 Let's make a start. It's very good to see you all here and a very warm welcome to the Digital Gathering 2023. The conference here is, we have a series of talks, we have some fantastic posters outside, we have a number of workshops as well as we look forward to the next couple of days and discussing barometer science and data science together. I'm Steve Hallett, one of the Digital Champions with Ron from Capital University. I'm sharing this morning and I'd like to start proceedings by just asking the colleague Pilvi to do a little bit of housekeeping for the conference. Pilvi. Excellent. Oh, do you want to include me through? Excellent, I didn't expect that. Thank you so much, Steve. My name is Pilvi Mustigiello. I work here at the British Antarctic Survey within our innovation team as impact facilitator. Doesn't say that much to most people, but what I basically do is a lot of project management for things that are on the edges of the business as usual. And the digital side, as it's growing, there's a lot of involvement, as well as trying to look for ways of supporting Scott and our AI lab team and such things. So I'm really happy to be here during these two days and also join in on the conversations. And just to point out that there's no testing of any fire alarms happening today. That only happens on Wednesday. So if there should be a persistent fire alarm, it is treated, you should treat it as a real one. And the nearest exit is just on my left hand side, your right hand side. And I would just say follow the flow of people because the bass colleagues know where they're going and we're basically headed all in the same direction. It's a car park on the far end over there. If there's any other incidents, you can of course come and talk to me, but reception is the best point of call because they can call our first aiders that can come and help if there's any first aid requirements, for example, or any other responses. We have toilets. So there's the ladies toilets just out on behind on your right hand side, a gents are in the corridor on your left hand side and there's some inclusive gender inclusive toilets downstairs. If anyone is feeling like they need to step away for a moment, we have a well being room downstairs as well. It is beyond our security doors. So please come and find me and I'll just make sure that you have access to that. And if you do have any other questions, be practicalities or whatever it is. Come and talk to me. All right. Oh, yes, sorry, I did have a note that said two other things. So we're using Slido today. We've never used it before. It's a very nice interactive tool for able to ask questions and kind of increase engagement as we probably in this broad audience can't all be talking at the same time. So if you just Google Slido on your mobile devices, and it will kind of pop up the screen to enter this meeting I think we have the first slide. The code for the slide or they will ask you to enter the meeting code that will be 23. It's very self explanatory. You know so scan the QR code as some of you are already doing. And my end is just that there is some filming that's going to be happening. It should be pretty obvious because they're going to be walking around with a camera. So if you prefer not to be on film, just be a little bit mindful of that or go and have the person filming on the shoulder. This is just to kind of document a little bit what's going on over the next two days. Thank you very much. Thank you. One of the reasons for having Slido is there's about 100 of us here. We're also joined various times during the next couple of days by 50 people who are online. Welcome to you as well if you're watching us online. So next up I'd like to ask fellow district champion Professor Ron Costanzo from Cranfield coming to give a few comments and opening thoughts. And after that to hear from from now from Dr Simon Gardner so Ron. Thank you. Here right. Good morning everybody in a very warm welcome it's incredible to see it really good. This is our second gathering. Everybody's here. I'd like to thank us for hosting this event but a credit with venue, then realize I was going to be faced with voting my both faces I walked in. But the ice core is actually far more interesting next to it. You don't have guys seen it. You can see the ice bubbles as you come through. And clearly this kind of gives you some sense. That's your interest in burying and stay with us, the breadth of what it means to be digital environment, the different domains different spaces we touch, all the way from to others to worrying about habitat quality and habitat happening in the UK. I'd also like to thank NERC for making this possible. Simon, Josie, Anna. Thank you very much. We'll be here without you guys. It's great to have your support. I just want to remiss a bit about what we've achieved. We've been in this now for, for many years. We've survived COVID that proved quite a challenge at the same time for the challenge can have a lot of opportunities. A lot of you, I saw for the first time in Birmingham last year for that it was all online type meetings in that period. So we've, we've reached untouched and been busy with 32 institutions, 45 project partners. We've had at least 26 digital technologies used. We've had many workshops. Some of them virtual, many of them virtual and one of them in person, some of them are typical to digital environments like hackathons others are more traditional academic like we're having today. The network's been a massive success. Again, it's crossed all institutions, all different disciplines. We've have geologists talking to people and do Arctic surveys. We have ecologists talking to people that do atmospheric sciences. It's been an incredible cross disciplinary exercise. The biggest take home message from this has been how incredibly cross disciplinary has been with people who work art in the digital environment. And with us, we have, I think, a poet back there, who is basically working with words and how to, and that creates an expression and how that relates to digital environments. And that's very important to me because basically, as you start thinking about digital technology and how that digital technology has revolutionized what we do. That digital technology is also going to revolutionize how we interact with the environment and how the public interact with the environment, and that can go both ways. There's a positive interaction in the sense that it makes the environment more accessible, makes the environment in many ways more open to everybody. And in effect, you can start thinking of enjoying environmental and enjoying certain types of environments without that associated carbon footprint. In other words, I can go through the rainforests in Brazil without needing to fly there. The downside of though, is there's lots of risks with digital technology, as we're well aware of now, the risk of digital technology influencing and changing each behavior of exceptions. And to me, that ability to interact and understand, not only the digital, it's digital space, you know, the computational power, analytical power, but also how that interacts with society and that societal component is key to making the digital environment work for everybody. Other big successes are digital trail exercises where we've really started mapping where NERC data can be found and made available to other researchers. Our webinar series, once still ongoing, but we've had seven in total. And again, the range of topics are wide ranging. I've gone all the way from typical data science, AI, tech stuff, to data and law, from data and ethics, and I got involved into a very, very interesting set of talks and conversations with individuals across the world around the ethics of data, and who owns the data, and where does it come from and how does one represent and respect that ownership, as one uses the data. In fact, you can go into the traditional IP type stories, but these people are more concerned about traditional knowledge and indigenous knowledge. So when you do go to the Amazon, you take a measurement to what degree do you have to represent and reflect that some of that knowledge is key. And then how do you put that in the metadata file. So, kind of summarizing that hand over to Simon. It's been an incredible couple of years. Hopefully, this will continue. In a way, this is kind of broken across disciplines, but digital science, the heart environmental science, put environmental science in the lightest aspect to me is transformative. And to me, very much the solutions to many of our challenges that we have in the environmental science world by the biodiversity climate change, by mitigation adaptation. I think that is key to that. We will be able to do it because of digital tools. Thank you. Thanks, Ron. And I would just like to ask Simon to give a few opening thoughts from the perspective of not Simon. Yeah, morning everyone. It's great to see so many of you here and I really appreciate the commitment that you've made to be here so early on on a Monday morning in Cambridge. It takes a bit of time to get here. So I appreciate, I appreciate that very much. First of all, just some facts. Well, first of all, I should introduce myself. I'm Simon Garvin. I work within the digital environment data and infrastructure team within NERC. So our Associate Director, Adam Rangersmith, is sat right in the middle of you. That was just a brief wave from Adam. There she is. And there are a few of us dotted around. Thank you for being here this morning. I need to thank Steve, Ron, and others, like John, like Pilvy, who's just come in, like Scott for actually making this happen, for providing basses of wonderful venue for us to meet. In the next two days, I think there'll be a great opportunity to have, you know, important peer to peer conversations and networking. So above and beyond the agenda that we have set out. I think it's important to remember that this is a, this is an event developed and designed by the community for the community. And we should use it over the next couple of days. Having said that, we tried to put together a really varied agenda for everyone. There are, you can see that there are a number of themes, things like next generation sensing data science tools and techniques, people and skills, which resonate. And not just with things like the constructing a digital environment program as a discrete investment, but more broadly with the NERC digital strategy between 2020 and 2030. We also have a series of key notes. So Emily Lyons will be kicking that off in just a minute, but also some master classes and spotlight tools as well. So it's important to keep you engaged over the next two days. And I'm really looking forward to it. Thank you.