-sector interest in nature conservation as part of corporate social responsibility, positive publicity, etc. These trends, plus various natural capital impact assessment schemes being developed, are creating a large demand for biodiversity credits, but no biodiversity credit standard exists yet. Analogous to carbon credits, biodiversity credits assign investable and tradeable economic value to biodiversity, for example allowing a landowner to raise finance (based on forecast biodiversity uplift) to fund nature conservation on their land. This project co-designs a Biodiversity Credit Tool (BCT) with multiple stakeholders. It centres on a partnership between two charities (Wallacea Trust - conservation; Plan Vivo - standards and certification) that have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop a biodiversity credit standard, and have already received a large amount of interest (see Beneficiaries). The project PI is in the Biodiversity Uplift Methodology Working Group (meeting since mid-2021) and has been selected as the only academic on the Biodiversity Standard Working Group (BSWG), starting in 2022, and also to Chair the upcoming Technical Advisory Committee (TAC). The current academic literature on standards development and commensuration challenges in environmental contests tends to be retrospective. This project provides a rare opportunity to observe tensions and equivocality emerging between scientific and different stakeholders goals in practice. This will improve understanding of decision making in biodiversity economics. The Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation's 2021 Conservation Finance report shows very rapid growth in private-sector biodiversity funding: from US$2 billion in 2016 to $18 billion in 2020. Remarkably, the report concludes that the growth rate could be considerably higher, but is held back by lack of appropriate methods for quantifying biodiversity. Our current NERC-ESRC project aims to provide a synthesis of methods to quantify biodiversity for potential use in biodiversity valuation and trading. That synthesis is informing project partner Plan Vivo's ongoing development of the methodology for its biodiversity standard. A key part of our proposed project is to rigorously field-test shortlisted options for this biodiversity quantification. Once the standard is launched, we will work with our stakeholders to improve it, and develop tools to implement it. The stakeholders have already produced an early draft of documentation for applying for biodiversity credits, and invited 10 of the many interested organisations to use it to put in pilot applications. These pilots (from 8 countries in 5 continents; see Track Record) will be processed iteratively, learning from the experience and from our stakeholder and field research to improve the standard and its workflows before full roll-out. The biodiversity quantification method being proposed for the credit standard requires field sampling and significant cost for project applicants (reflecting the difficulty of measuring biodiversity for economic valuation). In the later stages of the project - once that method has been developed - we therefore aim to develop tools to help select the most appropriate sites for biodiversity uplift projects. Overall, our project represents a synergy of fundamental academic questions addressed as part of delivering on a stakeholder-led initiative with high expected impact.

Green infrastructure (GI) is recognised globally as an essential component of liveable and sustainable places. It is generally defined as encompassing most vegetated elements in the built environment, for example trees, shrubs, wetlands and other planting. It is widely acknowledged that GI provides numerous benefits to health and well-being and there is a substantial body of research demonstrating these benefits. Despite this there is still considerable uncertainty amongst the multiple stakeholders of 'what good GI is'. Currently, there is no overarching benchmark or standard for GI. This Innovation Fund will address this by developing a national benchmark for GI. The Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments at the University of the West of England, Bristol are already developing a local benchmark for GI with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership. This benchmark is, however, focussed on local priorities in Gloucestershire and the West of England. This Innovation Fund will expand the local benchmark to ensure it can be used across England in a wider range of GI initiatives. This benchmark will allow an assessment of the process of GI creation, from policy, through to planning, design, delivery and long-term management, ensuring that current good practice has been adopted at all stages. The stakeholders, or end-users, for the national benchmark include planners, property developers, ecologists, urban designers, landscape architects, engineers, public health professionals, urban foresters, community safety officers and maintenance contractors. The objectives are as follows: - To work with a range of end-users to expand the local benchmark into a national benchmark and ensure that it is fit-for-purpose and user-friendly. - To apply this national benchmark to a series of GI demonstration projects including new commercial and residential developments and retrofitting initiatives across England to demonstrate its effectiveness. The national benchmark will then be formally launched and made available online for anyone to use for free. User documentation and reports detailing the demonstration projects will be available on a website for the benchmark. The outcome of the Innovation Fund is ultimately the delivery of high quality GI. This will maximise the benefits provided by GI including to nature conservation, health and well-being, economic growth, climate change adaptation and resilience. The key impacts include: Allowing developers to demonstrate to planning authorities, stakeholders and customers that they are providing high quality GI, which will act as a selling point for their developments. Enabling local authorities to communicate their expectations for GI in new developments and retrofitting projects (e.g. of social housing) and its maintenance; easily identify those planning applications that are meeting their requirements for the GI elements of developments; and demonstrate the quality of their own GI assets. Allowing built environment consultants to demonstrate compliance with a respected and recognised benchmark to their clients. Enabling policy makers to develop more effective policies, by being able to specify their expectations for GI at a national and local level in a range of contexts. This will improve clarity on the requirements for GI. Benefit residents and communities in both new and existing neighbourhoods who will gain from the provision of high quality GI and the associated benefits. This will ultimately improve, for example, their quality of life, health and well-being, environmental quality, resilience to climate change and the local economy. Benefit broader society which will have more consistent access to high quality GI and the associated positive outcomes from this including, for example, improved population health and well-being, inward investment, biodiversity, climate change adaptation and environmental justice.

LANDMARK (LAND MAnagement for flood RisK reduction in lowland catchments) will evaluate the effectiveness of realistic and scalable land-based NFM measures to reduce the risk from flooding from surface runoff, rivers and groundwater in groundwater-fed lowland catchments. We will study measures like crop choice, tillage practices and tree planting, that have been identified by people who own and manage land, to have the greatest realisable potential. NFM measures will be evaluated for their ability to increase infiltration, evaporative losses and/or below-ground water storage, thereby helping to store precipitation to reduce surface runoff and slow down the movement of water to reduce peak levels in groundwater and rivers. However, we need to carefully examine the balance between increased infiltration, soil water storage and evaporative losses under different types of NFM measures, because long-term increases in infiltration could actually increase groundwater and river flood risk if there is less capacity within the ground and in rivers to store excess precipitation from storm events. Also, following a review of the available research to date, other researchers (Dadson et al, 2017) came to the conclusion that land-based NFM measures would only provide effective protection against small flood events in small catchments. As the catchment size and flood events increase, the effectiveness of land-based NFM measures in reducing flood risk would decrease significantly. However, this idea needs to be tested further. Currently, there are many unanswered gaps in knowledge that make it hard to include land-based NFM measures in flood risk mitigation schemes. The Environment Agency tell us that there are no case studies on land-based NFM measures to support decision making, with most focusing on leaky barriers made from trees. Yet, land-based NFM measures have potential to do more than just reduce flood risk, including improving water quality, biodiversity and sustainable food and fibre production. So in LANDMARK, we will carry out research to help to fill this evidence gap, and test the ideas Dadson et al. proposed about land-based NFM using the West Thames River Basin as a case-study area. We will work at three spatial scales (field, catchment and large river basin) and explore modelling scenarios, developed with people who own and manage land and live at risk of flooding, to look at how land-based NFM could affect flooding. Scenarios will include experiences in the recent past in July 2007 and over the winter of 2013-14, and how future land use and management could affect flood risk in 2050 as the climate changes. We will consider how government policy could change after we leave the EU to support land-based NFM. Work will be carried out in five stages: (1) we will bring together available maps, data and local knowledge on current land use and management, and use this to create scenarios for modelling experiments to explore land use and management measures impact on events from the past and in the future; (2) we will make measurements to see how below-ground water storage and infiltration vary between different land-based NFM in fields where innovative land management is being practiced; (3) we will collect data from sensors sitting above the ground, flying on drones and on satellites to see how vegetation and soil moisture vary across large catchment areas; (4) we will use all the data collected from 1-3 to run modelling experiments across a range of scales, linking together models that capture soil and vegetation processes, overland and groundwater flows and catchment hydrology, exploring variation in model outputs; and (5) we will create web applications to display and explore the outputs from the modelling experiments. All this work will be supported by workshops, field visits, reports and resources to support people and their learning about how land-based NFM measures work and could be used to reduce flood risk.