A 2 year, £750k (£415k from Innovate UK) collaborative R&D investment by Ecometrica, Environment Systems and Rothamsted Research aims to develop wall-to-wall applications of Sentinel Earth Observation (EO) derived information products for environmental compliance and productivity monitoring in agriculture. Innovation is being developed with regard to the processing methods, calibration / validation processes and demonstration applications that can be scaled-up to run across large areas on a continual basis, delivering actionable content to be used by national agencies and businesses. The project will make use of a new Earth Observation data management facility (EO Lab) being established at Agrimetrics and will be an early demonstrator project of how big spatial data management systems can support the growth of agricultural information services in UK and export markets.

Projections suggest that, without further action, the availability of water for irrigation will become a serious limiting factor to agricultural production and quality, particularly for growing cereals and potatoes. Many of the most productive regions of Great Britain at present, such as Kent and the East Anglia fens, are also where projections of both soil aridity and water scarcity are severe [1]. The Climate Change Risk Assessment Evidence report clearly specifies the need for a more coordinated action to achieve the ambitious reductions in water demand and to find solutions for future agriculture. This research proposal is to address this particular issue by developing a novel concept of hyperspectral imager to remotely map the moisture content in crops and soil. At a time where scarcity of fresh water stocks is becoming an issue worldwide, the research will lead to an instrument offering precise feedback on the crop's water requirement and potential savings to farmers or communities. The proposed research will develop the next generation of space or airborne instrumentation for advanced sustainable agriculture, with a focus on strengthening resilience to environmental crises. In the last decades, technological progress made in the field of Earth Observation instrumentation has revolutionised agriculture. Nowadays, hyperspectral technologies provide both valuable and essential information to modern agriculture by removing cost uncertainties from agricultural assets and by helping to prepare for and mitigate the effects of natural disasters. hyperspectral imaging techniques offer an accurate spatial and spectral snapshot of cultivated areas, helping in particular to monitor: - water-stress, disease, insect attack, invasive species mapping and overall plant health - seed sustainability, with remote measurement of the germination efficiency hyperspectral instrumentation uses the spectral information in the image to reveal particular details about biology, mineralogy and chemical content, therefore providing valuable feedback regarding agriculture, earth science and environment. Two novel instrumentation concepts will be developed and put together in this research to offer a step change in the hyperspectral capability, at the service of UK advanced sustainable agriculture. The first concept, capitalises on the use of an Integral Field Spectrometer integrating a slicer mirror (array of small thin slices of mirror) in a hyperspectral imager, and the second concept uses novel optical elements: Freeform gratings. Freeform surfaces are novel and revolutionary optical elements with no particular axis of rotation or symmetry. Traditionally, gratings are machined as flat or as lightly curved spherical surfaces because of limitations in the machining capability. Progress made in the field of ultra-precision machining can potentially enable the machining of complex, curved gratings to further improve the instrument compactness, image quality or modularity. Freeform optics are therefore promising components for space-based hyperspectral imagers for their ability to reduce the overall dimension, and therefore mass, of the satellite's payload, which is a critical parameter in space imaging systems. [1] Committee on Climate Change, "Climate Change Risk Assessment evidence report - Synthesis report: priorities for the next five years." 2017.

Our vision: To impel climate change mitigation action by motivating private investments in sustainably managed forest ecosystem services. Our contribution: To address a critical KE gap between expertise on the mapping, modelling and quantification of the risk of forest carbon loss, and investor's confidence in forest investments (including in REDD+). Our focus: To address 4 categories of risks (i) Climatic (ii) Fire (iii) Anthropogenic and (iv) Regulatory. Our aim: To stimulate the exploitation of UK's world-class knowledge base -NERC and elsewhere - in forest loss and risk mapping by the UK knowledge brokers and financial institutions. Our impacts: To deliver, as a consequence of this work, a more accurate and holistic understanding of the real risk represented by forest propositions around the world; a more stable and mainstream investment environment for forestry and; to bring forestry from the margins of business, to a business line as common as aviation, motor or life and pensions. We request funding for a period of 12 months to support the creation of a ForestRisks-for-Finance Network. Partners, including WillisRE Ltd., ForestRe Ltd., Ecometrica Ltd, Acclimatise Ltd. The Edinburgh Centre on Climate Change, and Forest Research will contribute more than £55,000 in-cash and in-kind to this KE initiative. A PDRA will be appointed to effectively bring together the NERC funded and UK research community (on forest-loss risks) as well as to proactively engage with potential users (Brokers & End users). This initiative stems from (a) recommendations made at the NERC-funded Long Finance symposia on "Forestry and Finance: Where's the data" (London, July 2010 and Sept 2010), to which the PI (Patenaude) was an invited panellist and (b) the wider KE activities led by Richard Max-Lino (NERC Knowledge and Innovation Manager, Financial Services) and the Long Finance initiative (http://www.zyen.com/long-finance.html).

We are losing forests at a rate of circa one football pitch every 3 seconds. Urgent and large scale financing is required to prevent further deforestation and forest degradation. Yet, securing sufficient and long-term investments in carbon-related forest assets is a challenge, partly because of the liability of reversals and because the risks associated with such investments are perceived as either high or unknown. Better information on risks of forest loss are needed. We therefore propose a knowledge exchange forest-specific risk-toolbox for adoption by the investment community. Five Demonstrator Case Studies will be used to illustrate how NERC science can be converted and used in meaningful ways by the financial sector interested in forest assets. The five case studies are structured along key investment themes reflecting current and forecasted demand for forest investments (Timber, Afforestation/ Reforestation, REDD+, Voluntary Carbon Market and Forest Bonds). We propose to leverage the ongoing NERC KE network 'Forest-Finance risk network: towards stable investment environments' (thereafter referred to as Network -NE/IO22183/1). Key deliverables to this ongoing work include a database of experts and tools for the assessment of risks of forest loss. Early findings highlight that while significant expertise and datasets in the UK are available, the financial community requires demonstration for their potential use (Davies & Patenaude, in press). We request NERC funding for a period of 12 months to support the following three activities: the development of the forest specific risk toolbox to be adopted by the forest investment community; the identification of missing risk assessment opportunities and tools; and the dissemination of the demonstrator case studies illustrating how NERC data and research can be converted into a form that can be readily used. The continuous support from our existing (as well as new) partners (including Willis RE Ltd., ForestRe Ltd., the Global Canopy Programme, Verified Carbon Standard Ltd, Enviromarkets Ltd. Ecometrica Ltd, Bosques Amazonicas Ltd., Acclimatise Ltd., The Edinburgh Centre on Climate Change, and the Forest Research) is a clear demonstration of the need for this KE activity. Combined, they will contribute more than £100,000 in-cash and in-kind to this KE initiative. Our Knowledge Translator will effectively develop the toolbox, bring together the case studies and proactively engage with the users.