Pillar 3: *Building capacity*
Our goal is to ensure the UK has the people and skills it needs to stay at the forefront of global environmental research and innovation for the future. As part of this, we will support a stronger pipeline of digital skills. We will also enhance digital skills within our own organisation through targeted recruitment, offering opportunities for staff to develop new digital skills and through sharing of best practice in this area.
Our National Capability funding enables us to generate publicly available environmental data sets, software models and decision-support tools, enabling world-class environmental research, resource management and policy development. It underpins and enables the wider environmental science community to carry out research that contributes to improving human and environment health, mitigating, and adapting to climate change and supporting economic development. It also enables us to play a prominent role in the training and education of current and future environmental scientists.
This includes data science skills extending across the whole pipeline, from data acquisition and quality assurance, through integrative analyses, to presenting and visualising the results to support communication and decision-making. We also place emphasis on software engineering skills, and on bringing the many benefits of a systematic software engineering approach to the development and maintenance of our software assets.
CEEDS / DSNE Project training school CEEDS (the Centre of Excellence in Environmental Data Science) runs a regular seminar series to enable staff and students across Lancaster University and the UKCEH to share knowledge and learn about environmental themes such as air, biodiversity, land, soil, water and ice, as well as method themes such as data acquisition, data infrastructure, data science, decision-making under uncertainty, and complex systems. Topics have ranged from machine learning for quality control of sensor data and environmental digital twins to data challenges to support green finance. CEEDS also runs residential training schools for the community to upskill researchers across the higher education community, government departments and agencies with the latest data science techniques.
