The purpose of this project is to develop a user-friendly model that can be used to predict how environmental change (for example, caused by climate change, habitat loss, land use change, harvesting by humans or habitat management) influences animal populations. The model will be developed by adding a user-friendly interface to a novel, specialist model that has to date only been used within the scientific modelling community. This existing model has been successfully applied by the research team to a wide range of European intertidal and coastal sites, and used to predict how environmental change influences the wading bird and wildfowl populations that feed in these areas, and hence advise coastal policy and management for these species. The model has been used to advise management of coastal shellfisheries to maximise profit to the shellfish industry, while ensuring that bird populations that also consume shellfish are not adversely affected. It has been used to predict the effect of habitat loss through port development, and the most effective way of mitigating the negative effects of this habitat loss through habitat creation schemes. The model has been used in the marine environment to predict the relative impact of offshore windfarms on populations of diving ducks, and identify the developments that have the minimum effect on wildlife. Although the existing model has successfully advised coastal policy and management, it has had the major drawback that due to the technical difficulties of running the model and understanding its output, it has only been used by specialist modellers within the scientific community. This is unsatisfactory, as this tool should really be accessible to those who have a direct interest in coastal management and policy. For example, shellfishery regulators collect data on the abundance of shellfish from which they need to set quotas for the amount of shellfish that can be removed, whilst leaving enough to ensure the survival of co-dependent bird populations, and could do this in-house with a suitable model. Likewise, the model could be used by developers to compare the ecological impacts of alternative port construction sites, or by conservation agencies to assess the relative impact of development schemes to prioritise which, if any, schemes to object to. This project will provide such a user-friendly and accessible software tool. The new model will reduce the complexities of running the current model to a sequence of simple steps to develop a model for a system and define the required outputs. The new user-friendly model will be developed and tested for coastal birds, collaboratively between the research team and project partners from a range of conservation, government and industrial organisations, with an interest in predicting the effect of environmental change on coastal birds, and with whom the research team have worked successfully in the past. The new software, and associated user guide, will be developed, by an iterative processes of development, followed by testing by the project partners, a strategy designed to ensure that the partners have a full involvement in the project, and ultimately obtain the tool they require. Although, during the project, the user-friendly model will be applied to coastal birds, it will be constructed in a general way, such that it is not restricted to these systems, and can be applied to a wider range of systems in the future. These priority systems will be identified during the project. A workshop and scientific paper will be used as a platform to advertise the existence of the new model as a tool for addressing environmental conflicts both within the coast and the additional priority systems. Additionally, to allow the model to be distributed as widely as possible, and to ensure that updates can be made available after the end of the project, a website will be constructed, from which the model and updates can be freely downloaded.

Ensuring that oil and gas pipelines remain free of blockages and leakage is a challenging problem and one with enormous financial ramifications. Research at the University of Manchester has led to the development and preliminary commercialisation of an acoustic based system for detecting blockages and leakage in pipelines filled with static gas. An important benefit of the technique is that it is non-invasive and only requires access to one end of the pipeline. The project proposed here will extend the technique further by developing a prototype system that will be suitable for liquid filled pipelines and pipelines containing flowing gas or liquid.

Project Summary: Nature-based coastal defence solutions have increasingly been recognized as more sustainable alternatives to conventional hard engineering approaches against climate change. These include using wetlands, mangroves, coral and oyster reefs as a buffer zone, which can attenuate waves and, in a regime of moderate sea level rise, the sediment trapping in such zones can keep pace with sea level. Wetlands and mangroves are regions in which more salt-tolerant species exist, which can protect freshwater species behind them. Nature-based defences have been deployed in the USA, Netherlands and UK and also in some parts of China, with varying degrees of success. In deltas undergoing fast urbanisation, applying nature-based solutions can lead to competition for space with other land uses, e.g. land-reclamation. For optimised management, the question of how much space is required by nature-based solutions must be addressed. However, our current knowledge of the size-dependent defence-value and resilience of different ecosystems is insufficient. Additionally, we lack full understanding of the methods needed for ecosystem creation for coastal defence, as previous restoration efforts have suffered low success rates. The current proposal aims to develop process-based understanding and predictive models of ecosystem size requirements and how to create ecosystems for coastal defence, using the world's largest urban area, the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in China, as a model system. Delta-scale mangrove area monitoring and hydrodynamic modelling will be conducted to study recent wetland area changes and estimate the optimisation of ecosystem spaces for defence, under contrasting scenarios of climate change and land-reclamation. This large-scaled study will also provide underpinning boundary conditions for local-scale experiments and modelling. A set of experiments using novel instruments will be conducted to improve our insights into the processes influencing mangrove resilience and propagation. Innovative measures of using dredged materials and oyster reefs to facilitate mangrove establishment will also be tested experimentally. Local-scale models will incorporate the new experimental knowledge to predict mangrove bio-geomorphic dynamics and provide guidelines for management. The developed models and knowledge will be directly applied in the design of a pilot eco-dike project due to be constructed, in collaboration with our project partners. We will consider how to address resilient urban planning and management, in terms of combining spatial planning and disaster management by optimising land use, institutions and mechanisms for more sustainable urbanisation, exploring eco-dynamic design options to provide opportunities for nature as part of the urban development processes. Summary of the UK applicants' contribution to the project: The UK applicants will lead Work Task 1: Wetland area monitoring/hydrodynamic modelling. This work task will provide an over-view of the bio-physical conditions, including the morphological and land-use aspects of the PRD and its regional setting, for the present day, and under future climate projections of sea level and storms. The UK team will implement a high resolution unstructured-grid model (FVCOM) for the Pearl River Delta (PRD) for hydrodynamics, waves and sediment transport which will provide the interface between the larger scale atmospheric and oceanic boundary conditions and the smaller-scale process studies and ecosystem modelling to be carried out by our Dutch and Chinese partners. This model, together with regional sea level projections, will be used to provide quantitative scenarios for the local area ecological modelling.

Coastal flooding is one of the most serious environmental risks to the UK. Despite much research on general risks of coastal flooding, knowledge about how flooding affects the estuary port systems that sustain much of the UK economy is more limited. The proposed research aims to examine risks of coastal flooding to port systems and the supply chains that they sustain throughout the UK. As an exploratory study in a short term, the research considers two major ports (Dover and Immingham) that are subject to flooding risks. The supply chains considered are food import systems that are clearly of critical importance to the UK. The project has the following objectives: -Predicting time evolution of potential coastal flooding -Translating risks of flooding to risks in port infrastructure systems -Translating risks of flooding to risks in import logistics systems -Engineering risk communication between flood forecasters and infrastructure users/owners The core stakeholders of this project are the Maritime Resilience Planning and Consequence Management Team of the Department for Transport (DfT; UK central government), the ports of Immingham and Dover and John Dora Consulting. Network Rail and the Food Storage and Distribution Federation have agreed to make comments on our outputs and send officers to our workshops. The results of the projects will help their policy formation as well as development of Emergency Procedures and Business Continuation Plans. In particular, the results will be used in the UK government's cross-departmental initiative on UK maritime, food and energy resilience to a tidal surge.

The ability to predict how much sand moves under ocean waves and currents, at what rate, and where it goes, is critical for managing our coastal industries, ports, harbours, shipping routes, offshore energy infrastructures, beaches, estuaries, cliffs and the low-lying coastal environments they protect. This is particularly true in a setting of expected sea level rise and enhanced utilization of the coastal ocean. The effects of coastal erosion and flooding to settlements and natural resources is widely publicised, yet unfortunately our ability to predict the location and extent of damage remains poor, particularly over the timescale of years. This information is also required to design and predict the life of coastal engineering projects to mitigate the socially, ecologically and economically important impacts of erosion and flooding. Considering the state of current knowledge, the biggest leaps in improving such predictions, will come from improved understanding of what controls the direction and rate of transport of the sediment which makes up the seabed. Just like predicting the weather, the goal of researchers in the field of coastal engineering is to produce accurate operational models of sediment transport and the resulting changes caused to the shape of the seabed. This project is motivated by the observation that sediment transport predictions get progressively worse as water depths decrease to just a few metres (i.e. near land: arguably the most important area) because of the increasing importance of very small-scale processes of which we have inadequate understanding. Until recently, sensing technologies to measure accurately and rapidly at this small scale did not exist. Fortunately, commercially-available sensors now exist which are able to measure flow speeds at the required resolution. In addition, in conjunction with our project partners we have recently developed and tested new sensors which can provide us information on how much sediment is in the water, and how the seabed evolves over individual waves. By conducting detailed laboratory experiments with these new sensing technologies in a 'life-size' wave flume, we aim to further our understanding of all these very small scale processes which appear to be more important in shallow water. We aim to use the knowledge gained about these small scale sediment transport processes and implement them in models to predict the resulting changes to the seabed. By using measurements of this bed evolution taking in the wave flume, we'll be able to identify which of these various processes are most important, and what is the best way to incorporate them into models which predict the evolution of our coastline. Finally, we aim to make the entire data set publicly-available and accountable using a database linked web application which permits the user to easily specify their data requirements and data format. The coastal engineering and planning community will be able to browse, explore and download the data freely. Software developers and environmental consultants will be able to use the data set as a benchmark with which to test future models of sediment transport and coastal evolution. Finally, other scientists will be able to easily scrutinise our findings and use the data for their own analyses, which will serve as the basis for future progress in this important field of research.