 I'm going to use the results of a recent escape project called Scotland's Coastal Heritage at Risk and offer it as an example of the potential of empirical data collected through long-term monitoring programmes to contribute to current research into the impacts of climate change upon earth processes, in our case coastal processes. You can read the full report and all the data is available here to download. First things first, around 20% of Scotland's 21,000km-long coastline is defined as soft and low line by soft generally sandy and so by definitions susceptible to coastal erosion. Although for archaeological heritage this 78 hard and mixed, this is also very important at the scales archaeologists working a significant proportion of vulnerable sites are located in hard and mixed coasts which are poorly captured in models of coastal vulnerability generally. Now I'm sure you've already talked about sea level rise already this morning. Tidegade records reveal that sea level rise in Scotland as and everywhere else is rising. This is recent research by Jim Hansen and Coe and but we're looking at Scotland sea level rise tracking a high emission scenario. However in Scotland situated in the Atlantic in the northwest in northwest Europe, our geography means that wind and waves are far more significant factors now when we're looking at heritage loss and coastal vulnerability of archaeological sites and some of our most iconic sites of course have been revealed by storms in the past. So Skara Brae revealed in the storm in the 19th century is probably the most famous example possibly in the world but also this is Ballasher in the Western Isles revealed in a storm in 2005. Here we have a newly discovered broth on Shetland revealed in 2012 1112 and then a long running project we've been doing in in the Highlands in East Sutherland of Brawra. This is what it looked like in 2009 that was underneath the sand dune and this is what it looks like after a storm event in 2012. So that's what storms do to archaeological sites in very vulnerable soft sandy unconsolidated coastal areas. Now Scotland has very good baseline data collected through coastal zone assessment surveys but as you can see here there's a very large number of records and a lot of recommendations within those records for mitigation action to address the issue of coastal erosion and in fact these were done but the last one was done in 2010 and there were so many recommendations for action that it probably acted as a bit of a barrier to action because the problem was just too too too big. So also in 2010 my colleague Tom as a first step towards transforming this database into more of a management resource he applied quite a straightforward risk assessment methodology to pull out the most archaeologically significant sites that were being impacted by coastal erosion and Tom's desk based analysis of inspection based data he was using survey data ended up with 322 sites of the very highest priority and another 500 also recommended for monitoring. Now we at Scape recognise this as an opportunity to involve local communities in the updated well should have said Tom recommended in every case that the sites that he prioritised should have another visit to see what their condition was now because the data he was working with was 10-15 years old in many cases. So we used our experience of working with local communities to harness that knowledge and capacity to address a national issue really through a local lens because local people they know their local coastlines they're on hand to monitor change and they also bring in a lot of additional knowledge and experience that we can use in our coastal records. So this is where Scotland's coastal heritage risk project came from the technology we developed was simply just to provide the mechanism for people to access their records of coastal features in their area and to participate and contribute updates. So we put everything onto an interactive map and an app and then Ellie and I embarked on really a three-year intensive cycle of face-to-face training which is absolutely critical because we need to build a relationship with our volunteers otherwise basically our data will be very poor. I mean that's the bottom line. So over the four years of the project we had 1200 volunteers involved in project activities around half of those in the coastal surveys and they submitted 1,041 updates of sites. They found 400 new sites and very usefully we managed to visit 90% of the 322 sites that Tom had pulled out as the highest priority so that gave us a very good data set to work with. Ellie and I moderated records as they came in and towards the end of the project we systematically went through every every report submitted and we reviewed their priorities based upon our current understanding of the site significance and the actual threat of erosion. So the resulting priorities that came out of SHARP are the result of two cycles of inspection data and so it's really a very robust empirical data set. Our results showed that the total number of priority sites were reduced by around half but that the proportion of priority sites against the whole remained similar unsurprisingly. Shetland, Orkney, parts of the Highlands and the Western Isles because of their location in relation to north Atlantic storm tracks they retain the most numbers of highly vulnerable and also significant sites. Now most of our sites are located in low-lying soft sandy coastlines but nearly 20 quarter of our sites are located in low-lying areas that would be described as hard coasts or on mixed coasts. So this is important because these hard coastlines are really not captured in more geographic models of coastal vulnerability. So this is just an example of a site in Newark on Sandy in Orkney of one of our sort of soft coast vulnerable sites. There's a building there eroding out of as you can see a very unconsolidated sand dune and also on sandy here's an example of a site on a low-lying hard or mixed coast and here we've got rock platform with a a til veneer and just a little tiny bit of soft sediment and the archaeology is all in here and there's you know there's probably at least a hundred metres of this site. So while there's a fewer priority sites well at least 10 percent we can account for those because they have been either fully excavated or conserved. A very important reason for the reduction in numbers is that SHARF was introduced national parity to what were carried out as regional surveys so that's very important. In the western isles and the coast of the assessment surveys were done following a hurricane event so they were recording the aftermath of a massive storm event which had revealed coast a lot of archaeological sites at the coast. The SHARF surveys were done 15 years 10 years later and so we were looking at the intervening period of stabilisation so that doesn't mean we took them off any list it just means we reduced their their urgency of action status to from urgent now to monitor okay so we're picking up natural cycles. The value of using local people in surveys is that we get a lot of information about what's happening locally so land management is probably could account for more stabilisation of soft particularly sandy areas and people did talk about lower stock numbers and just improve management of fragile landscapes. People also told us about that there were not everywhere but in some places people said well there are less rabbits around which is very important in maca landscapes and we did a little bit of follow-up looking into this and you might have caught this in the press about in those in May because of this internal hemorrhagic disease that's hit certainly the UK Scottish rabbits population has reduced by 82% since 1995. Bear in mind the coastal zone assessment surveys started in 1995 and our SHARF surveys were sort of 10 20 years later so I think that's probably a factor there and also we looked at meteorological trends in particular storminess so here this is a storm index for the British Isles, the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea based on pressure data and there's only a couple of things I want you to take away from this graph firstly the randomness of weather records and then a point made by the authors that you can argue the case for decreasing or increasing storminess really depending on where you draw your line on your time scales important to bear in mind when we're talking about storminess but there is a trend of elevated storminess and this is backed up by most not all but most studies for storminess in this region peaks in the late 19th century and again around 1990 so the coastal zone assessment surveys were carried out from 1995 onwards the SHARF surveys were carried out 10 to 15 years later so it's just possible that we're picking up a stabilisation which is the result of natural meteorological cycles particularly in sandy areas and this is supported by wider research into sand dunes for example so we're now at a stage in Scotland where we have at least two cycles of empirical data for the coastal zone assessment survey areas which is about 35% of the coast and whether as a result of meteorological trends or coastal management changes or biological factors and probably a combination of all three our results are detecting a wider trend of coastal change in this case stabilisation but this could change very rapidly into destabilisation what matters is that our network of coastal heritage sites are seeming to act as a proxy for wider trends of coastal change and this is important because going forward our coastal heritage data can really step up and have a role in research into the how how the results of climate change could sea level rise or change in weather patterns are affecting coastal processes and our coastlines and this is applicable to all long-term condition monitoring datasets which are routinely collected by our heritage agencies because not only do they tell us about change to the heritage asset if we aggregate our data it could have an important role in describing and understanding or explaining the effects of climate change upon earth processes that interact with our historic environment thank you