THE JCEEI will be an integral part of the newly announced ‘Renewing biodiversity through a people-in-nature approach’ (RENEW) project funded by NERC. RENEW will work with landowners, businesses, and communities to restore woodlands, wetlands and farmland across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
To make truly effective use of the explosion in the availability of environmentally related data requires matching high-level technical expertise in data science and artificial intelligence (AI) needed to exploit massive, novel, datasets with environmental knowledge. Drawing on the wealth of experience and expertise within the JCEEI, it will act as the core ‘technical engine’ of RENEW. The JCEEI RENEW team will integrate data science and AI capability within the different RENEW work streams, providing a computational ecosystem that will enable data integration and advanced data science and AI methodologies to be applied at scale.
The RENEW computational ecosystem will also act as a host for web-based dashboards, tools and apps. It will facilitate the co-development of bespoke tools and datasets together with accessible interfaces, apps and dashboards. The result will be an interactive ‘Biodiversity dashboard’ containing a suite of visualisation tools that will provide a unified route to data and information and to highlight the outputs of the analytic work within RENEW in a form that can feed directly into decision making processes and inform business and investment decisions that impact UK biodiversity, particularly those that affect land-use.