 Hi everybody, this is an incredible event, this is our second gathering here, our second visual gathering, and it's an incredible venue, we should talk to the survey, as you can hear in the buzz above, we've had some incredible talks leading to some very, very exciting network. The visual environment story is brought to us by digital technology, and by two environmental problems. And that digital technology is the tool for some of our environmental challenges, such as climate change and integration by a university challenge. And here at the back, at the British Antarctic Survey, we have gathered a group of experts to debate and discuss most particular opportunities and opportunities to unlock our challenges. The conference involves oral presentations of 20 minutes in length, where we hear the latest state of art of the work that's underway, it involves a series of spotlight talks, each of which is 10 minutes long, quick update on what's going on, and a series of posters where we have descriptions of the work that people are undertaking. We also have a series of workshops, which have been running, and these workshops give all of the community a chance to come together to learn about different aspects of digital data science in environmental science. I'm Alejandro Cocacazzo, I am a research fellow at the Aventurian Institute. I'm working with a very diverse research team on the topics of environmental sustainability and attending to the CDA network event, Digital Gathering 2023, as a participant and as well as a presenter. I'm very glad about this network because this network is a very positive community that is aiming to change ideas related to environmental science, and I see a lot of progress from different UK institutions, UK researchers, in terms of leading these models and data sets and so forth to try to tackle very important environmental challenges, not only in the UK but as well in other areas of the world. In my case, what I'm very impressed about the network is the different broad topics that they are covering in this conference and as well how collaboration is fostered through this kind of networking that we are doing here and as well early career scientists of this network and it's very positive what this is impacting in my future career of researcher in the UK. My name is Michael Aspinol from Leicastres University. My research looks at developing a new type of ground based cosmic radiation neutron monitor. This is a global network of instruments which act together to enable us to deduce the primary cosmic radiation that is entering out the earth's atmosphere. Some of the impacts that severe space weather can have on our critical infrastructure includes aviation, power grids, rail networks, transportation, the internet, satellite, navigation and communication so it's a pretty important thing. I'm here at the NERC digital gathering 2023 conference to talk about some of my research and the impact that it has in the wider community. So, welcome to the construction data environment data gathering. Can you tell us something about your first impression here? So it's lovely to be here at the data gathering. It's great to be with such an interdisciplinary group. I've worked for a long time in atmospheric research. It's nice to be researchers from all over the different domains. We've done a lot of research without living in it. It's really exciting environment to be in. The need for digital infrastructure across different scientific domains. It's lovely to have these interdisciplinary conversations. What does digital environment mean to you? So, I'm increasingly aware of the importance of conserving the environment. It's been working for a long time. I think that the digital environment, the digital sphere, gives us lots of opportunities, lots of things, ways that people can work together to help conserve the environment. So digital environment is partly about gaining more information about the status of the environment. Can we use sensors to understand what the environment is activating what we need to work on? Digital environment can also offer solutions to environmental problems. It's really exciting. Well, thanks very much for taking part in this. The first question I'm going to ask you is, what were your first impressions as you walked in here? How did you find this place? Yeah, well, coming in the door, it's a really exciting venue. It's quite lots of interesting exhibitions around. Yeah, there's just a good feeling of energy as soon as you go upstairs. You've got to see all the posters, lots of people. Yeah, and a real range of backgrounds as well. So yeah, really exciting place to be. The concept of digital environment, what does it mean to you, how do you understand that? It's a difficult question this one. So I think for me the digital environment is about maybe putting parameters, pushing something that we can analyse on the world around us. So about how we can interpret it in a way that allows us to gather evidence, make predictions, and just generally communicate it to advance our understanding. This has been a really useful meeting. It's great to learn from your peers in other places, solving similar problems. Problems with environmental data are pretty uniform, there's continuity of data, there's difficulty in melding data from different sources, there's new data inputs from sensors, and this meeting has shown that other people in other institutes in other communities are really grappling with those same problems and have made real progress. It's great to see the development of tools that solve common problems coming out of the communities that we serve. So it's been really helpful in understanding how to solve the problems that I need to solve for the Wetsha logic survey and how I can integrate my data into the library and solve common problems. So it's been a fantastic meeting and I look forward to meeting some of the same people. I think the digital gathering this year perhaps has been a fantastic event and it's really felt like an evolution compared to the CDE 22 event run at the University of Birmingham last year. It's gone incredibly well. A wide variety of really interesting presentations not just from the academic community but also from our NERC centres and also in terms of research that's been funded through the Constructing a Digital Environment programme but also more broadly by NERC as well. We've also had a really interesting balance that's encompassed all of the main themes of the event. So looking at data science tools and techniques people and skills and next generation sensing for example and these themes resonate with the aspirations contained within the digital strategy itself. So it's been really really heartening to see how well the event has gone and I hope we go on as a council to support future annual events like this that bring the community together and allow individuals to have those important peer-to-peer conversations.