Published on 21 September 2026
The Renewing Biodiversity Longitudinal Survey (ReBLS) is a large-scale longitudinal survey exploring how people’s experiences of nature and biodiversity relate to their attitudes, behaviours, health and wellbeing, and how these change over time. In this blog post, Jen Weston explains the process of knowledge exchange undertaken with partners, which will help inform the final phase of research: how to communicate findings for maximum impact.
Developed by the University of Exeter and Natural England as part of RENEW, the Renewing Biodiversity Longitudinal Survey (ReBLS) survey follows people across England over multiple years. ReBLS is a component of RENEW’s Theme 1 work focusing on biodiversity and individuals specifically. This provides an opportunity to understand how people experience and relate to nature and biodiversity, how these experiences are associated with their attitudes, behaviours, health and wellbeing, and how these relationships develop and change over time. As ReBLS comes close to completing three years of data collection, an important next step is ensuring that the evidence it generates can be translated into useful and impactful outputs for those working to support positive outcomes for people, nature and biodiversity.
To share our ReBLS findings, and help prioritise research outputs, we ran workshops with the National Trust (NT), co-lead of RENEW and Natural England (NE), a key strategic partner on RENEW. Participants worked across a range of delivery, policy and strategy roles, bringing perspectives from those well placed to translate research evidence to inform real-world decisions and practice. Held online in early summer, the workshops were designed to encourage constructive knowledge exchange, giving practitioners an overview of the scope and potential application of ReBLS, while helping the research team understand where our evidence could best contribute to organisational priorities.
Each workshop began by sharing our findings and considering how they align with NT and NE strategies. We then explored potential future research questions and where ReBLS evidence could be most useful to each organisation. This knowledge-exchange will help inform the final phase of the ReBLS research, including how findings are communicated and which future analyses to prioritise, while identifying opportunities for the work to contribute to wider interdisciplinary research and practice.
The workshops will help ensure that the research we produce responds to what is needed. In the process of developing research questions, adapting methodologies and critically analysing data, it can sometimes be easy to lose sight of how findings will ultimately be used. These knowledge-exchange workshops provided an opportunity to bring that wider focus and to hear directly from practitioners about what they found most useful, interesting and relevant.
Following the same person over time moves beyond snapshots of people’s experiences and enables researchers to explore their interactions with and connection to nature, and behavioural changes over time. In turn, this can inform the work of practitioners working to improve outcomes for both people and nature. The workshop helped us recognise that this is not only an analytical strength, but also an important ‘hook’ when communicating the research more widely.
For example, discussions with the NT highlighted clear links between our data and their People and Nature Thriving 2025-35 strategy, across the three pillars: Restore Nature, End Unequal Access, and Inspire Millions. This includes ambitions relating to equitable access to nature, beauty and heritage and supporting people from all backgrounds to engage with, care for and act for nature. Similarly, our planned analyses mapped across all four outcomes of NE’s Recovering Nature for Growth, Health and Security strategy, with strong links to key focuses such as improving health and wellbeing. In addition, findings around nearby green space, visiting natural spaces and nature connection were especially relevant to ambitions to bring nature closer to people’s homes and increase opportunities to engage with nature.
How we communicate that evidence matters too. As a group we discussed the narratives we use to communicate our findings and the differing audiences we want to reach. Clear and accessible messages are important, but these should not come at the expense of the context and nuance that sits behind numbers. The workshops also reinforced the strengths of bringing together quantitative findings with qualitative insights to help explain why of how people respond to change in the ways they do.
Holding the workshops in relatively quick succession allowed us to identify both differences and commonalities between our stakeholder requirements. While the needs of large organisations can vary substantially, there were clear areas of overlap. Through the collaborative activities participants helped us to identify and prioritise research questions that can be explored during the next phase of ReBLS. The discussions raised some interesting questions for analysis:
We hope to be able to answer some of these questions in the final phase of RENEW.
These conversations are now helping us decide how to frame and focus our journal publications, partner-facing reports, and public-facing website content. For the Exeter research team, this is one of the most valuable outcomes of the coproduction process, as it has enabled us to combine our understanding with the knowledge and priorities of organisations working to deliver change in practice.
We will also produce non-technical summaries tailored for different audiences, focusing on the most relevant findings. Alongside this, we will continue exploring opportunities to bring together the qualitative evidence that can help understand the stories behind the numbers.
Perhaps most importantly, the workshops have reinforced to us the value of creating space for researchers and stakeholders to think together. Knowledge exchange is not simply about communicating research, it’s also about learning from those who can make use of the research in the real world and enabling end users to inform the research we do. By working collaboratively throughout, we can ask more meaningful questions, generate more relevant knowledge that meets evidence needs and ensure findings are communicated in a way which can be applied, increasing the likelihood of its impact on helping people and nature.
