These equipment upgrades will improve and enhance Historic Environment Scotland's (HES) core functions in investigating, caring for and promoting Scotland's historic environment, both in terms of managing our in-house collections and also underpinning our wider engagement and support across the sector. Our historic environment is a sophisticated assemblage of historic buildings and structures, archaeological sites, monuments and landscapes which, together with object collections and archives, make up a unique and interconnected resource, collectively documenting over 5000 years of human history. Through upgrades to key pieces of equipment - spanning across material science, 3D digital documentation and visualisation, remote survey and applied object conservation - our ability to apply science to culture to better understand and safeguard our national collections will be enhanced, increasing wider benefits through sharing of information and promoting additional collaborative research with a range of partners and stakeholders. The targeted investment is particularly timely because climate change is resulting in unprecedented impacts on our historic environment, significantly increasing the threats to its preservation. Increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events and the acceleration of coastal erosion are threatening iconic sites, requiring better understanding of impacts and adaptive actions. Tackling the causes of climate change also requires unprecedented levels of intervention to buildings to support emissions reduction and decarbonisation. To address these issues, HES recently launched a new and ambitious Climate Action Plan to set out our priorities for understanding and adapting to the challenges of climate change. Research and innovation is one of four cross-cutting priorities helping to support delivery of this plan. By allowing us to create richer datasets and helping to make information more widely available in more accessible formats and in greater quantity, this investment will transform our use of digital resources to support ourselves and others to make better informed choices about how we look after our cultural heritage for future generations. The investment will result in practical benefits to HES, our partners, and wider stakeholders. It will produce efficiencies and significant cost savings as well as the provision of new quality, multi-purpose data, which will support us and other asset managers to devise more effective interventions to maintain and adapt the historic environment to maximise benefits whilst retaining cultural value. This increased capability will support new research and innovation and increase access and engagement, including reaching new audiences and development of resources for education and training. We will also support new economic opportunities by informing planning and development, and supporting resource efficiency and the sustainable re-use of historic assets through, for example, provision of improved information to support energy efficiency retrofit of existing buildings, currently a major strand of economic recovery programmes. The upgraded equipment will also support research and skills development in heritage management and conservation. It will support the work and development of our in-house trainees, collaborative PhD students and junior researchers, and underpin national and international partnerships. This will help to ensure that the next generation of researchers and heritage professionals have the skills necessary to tackle contemporary challenges. Through the investment and the enhanced capability it will deliver, we will build on our strong reputation for excellence and innovative cross-disciplinary partnership approaches to research, and increase our support for others by providing a national-scale resource for collaboration, education and training.

"Heritage science" refers to the "fascinating, rich and diverse range of scientific challenges" associated with conserving movable and immovable heritage. Its significance should not be underestimated. Heritage, through tourism, makes a substantial contribution to the economy (£7.4 billion a year), and the sustainability of that contribution depends on heritage science. In November 2006, we published a report entitled Science and Heritage in which we acknowledged that the UK had a high reputation in the field of heritage science but warned that UK standing was "under threat" and that the heritage science sector was "fragmented and under-valued". (House of Lords Science and Technology Committee (2012). Science and Heritage: A follow-up. London: HMSO p4) In 2007, on the recommendations of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) launched the Science and Heritage Programme to fund research activities to deepen understanding and widen participation in heritage science. During the following 7 years, this £8.1 million multi-disciplinary, collaborative Programme has funded 48 projects involving more than 300 researchers, 234 institutions and 50 industry partners both in the UK and overseas. The purpose of this Impact Fellowship proposal is to strengthen the dissemination of research activities supported by the Science and Heritage Programme, with a particular focus on developing the relationship between heritage science researchers and industry in order to promote heritage science innovation and to inform policymakers of the value of heritage science to culture and the economy. For heritage science researchers to fully contribute to public benefit and economic growth a shift in attitude by both researchers and industry has to take place to create stronger strategic links and to exploit opportunities which anecdotal evidence suggests there are industry sectors that could benefit from heritage science research and innovation. Currently, the heritage tourism industry is the best understood industry utilising heritage science research and this will be considered alongside other business sectors such as construction and property development; creative media; insurance; forensics and security and sensors and instrumentation. Through a series of workshops, face-to-face interviews and data collection and analysis, the Fellowship will identify the benefits, impacts and growth opportunities produced by heritage science research and innovation, along with the research projects that have contributed wider benefits to policy, industry and the heritage sector and the industry sectors that utilise, or could utilise heritage science research. By examining industry needs, the skills and training required by future heritage scientists to engage with industry can be identified and evidence can be provided to produce recommendations on how policy could support the development of an innovation systems framework for heritage science. This will in turn be used to promote an innovation culture among researchers and industry willing to explore the business potential of research outputs. The research will be underpinned by a number of leadership development activities including publishing commissioned articles for Research Fortnight and Research Professional. Key outputs from the research will be published on the Science and Heritage Programme website and will include: a database of projects that demonstrate the benefits and impacts of heritage science research; a case study on skills training for heritage scientists and recommendations on how policy could support the development of an innovation systems framework for heritage science.