 We're gathered here at the University of Birmingham for the Constructing a Digital Environment 2022 conference, which is part of the NERC's programme about Constructing a Digital Environment. We have a very interesting agenda, which is all about bringing digital and data sciences to the environmental sciences, so a lot of activities about that throughout the next couple of days, including a hackathon, we've got various master classes, we've oral presentations, some excellent keynote speakers and all sorts of exhibitions and posters, so it's going to be an exciting couple of days. NERC is the Natural Environment Research Council, so it's where a lot of earth scientists get their funding from. Today's bringing together everyone who's been involved in this kind of NERC-funded programme over the past few years, attending the conference we've got a whole variety of scientists who are doing all sorts of things in this kind of environment and digital realm, so I'm really excited to be here to actually get to talk to them in person and find out what they're doing and how it interacts with what I'm doing as part of the scheme. I think it's a great opportunity to showcase the work of the programme. We have well over 200 people attending, both physically and virtually, from a wide array of different academic institutions, but also NERC national centres. It's really all about trying to bring some of these very exciting techniques from data science and digital techniques, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and apply them to environmental science, so we have a series of fantastic speeches, talks, exhibitions, demonstrations where these techniques can be used to really try to advance our understanding of the environment. Traditionally as scientists we tend to work in quite a siloed way and there's a recognition that we've got to work in a much more multidisciplinary way and we've got to work across thematic, so I'm an oceanographer but there are people here from the terrestrial environment, there are people from the atmospheric environment. We're already pretty good at working across those science themes, but increasingly we've also looked into work across the sort of the digital capabilities of engineers, so as scientists we tend not to have that much interaction engineers historically, but this sort of programme brings together people from lots of different backgrounds. In the poster session outside I've seen some really interesting posters already, so I'm really interested in rainfall data because it's absolutely critical to flooding, so there's been a poster out there which is looking at getting better measurements for the rainfall that actually hits the ground under tree canopies, so you get a lot less water hitting the ground because trees are intercepting it, so I'm going to go have a look in more detail at that. One of the things we're doing is the hackathon and of course this allows people to try to find ways of communicating the wide variety of data sets held by the Natural Environment Research Council and other environmental custodians of data and bringing art into that science. Hackathon is kind of an interesting experience for everyone, so we just try to put people together from different backgrounds and from different institutions and to come to here to brainstorm some new ideas. The idea is trying to use this opportunity to develop something we normally don't have time to develop ourselves, something more beyond the science to inspire people or to move people's hearts and to change their perception of using a different format that normally we'll see in the science. In academia it's very easy to be in your own little bubble working with people researching in very similar areas, so a hackathon brings people together from a wide variety of backgrounds and you'll get presented ideas which you probably more likely wouldn't have thought of yourself. Just hearing a couple of guys talking about what they want to do with their work so far and like this maybe like in the first hour, it's made me think about ways that I can apply some of my research background into other areas. So this is an incomplete picture, it's the name of this piece I created for the Interacting Indigenous Environment Art Science Hackathon. It explores uncertainty and data gaps in species trends. When we look at these analyses of trends we're really only reporting on a subset of biodiversity that is being monitored and being measured and of those that are being monitored and measured there's actually a lot of variation in the precision of those trends. This piece is trying to explore those uncertainties and data gaps in this trends data. When a species was very confident the engraving line was very confident and when the trend estimation for species was uncertain the line became broken and hard to read. I used those cuts to represent the space, the gaps in the data that we have. I think all in all create this yeah really nice visual of this incomplete picture, pictures broken in half. Climate change is a huge problem that affects pretty much everything and so we've really got to start working together if we're actually going to come up with proper solutions to these issues. So having everyone here in the same place is incredible because you can have hydrologists and coastal scientists and marine scientists and atmospheric scientists all talking to each other and trying to get to the root of the same problem. I'm really hoping to raise awareness of what we've been delivering over the last three years but also to look forwards in terms of maintaining engagement with those individuals, having peer-to-peer conversations about some of the work that's been delivered and focusing on how to deliver the strategy going forwards.