The most abundant form of litter in the marine environment is plastic, and the negative and detrimental consequences of plastic debris on fish, reptiles, birds and mammals are well documented. The hard surface of waterborne plastic provides an ideal environment for the formation of biofilm for opportunistic microbial colonisers; however, our knowledge of how microorganisms interact with microplastics and alter the dispersal behaviour of marine plastics in the environment is a significant research gap. Biofilm at the interface between the plastic surface and the environment has been termed the 'Plastisphere', and although plastics are extremely resistant to decay, variability in composition determines their specific buoyancy and surface rugosity, which will dictate the extent of microbial colonisation and their ability for long distance dispersal. Furthermore, because plastic debris can persist in the marine environment longer than natural substrates, e.g. feathers and wood, it offers an opportunity for the wider dissemination of pathogenic and harmful microorganisms. Microplastics from clothes, cosmetics and sanitary products are now common constituents of sewage systems and they frequently bypass the screening mechanisms designed to remove larger waste items from being exported to coastal waters. Microplastics entering aquatic systems from waste water treatment plants (WWTPs) come in close contact with human faeces, hence providing significant opportunity for colonisation by faecal indicator organisms (FIOs) and a range of human bacterial pathogens. Importantly however, there have never been any studies investigating the ability of enteric viruses binding to microplastics (or binding to the biofilm on the plastic surface), and this now needs critical evaluation in order to understand this potentially novel mechanism for the environmental dispersal of enteric viruses. Furthermore, there is growing evidence that the plastisphere can promote gene exchange, and so determining the potential of plastisphere biofilms for providing the surface for anti-microbial resistance (AMR) gene transfer is of the utmost importance. There is currently a lack of fundamental understanding about the mechanisms by which microorganisms, particularly pathogenic bacteria and viruses, can "hitchhike" on microplastic particles and be transported to beaches, bathing waters, shellfish harvesting waters and high benthic diversity zones. Consequently, it is not yet possible to determine the risk from these potential pathways, or establish environmental monitoring guidelines for informing future policy or environmental regulation. Therefore, the novelty of this project is to quantify the processes that are occurring within the plastisphere, and understand the potential for the vectoring of pathogenic viruses and bacteria. Previous research on chemical co-pollutants present on plastics often fails to consider the likely impacts of plastisphere communities. Microplastics in the environment are potential vectors for these chemicals, which often desorb when ingested by marine species, and can accumulate in the food chain. Microbes in the plastisphere may either mitigate this problem through biodegradation, or enhance it by increased biofilm binding; however, most laboratory-based studies are carried out with pristine non-colonised plastics, and ignore the pivotal role the plastisphere plays on defining the risk of microplastics in the environment. By understanding the multi-pollutant and multi-scale effects of microplastics, the "Plastic Vectors Project" will help to establish a more accurate risk assessment of microplastics by taking into consideration the effects of harmful plastic-associated microbes together with chemical co-pollutants. Therefore, the "Plastic Vectors Project" aims to quantify the significance and function of microbes in the 'plastisphere', and will deliver feasible solutions for reducing these multi-pollutant risks

Droughts are complex, slow-evolving and costly natural hazards. Detecting their onset and tracking their development can be hard, as they spread through the water cycle. Although the UK is stereotypically a wet country, recent droughts in 2012 and 2018 had significant impacts on water supplies, agriculture and the environment. Projected changes to future climate suggests that they will become more frequent and severe in the coming decades. We therefore need to urgently be more resilient to and better prepared for droughts, both now and in a rapidly warming world. Drought Monitoring and Early Warning (MEW) is an important part of effective drought management, but this is complicated by the challenges in defining drought, the difficulties in identifying drought impacts before they are very severe, and the diverse needs of the wide range of decision makers that use drought MEW information. In the UK, drought research has advanced substantially over the past decade thanks to the £12.5m NERC Drought and Water Scarcity Programme (DWSP) led by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), as well as other allied international research projects in which UKCEH was heavily involved. This has led to significant progress in the understanding of droughts and the development of drought MEW tools. This includes the UK Water Resources Portal, which provides real-time hydro-meteorological data and drought indicators. However, drought monitoring tools like this typically lack information on drought impacts - despite the fact that this is the single most important piece of evidence required by decision makers to take actions, as has been highlighted in work we have done with key stakeholders from sectors including water supply, agriculture, health, energy and the environment. Understanding the link between drought indicators commonly used in MEW systems (i.e. that describe the physical drought hazard, e.g. in terms of rainfall or river flows) with the drought impacts seen on the ground has been the focus of drought scientists for some time. However, due to the challenges of collecting and recording drought impacts, the analysis has generally been carried out at large spatial scales (e.g. for Wales as a whole), which are not relevant to decision makers who tend to manage water at more local scales, from field to catchment scale. In the IRIS project, we propose to address this issue of spatial scale by using new high resolution drought indicators and drought impact datasets to predict drought impacts at a high spatial resolution. We will do this across three integrated Work Packages (WPs): WP1 will focus on gathering data from multiple sources of both drought indicators and drought impacts, including new crop yield data at an unprecedentedly high resolution for the UK. We will also use high resolution remote sensing data which have become available in recent years such as Sentinel-2 to derive proxies for drought impacts (e.g., vegetation indices and wildfires). WP2 will then use the data gathered in WP1 to identify the relationships between drought indicators and drought impacts, and build 'impact functions' that describe these relationships quantitatively, using statistical and machine learning approaches. These relationships can then be used to forecast potential drought impacts using indicators that are readily available in near-real-time. In WP3 we will work with key stakeholders to develop case studies and assess whether the impact forecasts have sufficient skill to be used to manage droughts and mitigate impacts. The findings and outcomes of this project have the potential to be scaled up into a nation-wide drought impact forecasting system through future funding opportunities. An impact-based drought forecasting capability would revolutionise the way droughts are managed and mitigated in the UK, and would have huge potential for transferring to other countries and environments.

The mobilisation and transport of coarse sediment, referred to as bedload, has a profound impact on the evolution of mountain rivers, the surrounding basins they feed, and the communities that live within their catchments. However, we have few effective methods to routinely monitor bedload transport in near real-time because it is such a high energy and erosive environment under peak flow conditions. Hence, bedload monitoring can be considered a missing component of real-time environmental monitoring. In 'Sounding Out the River' we take advantage of low cost seismic sensor systems that have become available because of the rise of technology such as the Raspberry Pi computer and the ease to which these systems can be telemetered. We will demonstrate this system for monitoring the mobilisation and transport of bedload along the River Feshie in Scotland, which is catchment already monitored for a range of scientific projects. In order to ensure that the system is useful, usable and used we will co-produce the design with a range of stakeholders including SEPA, CEH, Practical Action Nepal and cbec eco-engineering UK Ltd. Beyond this proposal, we will then be able to address a range of environmental challenges, for example: - In Nepal the supply of coarse bedload to the mountain front has resulted in successive channel avulsion events on the Kosi River. This has caused the displacement of vulnerable people and the deposition of gravels across agricultural land has devastated communities. Through near real-time monitoring of bedload transport, we can better understand the dynamics of such systems and have the potential to develop early warning. - When rivers carry bedload, their erosive capacity increases; and when the bedload is deposited the beds become armoured. This poses a clear challenge for managing critical infrastructure. - Forecasting of flood hazard requires knowledge of the shape of the river bed. However, when flood waters mobilise the bedload, the shape of the bed changes which poses a problem for flood modelling. Our near-real time monitoring system has the potential to inform where and when we would expect flood models to start breaking down. - Bedload transport is an important process that cascades in the wake of other hazards, such as the monsoonal mobilisation of coarse sediment derived landslides triggered by the 2015 Nepal earthquake. It is often the case that these secondary processes (bedload transport) do not receive the same attention as the primary hazard (earthquake induced landsliding) because the uncertainty is often described as cascading, implying growing uncertainty. We believe that through the effective use of the monitoring proposed in this project, we have an opportunity to constrain the uncertainty and manage this cascading hazard.

Everywhere in the world people organize in relation to water. Its resources and assets provide essential 'goods' and 'services' and huge opportunities for the economy, society and communities. Harnessing these productively is a key route to optimising growth, value and community outcomes. Yet water is also multi-faceted and difficult to manage. Our work with stakeholders has identified that a diverse, multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral social science approach is urgently needed to square the value and impacts of water for human systems and communities and vice-versa. Also urgently needed is a serious investment in science-based capacity building across all stakeholders, focused on demystifying water's value chains and enabling innovative opportunities to raise the levels of key economic, social, community and environmental benefits. Our solutions-led approach to innovation adds to knowledge concerning key unanswered questions of productivity, place-making, and positive-sum system interactions. No-one has yet assembled the multi-disciplinary scientific capability we propose here, which builds on world-leading technological innovation to (i) optimise outcomes for communities and (ii) create transferable learning for initiatives and investments in similar contexts across the UK. These ideas are generating enormous energy in stakeholder interactions, and academic and non-academic support are each gathering at pace. This proposal suggests a Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) in the region of the Forth Water Basin (FWB) in Scotland (including the Firth of Forth and the capital city, Edinburgh). This unique, multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral partnership addresses three fundamental questions: (i) How can we optimise outcomes from water resources , in the pursuit of sustainable and inclusive economic growth? (ii) How can we raise stakeholder capacity to enable and connect new opportunities from partnership, including community resilience and empowerment? (iii) How can we build productive and harmonious relationships between human and natural systems in these pursuits? In sum, this novel and ground-breaking partnership addresses important, urgent and complex issues that lie at the core of our life and economy. Its innovative structures for 'optimising outcomes' from water assemble an excellent academic and stakeholder team, combining the capacities of each for the benefit of all. 'Optimising outcomes' means raising levels across the board for sustainable and inclusive economic growth, resilient communities and a healthy environment, through innovative solutions, place-making, and positive-sum system interactions. Moreover, our technologically-advanced HsO, and transferable conceptual and methodological development in an important and transferable learning context, will add further value to initiatives and investments in similar water basins across the UK.

By 2050 it is estimated that the global population will exceed 9 billion. This is expected to result in a 100% increase in demand for food. The world needs more high-quality protein, produced in a responsible manner. This challenge is addressed by UN Sustainable Development Goals SDG2 (Zero hunger) and SDG12 (Responsible Consumption and Production). Expansion of marine fish aquaculture has been highlighted as a key route to increase food production. It is also an important area for the blue economy with high potential for new jobs and revenue. In the UK, marine aquaculture is worth over £2 billion to the economy, supports 2300 jobs and has ambitions to double production by 2030. But climate change is a threat as fish production is highly sensitive to the environment. Climate change assessments are often only available for large areas, e.g. global or regional, and do not capture the local conditions that influence fish production. They focus on long-term decadal averages which miss the daily environmental variability and multiple stressors that fish experience. Impacts on growth, health and welfare of the farmed fish are determined by these environment-biological complexities at farm level, and are also influenced by production strategies and industry decisions which may be based on social or economic factors. Robust, industry-relevant, climate impact assessment must include the complexities, relationships and trade-offs between different natural processes and human interventions. Thus, a more comprehensive approach which uses systems thinking to capture the interlinking interdisciplinary components is urgently needed. Precision aquaculture, where vast amounts of data are collected and analysed, offers a framework to provide the detail required to understand the complex farm system, evaluate how the environment is changing and assess implications for future production. In this FLF, I will deliver a rigorous scientific framework for assessing impact of climate change on marine aquaculture using systems thinking and precision-based information. I will create an approach which integrates detailed knowledge of what is happening in the complex farm system now, with future projections of climate change and potential stakeholder response. This will involve collecting high resolution data, analysing complex datasets, developing farm-level models, simulating future climate scenarios, and determining the adaptive capacity of the sector. I will work closely with my network of key industry partners, research organisations, regulators and policy makers to maximise translation and transfer of knowledge and approaches to industry and associated stakeholders. Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) aquaculture in the Northeast Atlantic (Scotland and Norway) is used as a case study. Salmon leads marine fish production, with over 2 million tonnes produced each year, the equivalent of 17.5 billion meals. Norway and Scotland are responsible for 60% of production. The latitudinal range of farms extends across the thermal tolerance of the salmon, from temperate conditions in Scotland and south Norway, to arctic conditions in the north of Norway. This allows assessment of the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of climate change and a thorough analysis of how impact may vary between locations and different responses required. Beyond aquaculture, the positioning of marine fish farms offers an exceptional opportunity to gain deeper insight into the rate, magnitude and variability of climate change in coastal areas. This FLF will deliver vital new knowledge, data and approaches to understand how the environment is changing. This research is highly interdisciplinary, covering aspects of climate, environmental, biological and social science. The innovative techniques and transformative approaches will allow aquaculture to respond to the climate emergency, enhance blue economy opportunities and maximise its contribution to global food security.