 Thanks very much, everybody. Thanks very much, Linda and Miliana. As they just said, I'm going to talk to you about an experience that we've had here at SEI, conducting a thematic synthesis with the subtitle of Confessions of a Quantitative Ecologist. And I have to start off this presentation with a caveat or several caveats. That I come from a quantitative background. My PhD was in crayfish conservation, which involved a huge amount of coding and statistics. But that said, more recently, I engaged in a qualitative analysis back in 2014, actually, when I was doing a project on stakeholder engagement in systematic reviews. And now I did a thematic analysis, which is very similar to a thematic synthesis, which I'll introduce in a bit. But my background is quantitative. As a quantitative scientist, I'm not a qualitative researcher, but I started to get involved with it. It's really opened up my eyes to big differences in the way that we look at things from the way that we define data, for example, but also to the benefits of having a qualitative approach to evidence synthesis. So I'll start off by talking about quantitative our experience as quantitative researchers and the experience of doing a qualitative synthesis for the first time. I'll introduce thematic synthesis as a methodology. And then I'll just outline the results of our thematic synthesis, because I think that's interesting. So this comes from a project that started earlier this year in May called Bonus Return. It's a bonus funded project looking at reuse of carbon and nutrients using ecotechnologies in the Baltic region. So this is the overall aim to identify and test ecotechnologies for reducing emissions by turning nutrients and carbon into benefits. The problem for us was that this term ecotechnology wasn't really defined. The term was in the call. We used the term a lot in our grant application. But after we started, we realized that there wasn't really an accepted definition of what ecotechnology means. As we started off with a systematic map within this project, it was really crucial to establish a really strong search strategy and inclusion criteria. And without acceptable definitions, this is where you really hit problems. So the first part of a systematic map or review, as many of you know, is to establish the search and all of these definitions and make sure that everybody is singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were. So we knew roughly what was meant. Everybody roughly knew what was implied. It's a similar term to ecological engineering. It's basically technologies undertaken in ecological settings for the benefits of society. But anybody who works with definitions knows that you can't use the word technology or ecological if the term you're trying to define is ecotechnology. So this is one of the problems that we had. What did we mean by technology? Are we talking about hard technology, like machinery or nanotechnology or something that you put in the environment that's artificial? Or do we mean soft technology, which could be things like practices or behaviors? So what along this spectrum of structures, mechanisms, processes, behaviors, policies do we count as being included? And then what do we mean by eco? Do we mean in the environment? Do we mean using nature? What do we mean by nature? Or making use of biological processes? So these are the kind of things that we wanted to know. And it wasn't implicitly obvious to even the experts in our group. So we highlighted a need to understand how the term eco technology has been used. We decided to do a systematic review of how it's been used in the literature. So the population that we were interested in is scientific research articles in traditional academic literature. We wanted to see how research has used the term. And we were looking for any type of eco technology definition. We highlighted two different types of definition, the explicit definition where people say an eco technology is blah, blah, blah. And then also implicit or example-based definitions where people give an example of a technology and then refer to it as being a technology. And so we decided to use thematic synthesis to build a conceptual model and generate a definition or pick the best definition in the literature. And thematic synthesis is a method that was first published in 2008 by James Thomas and Hardin. And the definition of thematic synthesis is that it's basically the same thing as thematic analysis, if anybody's familiar with that. It has three key stages where you code the text that you're interested in line by line, so you go through and you identify relevant text within the article. And then you pull out themes that describe the text in the article. And from those themes, you then go on to the final stage of building an analytical theme and constructing a framework. So the first stage is extracting data from your studies. The second stage is part of data extraction but also collating and coding. So it's changing, collating and summarizing the themes that you find. And the final stage is the synthesis or interpretive stage. You can't have a thematic synthesis without this final stage that goes beyond just extracting and tries to look for patterns and similarities or differences across the evidence base. Thematic synthesis overlaps heavily with framework synthesis which is pretty similar but you start off with a conceptual model. You go to the literature and you see how other people have built conceptual models and you then adapt your conceptual model or framework based on the frameworks that you experience in the literature. And both of these methods are less interpretive. Thematic synthesis in particular tries to stay true to the source material. So what you're looking for is just themes that have been described within the literature and then trying to bring them together into a universal conceptual model. So the process for the bonus return was that we had a body of literature that we performed line by line coding in EpiReviewer. So we went through the PDFs and we highlighted and extracted blocks of text where ecotechnologies were defined. We then went through those quotes and tried to identify themes but those themes were staying very true to the original text. And then we went through and of all of the themes we grouped similar themes or identical themes together and changed some of the wording a little bit to make it consistent. And then we took those themes and tried to put them into groups and build a model based on how those themes related to one another. It'll become clearer when I show our conceptual model in a bit. But we started off with about 1200 search results. We searched for the word ecotechnology. So we only had three search terms in our search strategy based on different spellings of the word ecotechnology. So it's quite simple. We searched web of science, core collections, Scopus and Google Scholar. And we identified 657 unique articles after removing duplicates. We were able to retrieve about half of these. Some of them were quite obscure articles which unfortunately weren't able to get in full text. And within those 330 articles we found 49 explicit definitions of ecotechnology. And around 73 articles where they'd given an example of an ecotechnology that related to carbon and nutrients which was the subject of interest for bonus return. We then performed thematic synthesis based largely on the 49 explicit definitions. And then we tested our conceptual model based on those original definitions and the 73 examples. We tried to see where each of those 73 examples would sit. And then we had our final conceptual model built. Just one example I wanted to show of one line by line coding that was extracted. It's an explicit definition of ecotechnology and it's one of the most rich. We classed how many themes were in each definition and this was one that had I think six themes within it. And it was that ecotech is generally understood as the embedding of human activities into the cycles of the ecosphere and also into the social, cultural and economic organizational structure of societies through using the whole range of biodiversity. However, in a holistic and low invasive way ecocentric and not anthropocentric with the aid of efficient engineering in order to preserve the wellbeing of society by obeying eco principles, e.g. sufficiency. This was one of the better ones that we found. So you see the problem that we had. We didn't actually find a single definition of ecotechnology that was explicit enough to capture all of the themes that we identified. And so these were the, each of these bullet points isn't a second level theme. So we extracted the text, we summarized the text and then we went through all of those summary themes to make sure that there wasn't any overlap or duplication. And each of these is one of the kind of restructured original themes. And we've grouped them into nine blocks that we thought made sense. So we have things like making nature work for society, making society work for nature. Those were the overarching groups there. Good for society, good for nature, good for both society and nature, talking about profitability or efficiency, combining processes, integrating nature in society, improving processes or learning from the environment, components, equipment or machinery and then processes and behaviors. And so this structure of the nine groups kind of emerged by itself as we collated those bullet points together. And we then produced a conceptual model which is three mini conceptual models. One talking about the type of technology, was it hard or was it soft technology? Meaning components and equipment or materials and then a spectrum to behaviors and processes. And then the benefits were either good for nature or good for society along a spectrum. And the processes were the third group which was on a scale from society versus nature and then society and nature, which were things like improving or learning from the environment or combining and integrating processes and then making society work for nature or the other way around. And the terminology that was used within those definitions was quite influential in, for example, where they sat on this axis. So if people were talking about using nature or forcing nature to work for society, it would be very much up here. So it's not just the content, it's also the way that the definition was expressed. And then we've got that conceptual model again and for the four high information or information rich definitions, which each had six emergent themes within them, we mapped them to see where they fit. So how many of these different concepts, different groups of concepts were covered by the definitions. Some of them you can see were a bit more restricted within each so that the anonymous one only covered a couple of concepts. Interestingly, none of these and none of the other information rich definitions talked about whether it was hard or soft. That was always something that was kind of implicit. Occasionally they talked about behaviors and processes. So we had more themes within the behaviors and processes, but I think only one article mentioned hard technology, which was very surprising because as we started out in the project, we were all thinking ecotechnology has to be hard technology, right? So this opened our eyes a bit. But the conclusions here were that because we also identified where the word ecotechnology was used within each article, was it within the title, the abstract, the keywords, or the full text? And the vast majority of definitions were within keywords or titles and then also abstracts with not so many in the full text. And that gives an indication that it's being used as a buzzword. And because it was being used within those locations and then not defined anywhere else, it means that it slowly changes its definition over time or it can slowly change its definition over time because there was no definition to start with and no usable published explicit definition that encompassed all of those concepts. It means that it's potentially a bit of a dangerous word to use. It was sometimes conflated with ecological engineering, although one definition that we had said that they were two related but different concepts. But it also shows an interesting change in use over time that actually the use of the term is starting to drop, it's starting to be less of a popular buzzword now, perhaps being replaced by things like green economy or circular economy, other words that are becoming more popular. So we found it interesting that it was being used by bonus return, but there's a really good learning experience here for everyone we think. So because of this, we have to use the word eco-technology, so we decided to define it ourselves and we've used our conceptual model to make sure that every part of that conceptual model is captured by our definition. We define it as human interventions and social ecological systems in the form of practices and or biological, physical and chemical processes designed to minimize harm to the environment and provide services of value to society. So we hope we've captured quite a lot there. And then just to summarize the talk as well, hopefully I've given you a bit of an indication of how we appreciated qualitative synthesis. It was a really useful way of examining, taking a step back and pausing and examining how a word had been used to make sure that we start with the right definition. And unfortunately, we weren't able to find one in the literature, so we hoped we'd been appropriately brave enough to come up with one ourselves, but that production of a conceptual model helped us to ensure that our definition covers all the bases that could be covered by the various different information pour definitions in the literature. For me personally, I find thematic synthesis is really intuitive. You're looking for themes, you're making sure that they are similar and used in the same way across your evidence base, the themes that you pull out. You're then pulling them together, clustering them, putting them into a conceptual model. It's something that I probably do sometimes implicitly when I'm reading a body of evidence, but to have a methodology for doing it systematically was really useful. And it's a very accessible one because all the other forms of qualitative synthesis I find very, as a quantitative synthesis, very scary and a bit too different from what I've been doing before, but this is quite accessible for me. And as well for a bonus return, it's been vital for helping us start on the right page, even if it took some time. It wasn't a huge undertaking because we only had 330 full texts. But that's it, thanks very much. Thank you.