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This report summarises the research done from May 2016 to March 2018 regarding aligning delivery mechanisms that act on natural assets (biodiversity, soil and water).
Decisions about natural resources need to balance multiple interests and goals in order to safeguard Scotland’s economic, social and environmental prosperity. However, many existing policies for the environment focus on separate problems, such as protecting endangered species or reducing water pollution: this may not automatically enable a joined-up approach to environmental management. Our research explores the interactions of a sample of ‘policy instruments’, including regulations, incentives and guidance, and the consequences of those interactions for managing biodiversity, soil and water
My research focuses on the challenges of achieving more participatory and holistic natural resource management, with a particular focus on the Ecosystem Approach and the challenges of governing complex socio-ecological systems. My early work in both the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’ was largely focused on community-level conservation but in recent years, I have increasingly focused on how higher-level institutions affect and interact with what happens ‘on the ground’. I do not situate my work in a single academic discipline, but my work is informed by ideas from political ecology
Alba is a qualitative social researcher in the Social, Economic and Geographical Sciences research group at the James Hutton Institute. Her research interests focus on the management and governance of natural resources, and the involvement of stakeholders. Her SEFARI work currently involves projects identifying lessons for integrating delivery of water policy goals from international examples, and exploring how policy instruments interact to shape the management of soil, water and biodiversity. Alba's other research interests focus on understanding of the role of habitats and biodiversity in
"One of the most pressing questions for this research area is how to rationally predict the outcome of plant-microbiome interactions under agriculture-relevant conditions" A University of Dundee scientist based at the James Hutton Institute has been awarded almost £1.25 million to study the interaction between plants and soil microbes, with the ultimate aim of boosting sustainable food production. Dr Davide Bulgarelli, a principal investigator at the UoD Division of Plant Sciences, located at the Institute's Invergowrie site, has been awarded two research grants each exceeding £620,000 from
We first met Andrew Macdonald, ExhibitScotland, at the Royal Highland Show (RHS) in 2017. Staffing the Virtual Reality corner for RSPB in the Education tent, he first showed us his 360 film shot at Abernethy. If you’ve never been to the RHS, it is a bustling, noisy and thoroughly adrenaline-charged four days showcasing everything related to farming and rural life. Within seconds of putting on our headsets, we felt our heartbeats calming down. A minute later, we were admiring midges dancing in a Scottish pine woodland and had forgotten about the throng of people behind us. Clearly, Andrew was
"The application of remote sensing to models of carbon fluxes is a viable research method over Northern peatlands, but further work is needed to develop more comprehensive carbon cycle models" Peatlands store large amounts of terrestrial carbon and any changes to their carbon balance could cause large changes in the greenhouse gas balance of the Earth's atmosphere. There is still much uncertainty about how the GHG dynamics of peatlands are affected by climate and land use change, while peatland restoration has been recognised as one of the ways to reach carbon emission reduction targets under