 Good morning everybody. My talk today will introduce some of the work of the Cherish Project and we'll look at how we're trying to instill more precision in recording eroding cliff edges in the Welsh side of this Ireland-Wales project. Cherish is a five-year EU-funded project began on 1st January 2017 so we're coming to the end of our second year and you'll note our trilingual logo with Welsh, English and Irish reflecting the communities that we're working within and on the bottom of the screen there you'll see I'm with the Welsh Royal Commission, we're leading Cherish but with the Geological Survey of Ireland, the Discovery Programme in Dublin and also Aberystwyth University Geography and Earth Science and they're bringing the Paninology and the Extreme Weather Expertise as well that I think some people were talking about yesterday how how vital that was to include that in these climate change projects. So this current round of Ireland-Wales funding is managed by the Welsh Government and the specific objective we have to report to is objective two you'll read it there to increase capacity and knowledge amongst coastal communities for the IHC for climate change. So two years business planning and five years project that's what we have to deliver against how we deliver against that is is the structure and the the wider sort of make up of the project our evaluations our policy outputs and so on as well. What I'll talk about today is the way we're targeting data and knowledge gaps and there are plenty of them still in these more remote coastlines and how we're mapping and monitoring some of that heritage with greater precision precision we're still in the baseline data gathering stage and let me have the other three years to begin to crunch that data and make it work for us. I won't talk so much about the the past environments and weather history but that's a critical plank of the project. It's too small a project to be predicting modeling climate change that's for the bigger projects we respond to published documentation in terms of how climate change is seeing how climate change is affecting the coasts of Ireland and Wales. Our latest climate change risk assessment for Wales from 2017 notes the importance of the visitor economy the tourist economy which is a key part of this funding for these sites threatened by coastal erosion but also they're very worrying that they have significant evidence gaps still and that's part of the reason the EU has put the money into this funding stream and that's what we're seeking to to fill. So here's the the project map Wales looking rather small against Ireland you'll see our Irish colleagues are rather more sensible than us having sort of five main areas we've got many more the project areas in Wales they're on the right selected for a variety of means on the basis of coast edge type erosion risk data and knowledge gaps particularly those areas where we know nothing or very little or have been too difficult to study in the past where we have potential collaboration and partnership. We're testing our toolkit approach toolkit approaches are often talked about in remote sensing and archaeology but we're trying to make that work. Crucially you'll see from the airborne laser scanning the lidar right at the top to the light aircraft which is my day job at the Royal Commission Area of Photography down to the detailed survey and geophysics the peak coring and OSL dating the laser scanning on the foreshore and then bringing the GSI in Ireland the marine scanning and the wreck diving which we hope to start implementing next year. So it's exciting we're linking the terrestrial and the marine and making that work in a long-term project. In Wales we have a number of project areas but these are our designated and undesignated baseline monitoring sites these are the sites we're putting the most effort and work into a recording these are the sites we'll go back to after key storm events at extreme low tides and so on and they encompass prehistoric promontory forts listed buildings into tidal wrecks and island sites so there's a range of different types of site there and most of the first year along with other things but was also harmonizing in agreeing these areas so that the stakeholders the landowners knew what we were doing knew we were there and were able to work with those communities on the ground. I'll be talking at the top there about Bardsie Island and Dynastinley up in north Wales this morning's case studies. We've done some work over the last decade looking at the erosion of coastal promontory forts in Wales with other partners but comparing historical imagery historical data with present day data is often tricky. You see an eroding coastal promontory fort here 1946 heavily shaded Royal Air Force vertical photograph with a more recent 2006 Welsh Government vertical photograph verticals nowadays things you see on Google Earth are taken in flat light and summer to maximize vegetation minimize shadow but it's very difficult to sort of compare the cliff edge the exact edge where was the edge of that site how much has been lost how quickly is that site changing we also have significant data gaps we reckon that light our data airball laser scanning you need better than one meter resolution to begin to map cliff edges in any precision and certainly to begin to map archaeology in Wales this is south west Wales Pembrokeshire famous area that's that's the data that's better than a meter resolution the coast is virtually missing apart from the pieces we paid for the islands down at Scoma down here so there are problems in mapping and getting precision in the coast edge yet we still have major cliff falls happening of course in limestone scenery this is south Wales carboniferous limestone this is always collapsing but how quickly is it changing this is an iron age promontory fort with a cliff collapse last year how quickly is it changing did coastal erosion affect the prehistoric communities who are building these sites we also have major losses this is Storm Ophelia and Storm Brian last year which took the end of the Green Bridge of Wales a big tourist site but there is no 3d modelling data for the Green Bridge of Wales we didn't get there in time with the drone but it's a natural heritage site anyway so we know we can see how much has dropped off but there's no way to quantify that there's no sort of metrical way to understand how erosion is changing that natural arch but these these coasts are changing fast but potentially the top level the first and quickest way to gather baseline data is through active aerial reconnaissance something we've been doing in Wales since the mid 1980s to gather baseline data and legally monitor heritage sites around Wales and we're employing this in Cherish up the coastlines there to take what we're doing in Wales across to Ireland to show how effective aerial monitoring can be this is a joint nation project Wales and Ireland doing the same survey approaches in both nations to the same standard to the single survey team that's the critical thing photogrammetric software is ubiquitous nowadays you see it in all the power points and that's a critical part now just flying with the aircraft we can get about 30 sites an hour if we orbit those sites take between 15 30 photographs even in a rapid orbit we can pop up a tolerably good 3d model of that accurate to about half a meter so already we're banking modelling data for these sites for the future for the archive and then we can choose to work on that or not but we need that better data accuracy at the start of the project in Wales in 2017 we invested 25 000 euros getting a new LiDAR flow for six island properties which had no baseline geometric data at all no accurate geometric data and this was flown at 25 centimetre in winter at low tide so that's about the length of your hand the pixel resolution including quite remote properties like grass hole which is seven miles offshore which has prehistoric roundhouses on it and a grass a ganitary on it as well birds nesting and wonderful data like Bardsy here one of the larger Welsh islands where we have the the high resolution data has made all the difference to recording and we can analyse it with a relief visualisation toolbox to really get all the information out for for mapping the archaeology or pop it into 3d for more public outturns you can see Bardsy here high mountain the mannath a model farm and village planted on lower lying slopes here with fields the eroding instruments our study site and then a headland with the lighthouse on it to the south so looking at the eroding instruments of Bardsy this is one of our baseline monitoring sites work has been done there in the past not least by Tom and Joe from the skate project as well so we've got a bit of a history of monitoring data on the coast edge there this is a maximum five meter elevation the isthmus here looking at the current predictions for sea level rise and storm surges in Wales we're looking at anything between two meters and nine meters in the next century of wave over stopping and storm surges so we're not just looking at sea level rise threat but also up to nine meters above the sea level that heritage at risk from scouring damage and erosion and in storm aphelion this five meter isthmus was essentially underwater for many days and we visited this summer to look at the storm throne stones some fairly sizable that have been brought up onto the isthmus by the sea and the geographers in the team can then look at the eroding cliff faces find previous storm throne deposits and actually begin to recover radio carbon dating samples to see how often this is happening the eroding isthmus itself is producing prehistoric burials a mesolithic flint so there's plenty of archaeology popping out the 25 centimetre lidar for barter the new lidar is is fantastic this is a real sound investment you can see the sand dunes the sand undulations on the beach there mapped in in considerable detail and even sheep if you don't know what a sheep looks like i put a picture in one of one these little dots here individual sheep are standing in the fields here as well so this is fantastic baseline data not necessarily just for the next three years of the project but if people want to see what it was like in a century's time in the long-term archive we're improving on that lidar data building on it not only with GNSS survey of the eroding edge but also modelling all the detail of that eroding edge the topsoil stripping and so on with drone photogrammetry my colleague Dan doing that and you can see the the photograph and the drone image are working pretty decent together because the we're not expecting a huge amount of that rock to change in the next century but it's this scouring of that soft edge and the sand that's going to be changing so we can build a basic model of erosion and recession there from the 19th century mapping with the present day lidar anything between five or 15 meters of that isthmus has been lost but now we want to start modelling that more this winter to see the sort of softer erosion of that finer edge to see how that's uh that's being damaged and taken away looking uh finally at uh case study of Dennis Dintley promontory thought in Gwyneth seeing how our toolkit comes together in the intense analysis of a critically eroding site this is a prominent and iconic uh coastal promontory thought in north wales uh mentioned new marsh mythology of the early medieval texts uh thought to be an iron age and roman site with early medieval occupation this eroding edge is cutting right the way through the fort it's a geological triple si so we can't stop the erosion because the geologists want to be able to see that eroding edge uh and we have some historic uh coastal oblique photographs which show how much that eroding edge has changed we can get some photogrammetric data off those 1961 photographs too how do you tackle the site with a dangerous dynamic slumping cliff face the bit of the site we're interested in is the top half meter up here which is producing roman pottery and shards so you want to get out over that edge and recover archaeological samples datable samples palaeo environmental samples without even necessarily excavating just cleaning the section up so we're talking to rope access specialist to get us over that edge safely but where is the edge as well you see these huge hunks of turf hanging over that edge how do we define that eroding edge at this site our standard approaches to a site like this analyzing recent 50 centimeter lidar which is very good comparing that with a mapping from 19th century which gives us anything up to 45 meter loss of the cliff in the last century and we've also done an interpretive topographic survey this summer which we need to hasher up this winter so there's many ways we can compare the eroding edge from the data we already have we've commissioned high resolution radiometry now geophysical survey that's the postage on the left there and we know we've got the total loss of the site potentially within about 450 years so next year we're going to start commissioning excavations on the west side here to date some of this this this site this is not excavated there's no excavations here at all and we may even have a roman watch tower in the center of the fort there's a lot of critical evidence we need to understand before erosion takes it any further but we're now beginning to test the best ways to record that edge as I said at the start quick and easy with a light aircraft nowadays this is 17 high resolution full frame 35 millimeter photographs which gives us a tolerably good pop-up 3d model of that eroding edge better than we've ever had for this site and we can get that now in a flight with the light aircraft so this is a pretty good model but of course the standard approach to gathering more detailed data now is by drone photogrammetry uh in the UK we've had to train Dan up as a registered pilot with the civil aviation authority it's a national trust property so we have to have the land ends permission to do this it's quite complex but once you're qualified you can undertake drones survey safely and this gives us a resolution down to 17 centimeters of the site but this summer we're also out making a more ambitious laser scan survey of the coast edge 600 meters of the coast edge over 50 scans took about three days quite an intensive process with our long-range scanner but this is really paying dividends now we won't be doing this for 30 sites or 50 sites we're going to be doing this for about four or five sites our key critical sites which gives us a stone by stone model of that cliff edge for the first time this is great this begins a process now where we can measure change measure how this this cliff edge is slumping and changing how quickly it's happening or is it a creating is it is it stabilizing as well between particular storm events so to the final point there really we've talked a lot about projects yesterday as well three to three of projects five-year projects but at the end of those you reach a real cliff edge what happens to the data and hopefully within cherished we're from national bodies reporting to government so we're hoping that we have a long-term archiving policy in place so if you want this laser scan data in 50 years or 100 years it should be there in the national monuments record of Wales still accessible archiving big data archiving 3d data is still a challenge but we also have policy arms there we can get out the policy sort of recommendations this project through the sort of connections we have to government and Wales and Ireland but it's also about making sites like this relevant to the communities where they're based making a site like Dennis Dentley in quite an impoverished coastal community begin to work for that community begin to pay for that community through tourism and boosting the tourism economy so that's a sort of a little look there at what we're doing in Wales with the cherished project please take home one of my newsletters and anything else that takes your fancy many thanks indeed