The aim of this application is to have an impact on the public's knowledge and understanding by developing the public engagement work that we began in 2012. Our previous work has been in association with STFC's Dark Sky Discovery Site programme and we want to offer more scientific events, where we invite scientists to discuss a particular question that has been posed at one of our previous Dark Sky Discovery events. Our first event was called 'Dark Matters' in 2012 and was a well-received collaborative event between the North Pennines area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Dr Peter Edwards of Durham Universty, Jacqui Huntley of Durham University and Ed Restall of the Winyard Observatory. The Dark Matters journey began with a consideration of light pollution in the nearby cities and then linked the darkness of the high peat moors with pollen grain analysis of peat cores and then our speakers worked out through the atmosphere to the stratosphere into space and the sun and the Universe. We also invited local astronomers who came with telescopes ready to do some star gazing. Feedback from this event was very positive. In 2012, we were granted financial assistance from Durham University (from Natural England via STFC's DSDS project). This enabled us to bring a few key people and factors together - Graham Relf, a prize-winning local amateur astronomer from Rookhope, Andy Gray - the Head of Chemistry from Whitley Bay High School, Ian Reedman, Chair of a community group at Cowshill that set up a small Observatory and our newly designated Dark Sky Discovery sites (14 in total in liaison with Dan Hillier). The grant funded a modest public events programme. Secondary school children from Whitley Bay told us they had never witnessed the Milky Way before, that they had no idea about the number of stars visible with the naked eye, let alone the telescopes that we brought to the event. Since then, Kielder Observatory has been designated a Dark Sky Park and the local interest in star gazing has grown greatly. We would really like to respond to the groundswell of public interest and extend the scope and scientific range of these events whilst keeping them accessible and available to a wide range of people. There is other investment in the area for Dark Sky Tourism; our 'Discovering Northern Dark Skies' project is focussing on communities and schools. We want to put on at least 6 events per year for the next 3 years to pose a particular scientific question and try and explore some answers using top quality speakers, film clips, top quality photography and any other means we can access. We have learnt practical lessons from our recent engagement work so we want to deploy this experience to enable our different audiences to ask some of the big questions in science and then link these to how STFC is setting out to answer those questions , for instance when a student asks how big is the Milky Way we want to be able to talk about the Gaia measurements being made on the distances to and between stars and the depth of field, with the help of experts from Durham University. We want to work with eight high schools since we have proved that we can deliver really good events involving 140 high school students at two events - involving a talk, a visit to a small community observatory and star gazing. Invitees would be - Whitley Bay High School, Queen Elizabeth High School, Hexham; William Howard in Brampton; Wolsingham High, Teesdale High School, Barnard Castle. We also want to run training events for teachers where we link them with community led astronomy groups and experts from the region's universities as a legacy of this work. We want to work with our Dark Sky Discovery Site scientific partners - scientists, astronomical groups, astro-photographers - to reach new audiences - the rural parish councils and local communities, interested high schools and businesses.

Peatlands store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem, both in the UK and globally. As a result of human disturbance they are rapidly losing this carbon to the atmosphere, contributing significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. We propose to turn this problem into a solution, by re-establishing and augmenting the unique natural capacity of peatlands to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and to store it securely for millennia. We will do this by working with natural processes to recreate, and where possible enhance, the environmental conditions that lead to peat formation, in both lowland and upland Britain. At the same time, we will optimise conditions to avoid emissions of methane and nitrous oxide that could offset the benefits of CO2 removal; develop innovative cropping and management systems to augment rates of CO2 uptake; evaluate whether we can further increase peat carbon accumulation through the formation and addition of biomass and biochar; and develop new economic models to support greenhouse gas removal by peatlands as part of profitable and sustainable farming and land management systems. Implementation of these new approaches to the 2.3 million hectares of degraded upland and lowland peat in the UK has the potential to remove significant quantities of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, to secure carbon securely and permanently within a productive, biodiverse and self-sustaining ecosystem, and thereby to help the UK to achieve its ambition of having net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Peatlands form in wet environments where the organic matter built up by plants every year is not fully degraded. This means that, over time, partly degraded organic matter accumulates as peat locking away huge quantities of carbon. We call such areas 'carbon sinks' and through this process, peatlands moderate the Earth's climate. When carefully managed they are our most carbon-rich ecosystems on land. Unfortunately, due to poor management, they are currently our most intensive source of carbon dioxide emissions from land, amplifying climate change in the same way as burning fossil fuels. The primary means by which peatlands are damaged is drainage, which lowers the water table. This changes how peatlands function, and as a consequence, such areas switch from carbon sinks to carbon sources. Around the world, 10-15% of all peatlands have been impacted by drainage, and use as cropland, production forests, and grazing. In the UK and more widely across Europe, so many peatlands have been altered that >50% of former peat accumulating habitat has been lost. As part of the effort to reduce global emissions, governments across Europe have invested significant sums in peatland restoration efforts, however it is unclear whether these efforts will be successful in the light of climate change, particularly increasing global temperature and changes to rainfall patterns. In this project, we will investigate whether degraded peatlands differ from natural peatlands in the way they react to climate change. Using sites across the European climate gradient, we will examine what effect variations in weather over several years have on GHG emissions from natural and disturbed peatlands. Using a regional-to-global scale model to simulate future weather to 2100, we will use our new information to enable better policy decisions to sustainably manage peatlands. This will be achieved in the following way: First, we will determine how differences in climate and management affect how peatlands function, using measurements from 44 micrometeorological stations and thousands of satellite (Earth Observation) data points across Europe. The satellite data will enable us to understand processes on a far larger landscape scale than the field data. We will also use satellite data to determine the physical up-and-down movement of 15 exemplar peatlands relative to climatic drivers, as this is an important mechanism by which peatland water tables self-regulate. We will then model fine-scale water flows across these 15 landscapes to estimate how climate, vegetation and water flows interact in peatlands. Second, using the above observations and models we will develop and test a peatland version of a regional- to global-scale model: the Joint UK Land-Environment Simulator (JULES). JULES can model what happens to our environment under climatic change across the globe, but currently is unable to deal with peatlands. Finally, with the new JULES-PEAT model, we will be able to predict how UK and European peatlands will behave under climate change and current land use, and what strategies should be taken to minimise future carbon losses. We will develop scenarios of such strategies with our project partners and run a series of international workshops to compare the new JULES-PEAT model against other global climate models, in order to advance better global forecasting of climate change effects on peatlands as a whole and to find the best possible future management solutions for peat soils to mitigate climate change. Working with partners with UK/EU policy links, this will provide solid data for future peatland policies and management on the ground.