Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
The Natural Environment White Paper is a bold and ambitious statement outlining the Government’s vision for the natural environment over the next 50 years, backed up with practical action to deliver that ambition.
To find out more read the White Paper and press release.
Recent research conducted by a team in the School of Applied Sciences (ApSci) has highlighted the need for a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to environmental management and policy development. It is a project which is well placed in BU’s movement towards research focused on societal themes and aims to establish how stakeholder values of their local environment can be used to improve the effectiveness of ecosystem management creating stronger links between citizens and policy makers.
This European collaboration is nearing completion. The Transactional Environmental Support System Project (TESS), supported by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission was coordinated by Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (www.tess-project.eu) and involved several ApSci staff. The rationale for this project had its foundations in the move towards citizen-driven environmental governance and policy development. The aim of TESS was to provide a platform through which biodiversity information collected at a local level can be incorporated into policy development and land-use management. Could a system of this type encourage local communities to have more involvement in collection of these important data, and a greater role in the maintenance and restoration of their local environment and ecosystem services?
The project involved partnership with 14 other institutions from 10 different European countries. The project identified what information is required by both local land users and policy makers in order to develop effective environmental policy which will benefit both biodiversity and economic development. The results were tested through 11 local case studies which were then used to further develop the TESS portal (due to go online in the next month or so). BU’s involvement with the project has allowed us to develop strong, collaborative relationships with a number of institutions across Europe, linking strongly with the University’s desire to become more active on the European stage.
During the project, the ApSci team, including Prof. Adrian Newton, Dr. Kathy Hodder, Lorretta Perrella, Jennifer Birch, Elena Cantarello, Sarah Douglas, James Robins and Chris Moody, carried out a local case study within Dorset’s Frome Catchment Area. This case study site falls within the Dorset AONB and includes a SSSI, Local Nature Reserves, National Nature Reserves and Special Areas of Conservation. We were able to incorporate local knowledge and opinion into a novel evaluation of the ecosystem services and biodiversity benefits that might be realised through implementation of SW Biodiversity Implementation Plan. Such strategies have the implicit assumption that working on a landscape-scale to develop ‘ecological networks’ should have potential to facilitate adaption to climate change, increase ecological ‘resilience’ and improve the UK’s ability to conform to international policy commitments, such as the Habitat Directive. However, it is accepted that the cost of the ecological restoration required for such initiatives could be substantial and little work has been conducted on cost-benefit analysis of restoration initiatives. The work carried out by BU for the TESS project addressed the knowledge gap surrounding the cost effectiveness of ecological restoration approaches to climate change adaptation.
We currently have a paper in review with the Journal of Applied Ecology based on this work. It shows that spatial Multi Criteria Analysis could be used to identify important ecological restoration zones based on a range of criteria, including those relating to ecosystem services, biodiversity and incorporating the values of a range of stakeholders. This tool could be of direct value to the development of ecological networks in the UK as a climate change adaptation measure. Such tools developed through TESS may enable future plans for ecological restoration to incorporate local stakeholder values, improving the chances of societal benefits and long-term success of the schemes.
The wider results of the TESS project were presented at a conference in May 2011, hosted by the European Parliament Intergroup at the European Parliament in Brussels. BU was represented at the conference by one of our postdoctoral researches, Emma McKinley.
Next week I get a chance to get out in to the field when I am due to visit the Roccamonfina footprint site in central Italy about 60 Km from Naples. It is quite a well known footprint site and certainly the oldest in Europe. Roccamonfina is a stratovolcano located north of the Campanian plain and the Devil’s footsteps are preserved in one of the ash layers on its flank and where first publicised by a group of Italian colleagues in 2003 (Mietto et al., 2003; Nature 422). There are around 56 prints forming three trackways recording the movement of one or more individuals adopting a ziz-zag path as they negotiated a soft and potentially unstable slope formed of volcanic ash. In terms of anatomical detail the prints are not perfect due to the slope and consistence of the ash, but at 350,000 years old they fill an important gap in our understanding of the evolution of gait which is the main thrust of my current NERC grant held jointly with Liverpool University. We hope with Italian colleagues to document the prints using photogrammetry to preserve their digital signature for comparison with other footprint sites such as those we found in northern Kenya back in 2009. Above all else for me it is nice to be let out of the office to enjoy a brief spell of fieldwork!
My last spell in the field was back in December when I was working in Namibia on a much younger footprint site (<2000 years old) which has some fantastic prints and provides a perfect laboratory with which to explore the control of substrate on print formation. The research team made a short video clip during this trip which much to my embarrassment has just made it to the website in Applied Sciences, but despite my shyness it does give you an idea of what sort of tasks I get involved with when in the field. You can watch the video if you are interested here: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ8Qxsoxh68.
I am keen to hear about your fieldwork or research experiences so why not post on the blog about these as well?
Professor Matthew Bennett
PVC (Research, Enterprise & Internationalisation)
This week messages of good luck are due to Sophie Smith in HSC for a grant submitted to the Higher Education Academy and congratulations to Clive Andrewes for successful bids to the South West Strategic Health Authority and Dorset Community Health Services. Within DEC Nan Jiang, David John, Glyn Hadley, Sherry Jeary, Jacqui Taylor, Melanie Cole, Heather Mays and Suzy Atfield-Cutts have all submitted bids to the Higher Education Academy this month, while Christine Keenan has been successful in two bids for educational projects supported by HEFECE. I also have to report that I am involved in large NERC grant which was submitted last week via Liverpool University to look at the evolution of endurance running. Otherwise it has been a quiet week for bidding!
Research Professional is working on a project to improve its usability and they want to make sure that the terms they use on the website are easily understandable to all users. In order to shape the redesign, please fill in this short survey designed by Research Professional which should only take 5 mins, by 1st July. Any feedback you give will be enormously useful in making the site easier to use.
Norway and Poland signed a research cooperation deal worth 290 million kroner (€37m) on 10 June, the Norwegian research council 
. The money is part of a 2 billion kroner deal between the two countries focusing on green technologies, like carbon sequestration projects.The Norwegian research council has welcomed the collaboration. It is a way for Norway to develop its participation in EU framework programmes, said Jesper Simonsen, divisional director in the research council.
The UK EURAXESS website, which is run by the British Council, has just launched a new feature, allowing researchers to search for new funding opportunities. The types of schemes that are shown include fellowship programmes, study visits and exchange programmes.
Sweden’s academics should be rewarded for communicating their research and for research collaborations, VA, an interest organisation for researchers, suggested in a proposal to government. “Money is an important incentive. That’s why we want collaboration and communication to be taken into consideration when funding is allocated,” says Cissi Askwall, secretary-general of VA.
Members of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review College have resigned over the council’s continued refusal to remove references to the government’s Big Society slogan from its delivery plan.
Maria Manuel Lisboa, a professor of Portuguese literature and culture at the University of Cambridge, told Research Fortnight Today that she resigned a few weeks ago after receiving no response to a letter of complaint to the council. She described it as “completely unacceptable” that a research council has direct references to a party-political slogan in its delivery plan.
According to an article in The Guardian on 19 June, some 30 academics are planning to resign in the next two weeks. Manuel Lisboa, however, said she was not aware of an organised mass resignation and that her decision was a personal choice.
In a statement sent to Research Fortnight Today, a spokesperson for the AHRC said the council is not contemplating removing big society from its delivery plan: “We have over 1,200 members in our peer review college across all the arts and humanities disciplines. Since the initial petition against the inclusion of Big Society in the AHRC delivery plan appeared at the beginning of April only 2 academics have resigned from the peer review college, and they resigned very early on in the process,” he said.
The full story can be accessed on Research Professional
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) are currently carrying out a survey to gather vital information about International collaborations. The survey will allow the AHRC to gain a greater understanding of existing International partnerships, and gain input from the Arts and Humanities’ research community on where further links may need to be developed.
This is your opportunity to inform the AHRC of your experience in International collaboration and feed into the on-going development of the AHRC’s international activities.
This survey is aimed at UK based researchers eligible for AHRC funding, and will take no more than 10 minutes to complete. The deadline for submission is 10th July 2011.
All responses will be greatly appreciated, and will be used to inform the continuing development of the AHRC’s International activities and opportunities.
Please click here to undertake the survey.
Authors: John Oliver and Darren Lilleker
Alternative name suggestion: Creative and Digital Society
Brief theme summary:
This theme aims to explore the way digital technologies are developed, and how they are used and applied within organisational and social contexts. One important aspect of this is to understand technological developments, we argue that the key to understand the impacts of technologies is to adopt a social constructionist approach. This allows us to understand how users shape technologies to facilitate the accomplishment of their own objectives. We will explore this by looking at usage by corporate, media, political or governmental organisations, highlighting innovations in usage in order to develop best practice guidelines. However, this will be supplemented by focusing on end user perspectives. In particular we want to connect understandings of organisational usage to the way in which the broader consumers and citizens engage with technologies. The extent to which these facilitate participation in the development of consumer goods and services or public or social policy, and how technologies afford users the opportunity to be content creators, shaping the experiences of other users within a collaborate ecosystem. Of equal interest is how usage feeds back into technological development to explore the circularity between developers, professional users and the broader online participants, audiences and users.
Scope of theme: what is included?
We would cover any area of academic research where digital technology has relevance and meaning. However, specific areas could include; creative arts, creative industries, film, special effects, computer animation, computer games, marketing communications, digital marketing, media communication, journalism, social media, branding, media production, story-telling, cloud computing, geographic information systems, consumer psychology and behaviour, digital citizenship, and audiences.
Scope of theme: what is excluded?
We would cover any area of academic research where digital technology has relevance and meaning to the economy or society. Research conducted under the umbrella of this theme would include the development and application of technology in a wide variety of contexts and would exclude areas of study that would not have a digital technology component.
Which big societal questions are addressed by this theme?
How do this link to the priorities of the major funding bodies?
NESTA – interested in innovation and the role it has to play in enhancing eeconomic growth in the creative economy and public services.
AHRC – provide numerous opportunities through in their knowledge economy and innovation agenda. Particularly, emphasis is placed on funding research into improvements in social and intellectual capital, community identity, learning skills, technological evolution and the quality of life of the nation.
ESRC – have strategic priorities relating to; Understanding and influencing behaviour, Technology and innovation, Economic Performance and Sustainable Growth.
TSB – Innovation is a key enabler of growth. They place an emphasis on the Creative Industries, and in particular, how to exploiting digital technologies and commercialise digital content.
British Academy – a wide range of opportunities in the humanities and social sciences, opportunities.
EPSRC – have strategic priorities that relate to; information and communications technology, digital economy, user-led knowledge.
European Union – opportunities under FP7 for research into commercialisation, competitiveness and knowledge-based economy.
Leverhulme – broad range of opportunities.
How does this theme interlink with the other BU themes currently under consideration?
Since the digital world is increasingly embedded in all areas of life, we would see this theme linking with all other BU research themes.
The number of PhD theses and research articles coming out of Lund University, one of Sweden’s best-known research institutions, has dropped in recent years, despite an increase of public funding for the university. On 13 June, the newspaper Sydsvensken reported that the number of theses from Lund in 2010 was its lowest in 10 years and that the total research output had shrunk by a third compared to 2007.
Over the last 10 years I have had the privilege to work on half a dozen European Commission funded projects with a total income of about £1m. Most of them are relating to technology innovations and advantages with a primary focus to tourism and hospitality organisations and regional regions as well as cultural heritage. Getting European funding is complex and requires a lot of work, networking and innovative thinking. Success rates are low and it is quite demanding. Nevertheless there is a great number of benefits that comes with success. These include:
Perhaps the project I enjoyed most as it made me realise the impact that research can do is a recent project which I did when I was still at the University of Surrey. This was about accessible/disabled tourism and I was called to provide expertise on how to deal with information for people with disability that wanted to travel. The project lasted for 2 years and provided a series of key success factor for facilities to use and also guidelines on how those should be systematised for dissemination over the internet. Getting closely involved with people with disabilities and working out on potential solutions opened a whole world for me a
The immediate results of the projects and the other initiatives that emerged are equally impressive:
Although not always easy, involvement with European funded projects are incredibly rewarding for their intellectual stimulation, the exposure to knowledge and networking as well as access to resources. They are also fantastic for impact to society at an international and global scale. We are about to start a new project on Electronic Marketing, mobile phones, location based services, small business and tourism and look forward to cutting edge research.
Prof Alan Fyall, Deputy Dean (Research and Enterprise) in the School of Tourism, discusses the experience of receiving reviewers’ comments…
After nearly 15 years of publishing in peer-reviewed academic journals I am sure I am not alone in still living in fear of emails containing the “feedback” from editors and reviewers of journals about my papers. Over the years, the inconsistency of reviewers’ comments never ceases to amaze me, while the often unhelpful and sometimes down right rude tone of some reviewers does make me sometimes beg the question …. why do I bother? After a “time out”, however, often a period of two-to-three days, upon revisiting the comments advanced I often, albeit reluctantly, accept that the two or three reviewers have probably made some good comments and that, if I calm down and just adhere to the questions raised, will generate a paper far superior to the one I first submitted. This is not always the case but more often than not reviewers do actually provide very honest, fair and helpful comments in an attempt to improve the quality of submissions. Yes, they can sometimes be pedantic, over-emphasise their own contribution and state the obvious. More often, however, they will provide a critical overview of the broad theme of the paper and its rationale, the methodology and sampling, presentation of findings and conclusions drawn, as well as an overview of the way in which the paper is organised and presented.
My advice to old and new researchers is quite simple. In the first instance, take a deep breath when opening that email, read its contents and then leave for a while and avoid at all costs a hasty and reactive response that will only make things worse. Secondly, accept that editors and reviewers are only human (well, most of them) and that what they are communicating is their views and opinions which most probably do not concur with yours and more often than not will conflict with those of other reviewers. Thirdly, take all the feedback provided and take time in amending your paper and the reply to editors and reviewers that explains exactly what changes have been made in improving the quality of your submission. Where you still disagree be constructive in your explanation and offer further insights that the reviewers may have missed in their interpretation of your work. Finally, resubmit your paper and promise to yourself that you bear no grudges against the editor and/or reviewers as you can normally guarantee that at some point in the future they will once again review your work and remember the professional manner in which you dealt with their feedback the first time. For me, after 15 years of publishing I am still learning, still amazed at some of the comments I receive and am still ……. slightly nervous about opening that email; a fear which is unlikely to vanish perhaps as we continue to learn and learn from others in our respective academic publishing journeys
Involved in enterprise? Would you like to be a member of Association for University Research and Industry Links (AURIL) www.auril.org.uk? Now’s your chance!
BU has renewed its membership for 2011-2012 and is allowed unlimited members. If you think that this would be of benefit to you and you would like to become a member, please contact Nicola King (nking@bournemouth.ac.uk) no later than 1st July for inclusion on our institutional return.
Reporting from this years EARMA conference in Portugal, I have just heard a presentation from the DG for Research & Innovation who has revealed that this week the official new name for FP8 was launched -‘ Horizon 2020 – towards a new framework programme for research and innovation’. A bit of a mouthful so at BU we will refer to it as ‘Horizon 2020’!
A research project from the University of Bergen aims to chart Facebook addiction among Norwegian users. The aim of the project is to increase the knowledge of addiction to social media in relation to working life and will feed into clinical treatment programmes for addicts.
Depleting non-renewable resources and limited alternative (heat pumps and solar photovoltaic), renewable (tidal, wind, solar) options of energy generation are posing challenging questions. In addition sustained energy supply and security are important factors to consider.
“European Union ministers meeting in Luxembourg have signalled support for draft European Commission plans for an energy efficiency law impacting directly on utilities” http://www.utilityweek.co.uk/news/news.asp . Among other considerations it is noted that “Reinvigorated efforts are necessary in order to reach the 20% EU energy saving objective by 2020.” This is an optimistic, challenging but achievable target. However these savings could easily be topped up with available options and technologies available to us without painful cuts to energy consumption in our daily lives. This should not necessarily mean that energy inlets are to be reduced or energy flow through these inlets is reduced. As both of these are directly related to life standard and output. For example we will have to choose either have a TV or laptop and/or have a smaller TV at domestic level. Or reduced manufacturing lines in the industry or reduced number of industry.
One third of the available energy is dissipated through frictional heat in mechanical interacting machines for example motors, pumps, compressors, internal combustion engines, steam/tidal/wind turbines and manufacturing tools etc. A significant part of this energy is recoverable. This is achieved through mathematically adjusting the surface profile of the interacting surface through which energy is transferred. This key aspect is part of the science and engineering of friction, wear and lubrication; Tribology.
Colleagues in the Sustainable Design Research Centre have expertise and resources in this key and strategically important area of activity and are also actively engaged in the BU initiative within Green Knowledge Economy. If you are interested in this area or would like to find out more contact Professor Mark Hadfield / Dr Zulfiqar Khan. For details please see the SDRC webpage.
BU staff can login below:
Doctoral College PGR Research Culture and Community Grant – Apply Now!
BU Professor has been invited to a series of plenary and invited lectures.
An Interview of BU-lead EU H2020 FIRST project published in “Horizon”, the EU Research & Innovation Magazine
Update on Horizon Europe Guarantee
Research Information Network