In this CASE Studentship PhD project we aim to understand the drivers of elevated VOC production (Geosmin and 2-MIB) in drinking water reservoirs within the Wessex Water catchment. Episodic outbreaks of Geosmin and 2-MIB have occasionally, though not always, been associated with planktonic cyanobacterial blooms in Wessex reservoirs, but more recently, benthic communities have been identified as potential and significant sources of the VOCs, (Wessex Water, unpublished data). Focussing on three reservoirs and their associated catchments, we will analyse the distribution, transport and fate of these VOCs and their response to water treatment processes. The specific aims are: i) to isolate potential VOC producing microorganisms from the benthic and pelagic regions of the three reservoirs (and from the immediate catchment); ii) to examine intra-and interspecific variability in Geosmin and 2-MIB production under a range of experimental regimes; iii) to determine the degree of compartmentalisation between dissolved and particulate fractions of VOCs; iv) identify conditions that lead to the exudation of VOCs with a specific focus on the role(s) of viral lysis, protozoan and crustacean grazers, using isolated benthic and pelagic VOC-producing microorganisms.

Within the next few years the number of devices connected to each other and the Internet will outnumber humans by almost 5:1. These connected devices will underpin everything from healthcare to transport to energy and manufacturing. At the same time, this growth is not just in the number or variety of devices, but also in the ways they communicate and share information with each other, building hyper-connected cyber-physical infrastructures that span most aspects of people's lives. For the UK to maximise the socio-economic benefits from this revolutionary change we need to address the myriad trust, identity, privacy and security issues raised by such large, interconnected infrastructures. Solutions to many of these issues have previously only been developed and tested on systems orders of magnitude less complex in the hope they would 'scale up'. However, the rapid development and implementation of hyper-connected infrastructures means that we need to address these challenges at scale since the issues and the complexity only become apparent when all the different elements are in place. There is already a shortage of highly skilled people to tackle these challenges in today's systems with latest estimates noting a shortfall of 1.8M by 2022. With an estimated 80Bn malicious scans and 780K records lost daily due to security and privacy breaches, there is an urgent need for future leaders capable of developing innovative solutions that will keep society one step ahead of malicious actors intent on compromising security, privacy and identity and hence eroding trust in infrastructures. The Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) 'Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security - at scale' (TIPS-at-Scale) will tackle this by training a new generation of interdisciplinary research leaders. We will do this by educating PhD students in both the technical skills needed to study and analyse TIPS-at-scale, while simultaneously studying how to understand the challenges as fundamentally human too. The training involves close involvement with industry and practitioners who have played a key role in co-creating the programme and, uniquely, responsible innovation. The implementation of the training is novel due to its 'at scale' focus on TIPS that contextualises students' learning using relevant real-world, global problems revealed through project work, external speakers, industry/international internships/placements and masterclasses. The CDT will enrol ten students per year for a 4-year programme. The first year will involve a series of taught modules on the technical and human aspects of TIPS-at-scale. There will also be an introductory Induction Residential Week, and regular masterclasses by leading academics and industry figures, including delivery at industrial facilities. The students will also undertake placements in industry and research groups to gain hands-on understanding of TIPS-at-scale research problems. They will then continue working with stakeholders in industry, academia and government to develop a research proposal for their final three years, as well as undertake internships each year in industry and international research centres. Their interdisciplinary knowledge will continue to expand through masterclasses and they will develop a deep appreciation of real-world TIPS-at-scale issues through experimentation on state-of-the-art testbed facilities and labs at the universities of Bristol and Bath, industry and a city-wide testbed: Bristol-is-Open. Students will also work with innovation centres in Bath and Bristol to develop novel, interdisciplinary solutions to challenging TIPS-at-scale problems as part of Responsible Innovation Challenges. These and other mechanisms will ensure that TIPS-at-Scale graduates will lead the way in tackling the trust, identity, privacy and security challenges in future large, massively connected infrastructures and will do so in a way that considers wider sosocial responsibility.

The aim of the WASTE FEW ULL project is to develop and test internationally applicable methods of identifying inefficiencies in a city-region's food-energy-water nexus. We will undertake this through an international network of industry/civic society-led Urban Living Labs (ULL) in four urban regions - UK (Bristol), Netherlands (Rotterdam), South Africa (Western Cape) and Brazil (Campinas). Partners in Norway and the USA will provide economic valuations of potential impact, and impact-led public education, outreach and dissemination. Waste occurs across food, energy and water systems; at the interface of these systems, waste increases significantly the over-consumption of our limited resources (FAO, 2017): food (e.g. energy lost in food storage), energy (e.g. used to clean water) and water (e.g. nutrients lost in sewage). Resource scarcity is not only a matter of efficiency, but of access, distribution and equality (Exner et al, 2013). Each urban context has different pressures and opportunities (Ravetz, 2000). The focus of the WASTE FEW ULL project is therefore not so much on the specific downstream challenges, but on upstream processes by which cities can identify, test and scale viable and feasible solutions that reduce the most pressing inefficiencies in each context.

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.

Compared to many parts of the world, the UK has under-invested in its infrastructure in recent decades. It now faces many challenges in upgrading its infrastructure so that it is appropriate for the social, economic and environmental challenges it will face in the remainder of the 21st century. A key challenge involves taking into account the ways in which infrastructure systems in one sector increasingly rely on other infrastructure systems in other sectors in order to operate. These interdependencies mean failures in one system can cause follow-on failures in other systems. For example, failures in the water system might knock out electricity supplies, which disrupt communications, and therefore transportation, which prevent engineers getting to the original problem in the water infrastructure. These problems now generate major economic and social costs. Unfortunately they are difficult to manage because the UK infrastructure system has historically been built, and is currently operated and managed, around individual infrastructure sectors. Because many privatised utilities have focused on operating infrastructure assets, they have limited experience in producing new ones or of understanding these interdependencies. Many of the old national R&D laboratories have been shut down and there is a lack of capability in the UK to procure and deliver the modern infrastructure the UK requires. On the one hand, this makes innovation risky. On the other hand, it creates significant commercial opportunities for firms that can improve their understanding of infrastructure interdependencies and speed up how they develop and test their new business models. This learning is difficult because infrastructure innovation is undertaken in complex networks of firms, rather than in an individual firm, and typically has to address a wide range of stakeholders, regulators, customers, users and suppliers. Currently, the UK lacks a shared learning environment where these different actors can come together and explore the strengths and weaknesses of different options. This makes innovation more difficult and costly, as firms are forced to 'learn by doing' and find it difficult to anticipate technical, economic, legal and societal constraints on their activity before they embark on costly development projects. The Centre will create a shared, facilitated learning environment in which social scientists, engineers, industrialists, policy makers and other stakeholders can research and learn together to understand how better to exploit the technical and market opportunities that emerge from the increased interdependence of infrastructure systems. The Centre will focus on the development and implementation of innovative business models and aims to support UK firms wishing to exploit them in international markets. The Centre will undertake a wide range of research activities on infrastructure interdependencies with users, which will allow problems to be discovered and addressed earlier and at lower cost. Because infrastructure innovations alter the social distribution of risks and rewards, the public needs to be involved in decision making to ensure business models and forms of regulation are socially robust. As a consequence, the Centre has a major focus on using its research to catalyse a broader national debate about the future of the UK's infrastructure, and how it might contribute towards a more sustainable, economically vibrant, and fair society. Beneficiaries from the Centre's activities include existing utility businesses, entrepreneurs wishing to enter the infrastructure sector, regulators, government and, perhaps most importantly, our communities who will benefit from more efficient and less vulnerable infrastructure based services.