 Thank you, Simon, and thank you all for coming. What an incredible venue it is I've been thinking back Like Simon said, it's been five years ago that we got appointed digital champions And you must have all heard it many many times before but in those five years must just changed So when we set out to thinking what it would be to to be digital champions to champion this program to help support it to help develop it We didn't quite expect Everybody to be sitting at home and everybody be sitting on zoom and guess what? We're digital So in many ways we were at the forefront of how that whole innovation process happened So it's been quite a interesting couple of five years. It's been a tremendously exciting journey And they're reflecting back on that again, and I'll move on in a minute to to what we've achieved But when we set out in my mind I did set out a set of objectives as to what I was hoping to achieve with this program And to me there was a number of things that were very clear one of them was this concept of digital environment when we first did a Citizen science thing and we said what do you think about the digital environment? They either pointed at their phones or they looked at computers or they started talking about the internet But there was no environmental component in that for them digital environment was the environment in which digital happens Right, and so one of the things that we put for clearly and I'll show that in a minute The slide is this idea of that actually digital place within an environmental context is very powerful It is actually a concept a concept that is worth pursuing in in its own right And that was the first Challenge we had really is to kind of put digital on the map and with that Understanding and making clear what NERC's capabilities were around digital which are extraordinary I mean the amount of stuff didn't dark does in a digital space goes all the way from Submersives to satellites to large supercomputers, but all of it's invisible to the to the common public The next thing was clear to me and as I've been clear very long so my background is in modeling I'm a statistician and a muddler and I've noticed that in my particular community Everybody sticks to the discipline. So you have atmospheric modellers ocean and graphic modellers soul modellers biodiversity people ecological modellers and everybody kind of talks to their own community and sits in their own community and NERC very much is organized around similar type of pillars of discipline So you had an environmental data center an atmospheric data center an oceanographic data center And none of these people were talking to one another much When in fact they all faced the same challenges Challenges around how do we acquire data about the environment our understanding and our basis our databases of the environment is still sparse So how do we use sensor systems to get better information about what the environment is doing at this point in time? How do we take that data? How do we store it? How do we collate it? How do we organize it? How do we make that data accessible to the community? And how do we signpost the data? One of the big challenges we found is that half the time most of the academic community didn't even know where to find particular data sets So are there ways we can use digital tools to help signpost data to make the data more accessible? The other challenge we found of course is that the muddling communities weren't talking to one another and they themselves faced very similar problems so breaking across and Generating this this sense of community of people embarking on a similar challenge Which is the best what is the best most cost-effective way to acquire information about the environment? What is this is the state it's at and where it's heading? How can we use that data to inform decision-making in a coherent way? How do we support decision-makers? That component became core to what is now constructing a digital environment The second challenge of these We found was that in effect Digital was always in NERC in the background. There was quite a strong digital infrastructure One of the things that we brought together and it was not not just me and Steve But it was the entire NERC digital community together with Simon and Anna Was around developing a clear strategic view of how digital would develop in NERC One of our big wins was a strategic Was a strategy document the NERC digital strategy? Which is now implemented and is now being part and core of how NERC thinks about its environmental science offering So bringing digital at the core of NERC science offering Thinking about how digital can enable can transform how we think about the environment how we help make decisions about the environment and how we how we express and Articulate what we do in the environment to the general public and to policy makers and decision makers That was at the core at the heart of the things that I was hoping to achieve at the end of the program As always with many things There are ticks and some they're half ticks and others and some things we didn't that's that's the way things go But I do think and I can I'll go to slides for a minute The the key looking Mac one of the key elements that I feel we really really achieved Steve and I was this ability to unlock digital at the heart of NERC and of NERC science and From there also kind of showing how you can use digital tools To bring a community together in very intuitive ways things like hackathons and digital trails things that Don't normally sit within the core NERC science so The next slide the reason why I started with this very long preamble, and I'm sorry is that the next slide kind of shows Our achievements, so I wanted to first set out what we were hoping to do and then move on to what we've achieved So as Simon indicated we've had 10 million pounds committed to champions myself Steve and 23 projects funded that's quite a lot of projects that we managed to get through the door for 10 million pounds We had 32 institutions involved and 45 project partners, so our impact was wide We have at least 26 digital technologies used if you've got any questions about which digital technologies I'm going to point to Steve We had a large number of workshops and conferences a huge online presence as Abby will knows We had 80 expert members so in essence we built an expert network And that expert network was digital it was mostly online only towards the end of the program Where we able to bring them together and through that we had a community and that community spanned All the way from people that were very busy with sense of development How do I put a salinity sensor on a submersible to go into the ocean to people? Let's sit on the ethics side that sits on the legal side You know what is the legality of data? How does one use data who owns the IP? How does the IP gets transferred? those kind of ethical considerations the use of the data its utility and how that then gets Applied environmental decision-making was as much a discussion point as What is a digital twin and how does a digital twin function? And that's part of the strength of this program was we had these communities speaking to each other And we have these communities present in the room right now. So certainly You know invite you to speak to to members of the expert network and we have a hands is who he's here from the expert network a Couple So please do talk to them They can share your experiences. That's how they worked We had a previous discussion about what multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary is and how it functions This was multidisciplinary it did we did have people from very different disciplines talking to one another We did four digital trails, I'll spend a little bit more time in a minute But that was very much around Finding digital tools to signpost environmentally important data sets so where someone somewhere has made a measurement has deposited that data in One of the environmental depository data depository stores. How do you get other people to find it and use it? We had a very successful created webinar series. I'll spend a little bit more time with that We spent some time doing horizon scanning Where is digital going and what does the future in digital look like for the environment? And we have a very active slack channel On these these these vignettes kind of give a flavor of the various activities we've had So here's the CDE program overview as you can see we were pointed in 2018 That's a very young me there. I do recognize that I've aged since for a variety of reasons And of course in the middle of there was COVID and the impact of COVID Despite that we've had a whole series of very very active periods We wave one was a set of feasibility studies that were funded wave two was another set of feasibility studies That led to the demonstrator projects Again, we'll talk about that in a minute and later on in the program We have representatives from the demonstrator projects speaking to you about what they've done and what they've achieved and in the back We actually have them demonstrating what they did And then in the end we had a Funding of mini demonstrators these were the mini demonstrators were a result of all the discussion We had in the expert network of interesting ideas that came from that and we were able to fund a number of that and The one you're seeing there is the is is an art? AI combination around butterflies done by and again You'll hear more about that as the day goes on and then we had a whole set of Conferences and various other activities as you would expect from a program like this So what do we mean with digital environment? What is the concept of digital environment? There's two ways of seeing this One is what I call the arc where you start with the data gathering exercise the Development of the sensors the how you get information then you store that information how do you access it? How do you maintain it meta data the structure around that? How do you turn that data into? Information, so how do you make it informative then finally? How do you use that information to make decisions about how we manage and how we understand our environment? The problem with an arc, of course is that it goes from one to another. It's linear and your points well-made. It's Circular and so this represents that same idea, but in a circular sense that of course Sensor development will be as a function of where we need to make decisions. We're not going to put sensors in places We're not interested in so you end up with this kind of circular process And then of course all the buzzwords on the side Represent kind of the scope the sense of what we were trying to achieve with digital environment things like the various forms of sensor development the computing edge computing clouds computing and And the various computing capabilities the UKRI have with that And then moving from that how you get to things like analysis ready data data labs How can you make that data quickly accessible to the research community? to then move quickly into Making decisions something and this is my personal opinion here Something I've noticed a lot is we tend to repeat the data acquisition process a lot the standard research program starts with We're going to go collect some data And after we've collected some data We're going to go talk to the modelers and the modelers are going to do some things with it And then we're going to go talk to the decision makers and say look our pretty model does this and that's a standard research program and Actually, if you think about how often we collect data about the same thing over and over and over again When in fact, we've got massive data repositories of people have collected that data before But this data needs to be accessible and that's one of the work we did around that use of structured and unstructured data the idea I Came out of Lancaster around virtual labs And this idea of analysis ready data data that is can be immediately ingested through an API can be used quickly For the by the community to develop that on In a many ways, that's a massive efficiency Going back to the earlier point We go to Treasury and we make a case an expending review. We need funding for this We can go to Treasury and say actually there's been a previous massive investment of X amount of pounds in this data set And this data systems and all these structures and we need add-on investment to make that investment work for you You've got a case with Treasury and that's the other thing around these making these data sets available And then you move into the space that that I get excited about as a mutler and statistician, which is the digital twinning space You know, how do you turn all of this into something informative? The key to all of this is to keep the decision-makers front and central that what we're doing is meaningful And what we're doing actually helps us manage the environment better and helps inform decision-makers better And one of the things I personally really really enjoyed from Doing an SPF is we worked closely with DEFRA There was this clear component of government interest and what we were doing and how this related to government decision-making So we had a clear input from you get in our side from DEFRA and that deaf that component You could see that come through in many of the decisions we made as an SPF Having been involved in many other of these big strategic funding programs That having that key stakeholder governmental contact was key to making this successful uninformative So in terms of the feasibility studies, this gives you a flavor Again, there's a website digital environment org which has far more detail on what each one of these does But we have in essence we funded a hub for greenhouse that greenhouse Sorry, a hub for UK greenhouse gas data hugs And I can see Neil sitting in the back there as part of the hugs story Engineering and transforming integrating sensor networks and train the dynamic movement Motion map of the UK this was with pistol then feasibility to we went into water resources a digital environmental water resources from Glasgow mitigation landscape mitigation informatics against landscape geo hazards Under water large air resolution monitoring for distributed optical fiber acoustic sensors University of Southampton and sounding out to river a new system for monitoring riverbed load mobilization and transport these were moving rocks From the University of Edinburgh and a number of other ones mosaic moisture sensors So combining cosmos with measurements Metrology can ask virtual labs. So here we're starting to move to this concept of virtual labs and the virtual labs are what sits Above our data structures allowing us to quickly analyze data From Lancaster University. So all these various Feasibilities led to what was then our demonstrator call the idea was basically instead of having us a bunch of research Projects, you would have a set of feasibility Projects where we tried and trialed different types of technology But as you can see there is already decision-making and end-user components even in the feasibility component And I'll talk about the demonstrator call in a bit We also had we then let on to a demonstrator call workshop in 2019 we had a number of them across the UK Cardiff London and Edinburgh. I was president the Edinburgh one You can see a very young Simon there What COVID does to us And in effect, we had a lot of these they were well attended And we were really were we were really building a community around them COVID hit and the whole thing had to go online Which which functioned well at the end In terms of demonstrator projects Approximately each one of them was about a million pounds. They lasted 24 months months in duration each And I'm just going to read the titles because we are actually have representatives from the demonstrator projects following on this session and They have stands in the back and in the next room over where you can actually see what they've done and you can interact with some of the technology They've developed So cream tea is probably one of the best titles I have ever seen of a research program. I really like it Coastal resilience alerts and monitoring technologies. So this is very much around wave and wave action as it breaks over the edge and The nicest slides you always see is the train comes across and gets hit by a wave decide delivering enhance ecobytes delivering enhanced biodiversity information with adaptation citizen science and intelligent digital engagements Sense them smart sensing of landscapes under undergoing hazards and hydrological movement Pyramid platform for dynamic hyper hyper resolution Near real-time flood risk assessment integrating repurposed and novel data sources Sentinel which is treescapes and open GHG which was a follow-on from the feasibility study Around greenhouse gases and retina dynamic monitoring and reporting and verification of implementing negative emission strategies in managed ecosystems Now one of the things I hope as we've gone through this That you see the flavor and nature and breadth of projects. We've had these are cross-disciplinary We've had projects in most of the biospheres using a myriad of technology And this kind of to me addresses the first challenge I had how do we make sure that this isn't discipline based this isn't a particular discipline putting their research ideas forward And to me the the concept the structure of a feasibility leading to a demonstrator Addresses your point around challenge lead And if you do things from a challenge led perspective very quickly you are in that multidisciplinary world You're not worried about anymore if you're a ecologist or a hydrologist You're worried about a system and how do we understand to monitor and better manage that system We did quite a lot of work around community engagement. We had Public engagement process early on and then later we had a set of We called them digital gatherings, which sounds a bit oxymoronic, but we actually was there physically But it was digital gatherings And there's the the first conference we had post COVID which was at Birmingham in 2022 and then The last conference we had as a community was at Bass in 2023 just now and both both an incredible success nice buzz people really engaged We being digital of course part of our remit was to start using novel and different digital tools to engage the community and To engage the public and one of them one of the key ones is hackathons And one of the things we did a lot was how do we make NERC data available to the digital community to then propose or develop some hackathons around that And we had a set of challenges around that so we had the COVID-19 digital sprint hackathon That was massively successful. How does environmental data help our response to COVID? There's some really interesting responses to that designing trains and Understanding the importance of green space, but all based on NERC data And then we recently had another set of hackathons in 2023 Again very successful and the neat thing about hackathons is you're making NERC data available to the entire NERC community And you have people coming through that are not even part of NERC community Computer scientists and one that's suddenly interested in using environmental data in novel in different ways And it's very cost-effective. It's you know, you're not funding a very large in the science program What you're saying is here's some data. It's exciting data, but we're not so sure what to do with it Let's run a hackathon and at the end There's a set of prizes for the person that best develops a novel application a novel way of thinking about that data It's short. It's sharp But it actually addresses people and communities that typically we wouldn't address within our within our science community And then our expert network who were basically the backbone of the whole program and thanks again to everybody here on the expert network We're hoping this in some way or other may continue into the future But in any case, thank you so much for the support over the last five years We've had a lot of people that have stayed with us for the past five years and that's been really really encouraging as well as having quite Novel people coming in coming out all ages Early career researchers senior experts international experts. We had a quite an international community built around this And now we have an alumni system of 80 expert networks This is a community that is interested in understanding digital tools how to apply them and how to build from them and a lot of the network members are now embedded in the digital strategy our part This is a bit boring, but if you're into IT and into data systems, you understand that governance is one of the key elements That always sits behind it. They're part of the governance structure They're part now of that digital community that's supporting NERC and its science so in a way it's a It's an added benefit. It's it's a capability that NERC now has uses and has access to and that's been an incredible success story and again highlighting The incredible cross-disciplinarity of the we're just seeing there's faces, but you know, there's biodiversity. There's ethics. There's law There's digital twinning There's remote sensing there. So in those faces there is such a spread of expertise and knowledge represented The webinar series Again, this this we always intended to do it, but it became one of the key delivery platforms during COVID Because of the way to build the community and extend the community but also for people to start communicating. So we have over If you can see just their constructing digital environment, we have 278 subscribers, but we have over 83 videos webinar series of a whole variety of topics going all the way from how do you worry about uncertainty and statistics to ethics to law to To various applications sensor development. So if you haven't seen a webinar series yet I strongly encourage you want to subscribe because we want that number to go up and to You know, it's an incredible resource of Know-how of knowledge of how to think about digital and this to me was became the key point around signposting signposting Where data sets are but also signposting knowledge understanding tools This is a learning base where if you're embarking or starting on your digital journey You're thinking about using digital tools to help resolve a particular problem Please the experts are there. You've got 83 videos of people telling you what they've gone through and signposting best practices Signposting how one approaches a digital problem. And that's it for me. I think