There is a global biodiversity crisis driven by mounting pressures including land degradation and climate change. Within the UK, responses include the Government's 25 Year Environment Plan, which sets out a vision to secure a more biodiverse, connected and resilient landscape. The Natural Capital Committee has argued for the need to secure Net Environmental Gains, and this is a provision of the upcoming Environment Bill. A recent report from the UK Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology highlights the needs to secure our natural capital, not just to support biodiversity, but also ensure the provision of wider ecosystem services. Questions remain, however, as to how we achieve net environmental gain; what should go where? What does success look like? How long may it take to reassemble resilient communities that can reliably deliver ecosystem services? One widely adopted approach to securing net environmental gain is that of "ecological restoration". However, using specific natural and semi-natural ecosystems to define endpoints is increasingly contested, as target "pristine" states are hard to define, climate change is leading to a shifting baseline, and there is a need to restore ecosystems that are resilient to future pressures. We need a new paradigm for goal-seeking in ecological restoration which goes beyond reference systems, is agnostic as to prior assumptions of intactness, integrity and system "health", based on diagnostics of characteristics of functionally intact systems. There is an aspiration across the devolved administrations to deliver net environmental gain in biodiversity across all land uses. However, the restoration of ecological communities has been led by practitioners, with relatively little evidence gathered as to how individual restoration projects link together spatially to enhance the resilience of communities. This consortium brings together leading academic ecologists with a public sector organisation and a charity at the forefront of practical restoration activities, to extract the evidence from past activities through a natural experiment, and test resilience through manipulations. We intend to measure biodiversity, architecture and multifunctionality in ecosystems in different stages of transition from a degraded state, identify determinants and measures of complexity, and seek signals of emergent properties - especially resilience to perturbation. We have chosen grasslands and woodlands, being two major habitat types targeted for restoration programmes. Further to this we shall explore how approaches to accelerating re-integration of systems may affect emergent properties. In summary, we propose to move restoration science forward, but considering complexity and resilience as fundamental aims for restoration projects, rather than attempting to re-create specific target ecosystems.

Wastes and Strays is an interdisciplinary 3-year project that will study distinctively 'urban' commons in England, and identify and promote their value as publicly accountable, green, open spaces vital for culture, health, wellbeing and biodiversity in metropolitan contexts. In doing so, it will develop a multifaceted yet rigorous definition of the urban common, fit for the twenty-first century. The project is contextualised against the unique history of urban commons as economically and politically negotiated spaces within the complex context of English land ownership. Navigating contemporary issues of public and private, austerity and health, and competing ideologies (from commercial development, to controlled leisure and health activities, to 'rewilding') for the future of common land, the research will combine new historical, literary, legal and creative scholarship to activate and harness greater public identification and engagement with urban commons as valuable community green space. The project specifically identifies and researches four surviving urban commons across England: Town Moor, Newcastle upon Tyne; Valley Gardens, Brighton; Mousehold Heath, Norwich; and Clifton Down, Bristol. These case studies vary from awkward underused strips to sizeable pieces of pasture land and have been selected to represent a full range of contemporary urban contexts, cultures, legal origins, geographies, sizes, and historical and current uses and values. Each is legally defined as common land or, in the case of Brighton, has been so in the past, and each continues to be at the centre of contemporary heritage and development debates. The urban common has a long and complex history of contestation and negotiation between social right, legal ownership, and political and cultural value that warrants deep analysis. Building on this, we aim to not only provide a meticulous history, but suggest that contemporary analysis and plans for the future should be made through, and mediated by, this body of historical knowledge. The project is interdisciplinary: a spectrum of scholars (from law, geography, planning, creative practice, history, architecture and literature), and from a variety of academic and civic institutions across England (including Newcastle University, University of Brighton, University of Exeter, National Trust, Natural England, and local government bodies) will come together to research the legal, archaeological, geographical and political history, as well as draw out previously under-researched aspects of urban commons, including literary, creative, architectural, health, and poetic representations. In this context, new methods of engaging civic and public partners will be trialled, for example 'spatial' oral histories research, sports events and games, reconstructive performances, food fetes, poetry/performance residencies, and health and biodiversity walks. The aim is to design and facilitate a rich exchange on the urban common that negotiates positions between past, present and future, preservation, restoration and development, nature, health and culture, urban and 'wild', in order to stimulate both wider and deeper scholarship and to engage and promote shifts in public perception and involvement. Through this method of 'co-production' between different stakeholders the project itself will be based on the principles of 'commoning' (i.e. the pooling of resources to ensure benefits across the whole community) and will act as a cooperative 'commons', accessible to all. The project will deliver a wide range of academic and publicly facing outcomes including: online resources; lively and accessible engagement and public activities; and high quality academic and creative outputs. This is an exciting project which aims to restore political and cultural confidence in, and provide public agency for, the future of these beautiful and valuable pieces of land.

We will exploit the potential of scientific equipment, portable tools of analysis, and digital data capture technology to significantly enhance the Trust's core functions to understand, look after, and promote our historic collections and sites. It will provide new pathways to innovative cultural and creative research and will provide rich data to better inform the management of material change of heritage assets now and in the future. The development of a mutual learning environment among universities, cultural institutions, and creative enterprises, will encourage a future generation of heritage scientists and practice-led specialists to address the contemporary challenges of managing material change of moveable and immoveable heritage. The NT is home to a remarkable portfolio of heritage assets across the UK from historic buildings, monuments, landscapes, gardens, archaeological sites, as well as over a million objects in our care. The proposed upgrades and enhancements of scientific facilities, and historic digital data capture will significantly increase existing creative research capability and extend the breadth and geographic reach of our current provision to other organisations and networks. It will build on our reputation for conservation excellence and innovative cross-disciplinary partnerships, significantly increasing our support for others by providing a national-scale resource for collaboration, education, and shared training. By exploiting the potential of portable tools of analysis we will undertake research to deepen understanding of how objects in our collections were made and used, and the cultural contexts in which they are situated. Crucially, scientific analysis will also help us to document change over time to inform choices of how change is managed now and in the future. Building on the exceptional public engagement programme established at Knole Conservation Studio, we will use augmented reality tools (AR) to enable novel approaches to develop and trial immersive content. This presents a unique opportunity to connect with the public and to share with other heritage organisations the challenges and choices of collection conservation presentation and management. Enhanced heritage digital data capture tools, for example, geophysical survey equipment, photographometry, and handheld laser scanners will provide digital twin outputs to monitor change and enable research to make better informed choices of how we manage heritage now and in the future. These digital tools will provide new quality, multi-purpose datasets, which will support us and other historic asset managers to devise more effective interventions to maintain and adapt the historic environment to maximise benefits whilst retaining cultural value. This is particularly timely, as climate change is resulting in unprecedented impacts on historic sites. We will develop relationships with new heritage research partners and stakeholders, especially those in under-served regions of the UK. Given the Trust's geographical reach, uniquely we will provide 'in the wild' state of the art evaluation of heritage assets by taking the tools to the assets, along with management and conservation protocols. This will enable a diverse range of researchers (including Early Career Researchers (ECRs), secondees, interns) to develop interdisciplinary capability, practice-led skills, and carry out knowledge exchange, to catalyse new creative research opportunities. As an incremental step towards our ambitions to grow our research capacity and capability across the Trust, this project will provide the platform for creating a culture for mutual sharing of equipment and knowledge. This will be achieved through training, workshops, placements, and hosting through existing and new networks. The project will provide new economic opportunities, inform regulatory frameworks, and develop skills to meet heritage challenges now and in the future.

Walking through a cultural heritage site is an immersive educative experience. The physical space itself and the artefacts that are laid out in it tell many stories of the place's history through audio guides, labels, videos, and interactive touch screens. However, the site remains a static display, which is only revived through the imagination of those who visit it through the things they learn about it. Past research has shown that immersive Mixed Reality (MR) technologies such as mobile Augmented Reality (AR) have the potential to bridge the gap between the past and the present during the visitors' walkthrough, and enhance their learning experience. However, mobile AR relies on handheld devices, poor tracking quality of the user, and the digital content is only superficially super-imposed on the physical world not interacting with the physical objects in a realistic way. AR glass technology, also called direct AR, has the potential to break these barriers and provide significantly increased immersion and a plethora of interaction mechanisms to the visitors, both of which can considerably enhance their learning experience. The proposed fellowship seeks to explore a design framework for developing engaging, situated learning experiences in cultural heritage places for teenage and adult visitors (in the 12+ age group) with the use of AR glasses. AR glasses are a pair of wearable glasses with the ability to extend the visible physical space using superimposed digital content, including holograms, which is so well positioned that it blends successfully with the physical surroundings. They are an emerging MR technology, which has not yet been adequately researched within the context of cultural heritage education. In collaboration with professionals from heritage education, design, and MR development the project will explore the challenges and opportunities in relation to the use, adoption of and engagement with the AR glasses by visitors of diverse demographics. It will then seek to understand what is lost, gained, transformed, and confused in the visitor's learning experience during the transition from a simple to an augmented walkthrough, and build a design framework based on these insights. The research outputs will highlight implications for future design approaches for MR experiences within the heritage context. The research will demonstrate in what ways AR glasses increase the immersion as opposed to other MR technologies, and explore their educational challenges and opportunities to create compelling educative MR walkthroughs of a heritage site. Accordingly, the programme of research will investigate the type of MR content that can be built upon the physical and educational capabilities of the device. The collaboration has the potential to promote good practices in using emerging technologies, create value for the cultural organisation that will facilitate its design and the MR developer company that will develop it, and highlight emerging skills in the MR sector. The proposed fellowship comprises a 3-month period of preliminary research, which will bring heritage professionals, particularly educators, and MR developers together to identify the current landscape in terms of educational experiences using immersive technologies for visitors of the specific age group, discuss how MR can engage visitors through meaningful educational interactions, and create a document of considerations. The MR developers will then use this document to design the content for the MR application. This will be followed by a 3-month period of carrying out user evaluation with the public, iteratively adjusting the MR content based on the received feedback. Finally, a 3-month period of reflection, writing, and dissemination will produce a document introducing the design framework, a Mixed Reality application, two journal articles, one conference paper, a website, and a symposium.

Context: The proposed research focuses upon the dramatic phase of monument construction that characterises the later Neolithic of the British Isles. This is a period that saw the creation of a wide and varied range of megalithic, timber and earth structures, alongside the development of extensive landscapes of linked and interwoven monuments. Nowhere is this more apparent than Avebury, north Wiltshire. A key component of the UNESCO Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site, the Avebury henge is one of the pre-eminent megalithic monuments of the European Neolithic, sitting alongside Stonehenge, the Boyne Valley passage graves and Carnac alignments. Its 420m diameter earthwork encloses the world's largest stone circle, which in turn encloses two smaller (yet still colossal) megalithic circles of c.100m diameter - the northern and southern inner circles. Within each of the latter are further complex stone settings. From two of its four entrances lead avenues of paired standing stones that together extend for c.3.5km linking with other monumental constructions. It sits at the heart of a landscape rich in later Neolithic monuments, among them Silbury Hill and the West Kennet palisade enclosures. Avebury has stood at the heart of developing narratives of the Neolithic period in the British Isles - a period of remarkable transformation in the ways in which people understood and engaged with the world. Avebury's history has a resonance that extends far beyond the British Isles, informing research on a range of fundamental questions concerning the European Neolithic such as: what sparked this remarkable period of monument construction? What was the inspiration for the monumental forms we observe? Why were specific locations chosen to monumentalise? Aims & Objectives: Despite its international importance, detailed knowledge of Avebury is sorely lacking. The only large-scale excavations to take place at Avebury were carried out in the first half of the 20th Century, with an ambitious programme of open area excavation brought to an abrupt end by the outbreak of WWII. As a result, we have only a partial understanding of the range, character and relationships between the features present at Avebury. This lack of understanding is due to a failure to synthesise, integrate and make available the full detail encoded in the archives resulting from this extensive early 20th century work - much of which was methodologically exemplary - as well as much smaller ad-hoc investigations that took place after. This has lead to only partial understandings of this pivotal site, circular arguments, repeated rediscoveries and a serial forgetting of the results of previous work. To rectify this we will complete the work that ended so abruptly in 1939: carrying out unfinished programmes of detailed post-excavation analysis and synthesising the mass of unpublished detail that survives only in archive form. Most critically, we will make the full set of data available and accessible through the design and implementation of an ambitious, open access digital archive, that will provide a baseline from which all future engagements with Avebury can proceed. This will not only support future archaeological and Heritage studies, but is expressly designed to stimulate, foster and nurture innovative public and creative engagement. Applications & Benefits: The results will have enormous significance for the general public, creative industries and all academic students of prehistory, revealing in detail the origins and subsequent life-history of one of Europe's most important prehistoric sites. They will also allow for effective heritage management (through a fuller understanding of the WHS and its history) as well as enhanced education and tourism potential. Avebury has always been an object of fascination, and as international media interest in recent discoveries has demonstrated, public interest in Avebury is global.