Research team

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Partners

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Aims

Common land, especially upland common land in places like the Lake District, encompasses large tracts of our most well-loved and ecologically rich landscapes. This makes it key to biodiversity conservation in England.  

The ongoing roll-out of new subsidy schemes means that decisions about land management on commons are at a critical moment, and require close collaboration between farmers, owners of the common and other stakeholders.  

The aims of this PhD research project are:  

• To work with farmers to develop the tools and knowledge to have greater ownership of the evidence and data that underpins environmental decision-making  
• To model the consequences for nature of different ways common land could be used in future 
• To explore how this approach affects farmer engagement, empowerment and decision-making about common land.

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Approach

We are working closely with partners including commoners, local community organisations and local decision-makers. There will be two phases to the work. The first will improve our understanding of the current condition of the common and integrate farmers’ knowledge of the land with environmental data.

This could include:

• Training farmers so they can assess the ecological condition of the common themselves and store that data on an app, e.g., farmer-led habitat assessments, peatland surveying, soil carbon sampling, plant ID training etc. 
  
• Developing a remote sensing map to allow better monitoring of habitat cover on the common as a whole over time. In future this could be updated using the data that farmers are collecting themselves in their habitat assessments 
  
• Integrating farmer knowledge of the common with environmental maps, for example how the common has changed, where vegetation shifts have happened, or where livestock spend time. 

The second phase is about reimagining the future of the common.  

This could include: 

• Developing several visions and scenarios for the future of the common with farmers and other stakeholders, using participatory scenario planning
• Predicting the environmental outcomes of those future scenarios through ecological modelling. This includes the potential change in habitat cover on the common; the change in the abundance of certain species; and the change in farmer income 
  
• This work will culminate in an interactive systematic conservation planning tool where farmers can experiment with how different actions affect biodiversity and farmer income.
  

Throughout this, we’ll explore the impact of this process (including the co-production of ecological knowledge, participatory scenario planning and co-developing the systematic conservation planning tool) on farmer engagement and empowerment and how it feeds into formal decision-making about these commons in the longer term. This will give us an idea of how effective this is as an approach for co-designing a sustainable (economic and ecological) future for upland landscapes with diverse stakeholders.