Evidence indicating that nutrient flux to inland and coastal waters is increasing worldwide is clear. Despite significant management effort to reduce theses fluxes, while N & P concentrations have recently levelled off or decreased in some European catchments, in others an increase is reported, particularly in rivers draining through rapidly developing economic regions. A rising trend in Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC) flux to freshwaters & coastal areas such as the Baltic Sea is also widely reported, particularly in the N Temperate & Boreal regions. Impacts on ecosystem health are extensive & undesirable in both freshwaters & coastal waters, & there are implications for human health where DOC & DON are also known to support carcinogen formation in water supplies. In Europe the control of nutrient flux to all freshwaters & the coastal zone is required in order to meet the target of restoring waters to Good Ecological Status under the EU Water Framework Directive, while the UNECE Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) is currently revising Annex IX of the Gothenburg Protocol (to Abate Acidification, Eutrophication & Ground-level Ozone) to further reduce the emission of ammonia from land-based activities. Simultaneously, the UN has listed coastal nutrient pollution and hypoxia as the one of the greatest current threats to the global environment. Impacts include eutrophication of coastal waters and oxygen depletion, and the associated damage to ecosystems, biodiversity & coastal water quality. The UNEP Manila Declaration (Jan 2012) identifies nutrient enrichment of the marine environment as one of 3 foci for its Global Programme of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-based Activities, and this was one of the key foci at the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, June 2012. A detailed understanding of the nature, origins & rates of nutrient delivery to waters is essential if we are to control these impacts through management intervention, yet much of the necessary evidence base is lacking. Routine water quality monitoring is largely based on inorganic nutrient fractions, and substantially underestimates the total nutrient flux to waters, while research confirms that dissolved organic matter (DOM) plays an important role in ecosystem function including supporting microbial metabolism, primary production and pollutant transport, suggesting that its oversight in routine monitoring may undermine international efforts to bring nutrient enrichment impacts under control. Here, we address this knowledge gap, building on the specific expertise of project members, undertaking a suite of interlinked experimental & observational research from molecular to catchment scale. We will use a combination of well-established approaches widely used in catchment research, with a range of cutting-edge approaches which are novel in their application to nutrient cycling research, or employ novel technologies, bringing new insights into the process controls on nutrient cycling at a molecular to river reach scale. The programme will deliver improved understanding of: 1. the role of DOM in the transport of N & P from source to sea & the ways in which this might alter nutrient delivery to freshwaters & the coastal zone under a changing climate; 2. the ecological significance of DOM as a source of nutrient uptake & utilisation by algal, plant and microbial communities in waters of contrasting nutrient status & DOM character; and 3. the impacts of DOM flux from soils, livestock & human waste fluxes on the ecological status, goods & services provided by freshwaters. It will also deliver knowledge exchange between the 5 groups & the wider science community, and have an impact beyond the lifetime of this project, building capacity through staff & PhD appointments in a field where current understanding is uncertain, undermining business planning and international policy development.

Land-use and agriculture are responsible for around one quarter of all human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. While some of the activities that contribute to these emissions, such as deforestation, are readily observable, others are not. It is now recognised that freshwater ecosystems are active components of the global carbon cycle; rivers and lakes process the organic matter and nutrients they receive from their catchments, emit carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane to the atmosphere, sequester CO2 through aquatic primary production, and bury carbon in their sediments. Human activities such as nutrient and organic matter pollution from agriculture and urban wastewater, modification of drainage networks, and the widespread creation of new water bodies, from farm ponds to hydro-electric and water supply reservoirs, have greatly modified natural aquatic biogeochemical processes. In some inland waters, this has led to large GHG emissions to the atmosphere. However these emissions are highly variable in time and space, occur via a range of pathways, and are consequently exceptionally hard to measure on the temporal and spatial scales required. Advances in technology, including high-frequency monitoring systems, autonomous boat-mounted sensors and novel, low-cost automated systems that can be operated remotely across multiple locations, now offer the potential to capture these important but poorly understood emissions. In the GHG-Aqua project we will establish an integrated, UK-wide system for measuring aquatic GHG emissions, combining a core of highly instrumented 'Sentinel' sites with a distributed, community-run network of low-cost sensor systems deployed across UK inland waters to measure emissions from rivers, lakes, ponds, canals and reservoirs across gradients of human disturbance. A mobile instrument suite will enable detailed campaign-based assessment of vertical and spatial variations in fluxes and underlying processes. This globally unique and highly integrated measurement system will transform our capability to quantify aquatic GHG emissions from inland waters. With the support of a large community of researchers it will help to make the UK a world-leader in the field, and will facilitate future national and international scientific research to understand the role of natural and constructed waterbodies as active zones of carbon cycling, and sources and sinks for GHGs. We will work with government to include these fluxes in the UK's national emissions inventory; with the water industry to support their operational climate change mitigation targets; and with charities, agencies and others engaged in protecting and restoring freshwater environments to ensure that the climate change mitigation benefits of their activities can be captured, reported and sustained through effectively targeted investment.

The threat of antibiotic resistance has been compared to that posed by climate change and global terrorism by the Chief medical Officer Dame Sally Davies. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics has existed for hundreds of millions of years, as it evolved to combat antibiotics produced by bacteria and fungi. Resistance is conferred either by mutation or by uptake of DNA from other bacteria which may not even be closely related. This horizontal resistance gene transfer is one of the most important issues facing the fight against infection in the clinic. Novel resistance genes that are taken up by clinical pathogens originate in environmental bacteria, and once in human pathogens or even harmless commensal bacteria, will be selected for by clinical use of antibiotics. However, little is known about the conditions under or locations in which these genes are mobilised into human associated bacteria, or what the human exposure routes for transmission of these resistance genes are. Increasing evidence suggests that the use of antibiotics in agriculture contributes to the increase in resistance seen in the clinic, however much less research has focused on evolution of resistance in farm animals than in humans so less evidence is available. Even less is known regarding reservoirs of resistant bacteria in the natural environment, particularly locations heavily polluted by human or animal waste. 11 billion litres of waste water are discharged into UK rivers every day; critically much of this treatment does not significantly reduce numbers of resistant bacteria. Millions of tons of animal faecal wastes are spread to agricultural land every year, providing additional inputs of resistant organisms into the wider environment. Our previous work has shown that the use of a marker gene, which is predictive of levels of antibiotic resistance genes in sediments, varies by up to 1000 times between clean and dirty sediments. Our data also shows that waste water treatment plants are responsible for the majority of this effect (about 50%), and 30% is associated with diffuse pollution from land adjacent to the river. Other data generated by the consortium suggests that there are real human exposure risks to these environmental reservoirs of resistant organisms, with several million exposure events occurring each year in England and Wales through recreational use of coastal waters alone. This project will, for the first time, use cutting edge high through put DNA sequencing technologies and computational analyses to increase our understanding of the human activities that drive increased levels of antibiotic resistant bacteria across the River Thames catchment. Abundance and identity of over 3000 different resistance genes will be determined at 40 sampling sites, in triplicate at three time points over one year, to capture impacts of seasonality and flow. We will also measure a range of antibiotic residues, metals and nutrients. We will use graphical information system data on waste water treatment plant type, size and location and land use throughout the catchment. Together this data will be used to produce a model which will reveal the main drivers of resistance gene abundance and diversity at the catchment scale. We will also identify novel molecular markers associated with different sources of pollution that can be used as source tracking targets. We aim to analyse the effects of specific mitigation strategies that are able to reduce levels of resistant bacteria, this will enable estimates of reduction in resistance levels that can inform policy and regulatory targets. A translational tool will be developed for surveillance of the most important marker genes identified from the DNA sequence analyses and modelling work. This will be an affordable test that will help identify key factors for human health risk assessment.

We are facing a global biodiversity crisis and freshwater biodiversity is declining more rapidly than either terrestrial or marine biodiversity. One in ten freshwater and wetland species in England are threatened with extinction and two thirds of existing species are in decline. Regulatory data suggest that chemical pollution from wastewater discharges, transport, urban environments, agriculture and mining all contribute to failures against existing quality standards. The Environmental Audit Committee recently summarised the state of water quality as: "rivers in England are in a mess. A 'chemical cocktail' of sewage, agricultural waste, and plastic is polluting the waters of many of the country's rivers". However, these assessments of the impacts of chemicals on UK surface waters, are unlikely to reflect real impacts as they: focus on a small proportion of chemicals in use; take a single compound-single endpoint approach; ignore the combined effects of chemicals, water quality parameters and species interactions; and do not recognise that the sensitivity of ecological communities can vary in space and time. If we are to halt biodiversity loss in UK rivers while continuing to realise the societal benefits of chemicals, we urgently need more effective methods for assessing, predicting and managing the impacts of chemicals both now and in the future. We aim to deliver and demonstrate a new assessment framework that accounts for the known variability in the physico-chemical and ecological characteristics of a catchment and determines the combined impacts of mixtures of chemicals, bioavailability modifiers and nutrients on the structure and functioning of species assemblages at high spatial resolution. The framework will be developed not only to assess current chemical impacts but also future impacts resulting from changes driven by global megatrends such as climate change, urbanisation and population growth. Using 350 sites in nine Yorkshire river catchments covering different land-uses and pollution pressures, we will develop, test and demonstrate our framework by: 1. prioritising chemicals emitted to UK freshwaters to identify those chemicals in catchments that are driving impacts; 2. characterising current (2002-2022) and future (2061-2080) chemical exposure and general water quality parameter profiles in UK catchments; 3. estimating the effects of chemicals on UK-relevant species under different water quality conditions; 4. predicting the current and future combined effects of chemical mixtures, bioavailability modifiers and nutrients on biodiversity and ecosystem function; and 5. applying the findings to identify interventions to mitigate the impacts of chemicals on biodiversity now and under future climate and catchment change. The understanding and predictive modelling tools developed during this project will inform the development of better plans for adaptation and mitigation of risks associated with declining water quality now and in the future. By working closely with our partners, who include key representatives from the policy (JNCC), regulatory (HSE), major industry (Unilever, UKWIR, Network Rail) and NGO (National Trust, Rivers Trust) sectors, we will provide policy makers with the knowledge and frameworks to realise a paradigm shift towards chemical risk assessment that will protect biodiversity and key environmental functions in areas where they are vulnerable. Regulators and industry alike will be able to focus future investments and effort on scenarios where harm is most likely/actually occurring. Manufacturers of chemicals will be in a better position to produce chemicals that are beneficial to society but which do not negatively impact the natural environment and the ecosystem services that it provides. Only by taking an integrative and system-wide approach adopted in this project will we be able to deliver the Environment Act's aspiration to "reverse the decline in species abundance by the end of 2030".

By the middle of this century, two thirds of the world's population will be urban - equivalent to around 6.3 billion people. Mismanagement of these urban areas will adversely affect the health and well-being (i.e. how people experience their lives and flourish) of the population, and lead to social and environmental injustice. It has long been recognised that good quality cultural, social, built and natural environments within cities provide benefits in terms of health, well-being and equity of urban residents. Conversely, poor quality environments negatively affect the health and well-being of citizens and have negative economic consequences. With increasing urbanisation and changes in climate, the built, cultural, social and natural environments within cities will come under further pressure. While the relationships between selected environment quality parameters, such as noise and air pollution and health, have been well characterised, relatively little is known about the relationship between other quality measures, or endpoints, of economic and societal well-being and health. A major reason for this limited understanding is that while much data on city environments exist, this is fragmented across numerous data owners, is not joined up or at suitable granularity. As these existing datasets have been collected for other reasons, they are not always in a form where they are useful for a wide variety of purposes or for future needs. Data on some important parameters simply does not yet exist. Additionally, specialists in the different disciplines needed to tackle these complex issues often work in isolation. By bringing data together, breaking down barriers across research disciplines and exploiting and developing new monitoring, modelling and analytical technologies (e.g. wireless sensing networks, wearable devices, drones, crowdsourcing, 3D models of cities and virtual reality), it should be possible to provide a holistic analysis of the quality of the environment with a city that can be used by many different stakeholders (e.g. researchers, policy makers, planners, businesses and the public) to address their needs. This holistic analysis will then provide us with a better understanding of how to manage city environments and will provide long-term benefits to citizens and the economy. The York City Environment Observatory (YCEO) initiative will address this major knowledge gap by providing a framework, tools and conceptual models at the urban scale that can be rolled-out to assist with governance of environments in York and other cities in the UK and around the world. In this diagnostic phase project, experts from a diverse range of sectors and disciplines, will work together in a holistic way to design and lay the groundwork for establishing the YCEO. The consortium will work with a range of stakeholders and look to the past, present and future in trying to diagnose and predict environmental issues for York and their associated human health and well-being and economic impacts. We will build on York's strong track record in open data and combine data and models in order to do this. This diagnostic project will allow us to develop a prototype design for the YCEO, to be implemented within the next five years and a roadmap for achieving this. The YCEO will be designed to provide the evidence-base for making decisions on how best to manage and enhance the social, cultural, built and natural environment across city systems now and into the future, and in this way, improve the health, well-being and equity of citizens and the economy of the city. The YCEO will also aid local, national and international stakeholders (including planners, businesses, residents and community groups) to come up with low cost and innovative solutions to a range of problems identified as part of this diagnostic phase of the Urban Living Partnership.