Science blog

Johanna Kieniewicz reflects on Envia, a new tool for flooding researchers and practitioners

This past winter, the UK received unprecedented amounts of rainfall. I returned from Christmas holidays to find a big damp patch on a south-facing wall of our Victorian terrace house. Our mild inconvenience was nothing compare to others across England who faced disaster, as rivers overtopped their banks, flooding communities for weeks on end.

A debate played out in the press about whether dredging the Parrett and Tone rivers might have saved the Somerset Levels. The then Chair of the Environment Agency, Lord Chris Smith,  defended the work of his organisation, standing firm in the face of enormous pressure from politicians and communities alike. In the end, pumps were imported from The Netherlands that sucked the water away, and some dredging is now planned. In the wake of this, the Chartered Institute for Water and Environmental Management published an interesting report: Flooding and Dredging: A Reality Check, in which they examined the impact of dredging rivers on flooding. They concluded that although dredging may benefit flood risk management in some cases, it is not a standalone solution and should be viewed as part of a larger suite of tools and that the risks that it poses must be well understood at a local level.

Flooded farmland in the Somerset Levels (Image: Shutterstock)

To me, the debate whether to dredge or not highlighted the importance of the scientific evidence base to flooding researchers and practitioners. The ability to easily access trustworthy information quickly, particularly in a crisis, is of paramount importance. Intuition might say that if a river that accumulates sediment over time is flooding, then it might be a good idea to dredge it from time to time. Fair enough. But evidence also suggests this may speed up the movement of flood water (increasing risks to communities upstream), destabilise river banks and result in loss of fluvial and floodplain habitats. I can’t say whether the dredging debate would have played out any differently, had politicians and the public had better access to information. However, it did emphasise how important it is for everyone involved in tackling flooding—from local authorities, to charities, to academics, to the Environment Agency-- has the very best evidence available.

At the British Library, we are keen to help make that possible. A few years back, we started to look at whether we could make more of our environmental science collections, providing instant access to information online, to anyone, anywhere, for free. To that end, we now have Envia, a new tool that allows users to discover and access a curated selection of reports (including UK government, EU and more), PhD theses, and data resources online. It’s a simple search box, either on the Envia website, or something embeddable in browsers or webpages, that you can use to search over a wide variety of content.  We had good evidence from our own research that flooding would be remain a high priority across the environment sector in the UK, and so decided to focus on content relevant to flooding experts for our pilot.

Over the past few months, we’ve been adding more content and functionality that will make Envia as useful as possible to people.

New Content – Envia will now connect you to reports from EU institutions on topics including water management, meteorology, coastal protection, climate change and more. We have developed our selection relating to the social impacts of flooding, and flooding and habitat management. We are also experimenting with content that you may need to pay for in order to access.

New Layout –Envia now has a cleaner layout that also displays beautifully on your smartphone or tablet computer. So now, whether in the field or whilst travelling, you can search and discover environmental information.

New Functionality –Envia now supports the export of search results by email, as well as in formats suitable for Refworks and Endnote.

So, if you are a flooding researcher or practitioner, or anyone interested in research and policy information relevant to flooding , do please try Envia, and tell your colleagues. We are keen to know how we might make Envia more useful to you, so don’t hesitate to give contact us at [email protected].

While Envia itself might not be able to hold back the waters of the future floods that will undoubtedly come our way, we hope that it may help those in search of the evidence they need to make the very best decisions possible to protect homes, businesses and habitats.

Related articles

Seek, but shall ye find?

Decision making in the twilight of uncertainty

Natalie Bevan looks back on last week’s World Environment Day #WED and considers the role of environmental data, outlining some examples of global ecological information sources available today.

Last week saw the annual celebration and public awareness campaign for all things green World Environment Day. With this in mind it seems an opportune time to consider some of the outstanding information resources available today for those interested or working in the broad discipline of environmental sciences. 

Taking biodiversity as an example, data generated from scientific research are being used in a variety of innovative and progressive ways by organisations and individuals. As more data is made available, better analysis can be undertaken regarding the risks and threats faced by the natural environment. Most vitally this data can also be interpreted to discover effective solutions to complex global ecological problems.

The United Nations Environment Programme and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre - which support World Environment Day - have recreated this Conservation Dashboard. It provides easy access to snapshots of key ecological profiles country by country.

Biodiversity data are available to view, download and analyse in a variety of tools via this site. These include, to name but a few:  Ocean Data Viewer – this tool provides access to, and geospatial navigation of data on the conservation of coastal and marine ecology and Protected Planet -   this gives access to the most comprehensive global data on the world’s protected areas that can be explored through the map or searched for specific datasets.

We are also making strides here at the British Library in providing more visibility to datasets available on the web via our online catalogue, making a limited number of selected scientific research datasets records available in Explore the British Library.  Search for datasets here.

We have also made datasets relevant to flooding discoverable through our Envia tool.

Finally, has it ever occurred to you that you might be interested in generating or collecting biodiversity data yourself? There are a number of interesting citizen science initiatives afoot in this area. Its worth checking out:

• The Great British Bee Count – It’s well known that bees are suffering loss of habitat and food sources, but there is not a detailed picture of overall bee health across the UK. This project invites you to download an app, and record the bees you spot in your daily activities.

• OPAL (Open Air Laboratories) – OPAL runs nation-wide surveys on the state of the environment. From the health of the trees in your neighbourhood, to the bugs in your hedge, learn a bit more about the environment around you and contribute to important scientific research!

Climate scientist and NERC Policy Intern, Adam Levy, explores the communication of extreme weather in advance of our upcoming TalkScience event on 17th June (doors open 6pm).

In spite of the immense threat posed by global warming, its impacts often seem too distant and abstract to motivate us to action.  In contrast, extreme weather events – from droughts to hurricanes – are incredibly tangible, wreaking havoc on communities around the world.  As discussed previously, climate scientists are now beginning to establish the effect that manmade climate change is having on extreme weather patterns today.  We are quickly finding out, however, that communicating this scientific understanding presents challenges of its own.

This winter, the United Kingdom was hit by the most extreme rainfall observed in Southern England since records began almost 250 years ago.  The flooding that resulted caused huge damage to infrastructure and homes, the costs of which could exceed £1 billion.  As the rain continued to pour, one question in particular was being discussed in every sphere: What was the role of climate change in this devastation?

Frustratingly, examining the effect of climate change on a particular extreme weather event can take several months, and so at the time there were no clear-cut answers.  It is well established, though, that hotter air holds more moisture, and there is good evidence to suggest that this will lead to increases in the intensity of extreme rainfall.  While this could not be seen as the cause of the storms, it does point towards an influence from climate change on the strength of the storms.  This is precisely what the Met Office’s Chief Scientist, Professor Julia Slingo, was referring to when she commented that: ‘while there is no definitive answer… all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change’.

This measured statement seems to strike the right balance – while emphasising that our fundamental scientific understanding would make a link likely, it acknowledges the lack of conclusive evidence on the role of climate change in this particular event.  Many of the responses to it, however, were not quite so balanced.  Newspapers with a history of climate change denialism (such as the Spectator and the Mail on Sunday) were quick to oversimplify Professor Slingo’s comments in order to present a false conflict between her and others at the Met Office.  Nigel Lawson – chair of the Global Warming Policy Foundation – expressed this position particularly concisely and acerbically: ‘You'll see the Met Office's own report denies it.  It is just this Julia Slingo woman, who made this absurd statement’.

Misrepresentation of Professor Slingo’s statement, however, was not limited to climate change deniers.  Professor Nicholas Stern – a leading climate change economist – cited the storms as a ‘clear sign that we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change’.  This statement implies an unambiguous causal link between climate change and the storms, going beyond what scientific understanding at the time was able to tell us.

These misrepresentations of Professor Slingo’s comment – both by climate change proponents and deniers – are deeply concerning.  What’s more, they are symptomatic of the way climate change is discussed more widely.  So why does this take place in discussions of climate science, and how can it be avoided?

It is tempting to argue that scientists simply need to communicate the science more clearly, and inaccurate reporting will dissipate.  While it may be true that some misrepresentations are indeed caused by misunderstandings, this neglects other crucial factors that influence interpretations of climate change.  After all, climate change is not just a scientific issue; it is a political and social issue.

The actions required to tackle climate change are often presented in a way that appeals to those with left of centre political beliefs, while conversely alienating those on the right.  As a result, left of centre individuals are more predisposed to accept the statements of climate scientists than right of centre individuals.  Inevitably, then, some will exaggerate scientific statements, while others will dismiss them out of hand.  Worse still, a recent study has shown that amongst those who already believe or deny climate change, higher scientific literacy in fact only serves to empower people to defend their positions more boldly.  This deeply challenges the conviction held by many – including Professor Slingo – who feel that better scientific communication is the key to progress.

What hope is there, then, to avoid these misrepresentations?  First and foremost, climate change communicators must acknowledge that communicating the science is only a starting point.  We must take account of the varied political and social lenses through which different individuals engage with the debate.  Crucially, we must find mechanisms for communicating both the impacts and the mitigation of climate change that are engaging to those with right of centre politics.  After all – while the debate rages on – the world keeps getting warmer.

25^th TalkScience Event - Extreme Weather: Climate Change in Action

To explore scientific and communication perspectives on this issue, come along to the British Library on the evening of 17^th June and join James Randerson (Assistant National News Editor, The Guardian), with Professor Stephen Belcher (Head of the Met Office Hadley Centre), Laura Sandys MP (Conservative Environment Network) and George Marshall (Founder of Climate Outreach & Information Network).

More information and tickets available here.

Related articles

Extreme Weather: Climate Change in Action?

Climate scientist and NERC Policy Intern, Adam Levy, explores extreme weather in advance of our upcoming TalkScience event on 17^th June (doors open 6pm).

From the winter storms in the UK, to the drought currently devastating California, extreme weather is constantly in the news.  As our lives become increasingly removed from the natural world, catastrophic weather events remind us of our vulnerability and call into question how we protect ourselves from the elements.  Recently, though, headlines have begun to challenge not only our preparedness, but also whether our actions are contributing to these events.  Are we, by emitting greenhouse gases, putting ourselves at greater risk of extreme weather?

Understanding the climate

In 1990, when the first major international report on climate change was published, we were still unable to detect whether greenhouse gases were already causing the earth’s temperature to rise.  Now, not only do we know that this is extremely likely, but we can begin to unpick how the earth’s rising temperatures affects the climate of different parts of the world in different ways.

The properties of the climate that are easiest to study, though, are often far removed from the weather we experience day to day.  To those of us that don’t work in agriculture, knowing how much rainfall there will be in the average 2040s summer is of limited use.  Even when this information relates directly to our own region, it fails to resonate with our experience of the world around us.  The damages caused by extreme weather, on the other hand, are far more tangible.  In contrast to the facts and statistics that are normally presented on global warming, extreme weather is something we are naturally inquisitive about.  So can scientists tell us anything about the influence of global warming on these weather events?

Insights into our weather

In some cases, scientists have been able to use physical understanding of the climate to evaluate how rises in the earth’s temperature could affect extreme weather.  Heat waves, for example, are very likely to become both longer and more frequent, as a hotter world is biased toward more extremely hot days.  We can also expect more extreme rainfall, as hotter air holds more moisture, and so when it rains, it pours.  These findings are invaluable, but when extreme weather hits, we understandably want to know the role of climate change in that specific event, not general physical patterns.

There has always been extreme weather, so it’s not possible to claim that a particular event never could have taken place without climate change.  We can ask, however, whether emissions have changed its intensity or likelihood.  To investigate such changes, scientists use physics-based computer simulations of the climate to compare what actually happened to what might have happened had there been no manmade emissions.

Scientists in the University of Oxford recently utilised this technique to investigate the record breaking rainfall experienced by the UK this winter.  Using a computer model designed by the UK’s Met Office, they ran almost 40,000 simulations on volunteers’ home computers.  They found that the recent storms - which forced thousands from their homes and cost the UK more than £1 billion – has gone from being a one in a hundred year event to a one in eighty year event.  The implication of this amazing result is that one fifth of the storms’ costs – both human and financial – can be ascribed to manmade climate change.

Findings like these empower people to engage with the consequences of our changing climate.  Continued warnings of the future dangers of greenhouse gases have patently failed to motivate meaningful action: emissions continue to rise relentlessly year on year.  Linking extreme weather to global warming, however, enables us to see the damages our emissions are already causing.  The challenge now – not just for climate scientists, but for all of us – is to communicate this powerful science in a way that motivates us to action. 

25^th TalkScience Event - Extreme Weather: Climate Change in Action

To explore both scientific and policy perspectives on this issue, come along to the British Library on the evening of 17^th June and join James Randerson (Assistant National News Editor, The Guardian), with Professor Stephen Belcher (Head of the Met Office Hadley Centre), Laura Sandys MP (Conservative Environment Network) and George Marshall (Founder of Climate Outreach & Information Network).

More information and tickets available here.

Lead Curator Johanna Kieniewicz ponders the weather and climate section in Beautiful Science

Whether dramatic, delightful, dull or dreary, the weather affects us all and is a source of endless fascination and conversation for the British. Monitoring local weather conditions has long interested the public, amateur scientists and national institutes alike. And data about the weather—whether collected by a citizen scientist or national monitoring station—has been central to the endeavour to predict the weather and understand global climate systems. In our Beautiful Science exhibition at The British Library, we explore how by picturing data about the weather, we can connect our individual experience to a much bigger picture—whether that over the course of the year, or across the globe.  In so doing, we also highlight the importance of archives to contemporary science—and explore the importance of the citizen scientist, past and present.

Early Ocean Currents, Eberhard Werner Happel, Die Ebbe und Fluth auff einer Flachen Landt-Karten fürgestelt. Ulm, 1685

The observations of mariners have been vital to the development of early maps of ocean currents, winds, and air temperatures—and continue to have relevance today. A particularly interesting set of data is to be found in East India Company ships’ journals, over 4000 of which are housed in the India Office Records at The British Library. In 1709, the East India Company ship, the Rochester, sailed from England for China via Batavia (now known as Jakarta, Indonesia). Its captain enlivened his journal with drawings of ships, wildlife and places as well as recording the required information about location, course and weather. On the page displayed in the exhibition from 15 May, 1710 he refers to ‘fresh gales of wind and cloudy weather with squalls and rain as well from the WNW’.

The journal of the Rochester, as displayed in Beautiful Science

Such descriptions of weather in early ships’ journals are still useful to climate scientists although they lack the precision of instrumental data. However, these journals contain not only administrative notes and comments about shipboard life, but also a huge amount of instrumental data about the weather, making them a valuable resource for modern climate studies. Digitised and transcribed, the weather data from 891 of these logbooks has been utilised by the UK Met Office to inform the development of their global climate models.

This use of ‘old weather’ data from archives by the Met Office was not a one-off. They are enormously interested in ‘data rescue’—as participants in the international ACRE project, they aim to facilitate the recovery of instrumental weather data from across the globe. These observations act as ‘ground truth’ data points to underpin global weather reconstructions spanning the past 200-250 years. An important component of this work is the OldWeather project, a citizen science project in which anyone can help with the transcription of ships logbooks. The recording of temperature and pressure at particular locations provides thousands of data points that can be fed into computer models of the atmosphere – from which a weather map might eventually emerge.

Luke Howard, Barometrographia: Twenty years' variation of the barometer in the climate of Britain… London, 1847.

 Citizen science – the engagement of non-experts in the enterprise of science-- is hardly a new phenomenon, despite a new proliferation of efforts—in part thanks to the popularity of Zooniverse projects like OldWeather. Indeed, there are some interesting parallels to be drawn between the roles of amateurs in science in the 21^st century, and that which they played in the 19^th, particularly in the area of weather observations. Luke Howard, a chemist and amateur meteorologist, made some of the earliest consistent scientific observations recorded. In Barometrographia (1847), he recorded the atmospheric pressure readings from 1815 to 1834 at his homes in Tottenham, London and Ackworth, Yorkshire, alongside accounts of the weather. In Beautiful Science, we display a page from 1815, where he accompanies his barometric pressure measurements with some recollections of the freezing over of the Thames in London….

 “On the 6^th of January snow falling in some quantity on the previously formed surface, the air at 33˚-34˚, it was occasionally collected by the wind into a ball which rolled on gathering from beneath until its weight stopped it; thousands of these natural snowballs covered up the fields, up to several inches in diameter. On the 9^th the snowy landscape had a bluish tint, and the thermometer fell in the night to 8˚ with us; at Croydon (more exposed) to 5˚. By the 12^th the river Lea was firmly frozen and the Thames was become scarcely navigable.” 

The elegance and consistency of Luke Howard’s measurements is impressive. Carried out over 20 years, the circular engravings were mechanically traced by a self-recording barograph over which he plotted the phases of the Moon in an attempt to discern the lunar influence on the weather. While his speculation that the Moon’s gravitational pull influences the weather has been proved wrong, we know that changes in air pressure play a key role, which Barometrographia illustrates. His personal anecdotes give a flavour to the data that the mere observations do not in themselves provide.

It is interesting to contemplate the recordings of India Office ships captains in the light of what meteorology and climate science have become today—behemoths of data—but beautiful nonetheless. Perpetual Ocean, a marvellous visualisation of ocean currents from the NASA Scientific Visualisation Studio derived primarily from satellite data, draws visitors in like flies to lamp; they stand in wonder – both in the complexity and dynamicity of our oceans, but also our ability to picture them.

  Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight, sponsored by Winton Capital Management, is on display at the British Library until 26 May 2014 in the Folio Society Gallery. Admission is free. 

The journal of The Rochester has been digitised and can be viewed here.

Related articles

Divining the Deluge

Beautiful Science Preview

Johanna Kieniewicz introduces the section of Beautiful Science that explores the Tree of Life.

In our Beautiful Science exhibition, we explore the evolution of evolution, with a section of the exhibition dedicated to the ways in which we have pictured the tree of life—simultaneously image and metaphor for our relationship and connection to life on Earth.

We start out at the beginning, with an illustration of the universe by Renaissance alchemist Robert Fludd. The ‘Great Chain of Being’  is an ancient Greek concept that classifies life on earth into a hierarchical order with respect to the rest of the universe. A great ladder links God and other divine beings to astronomical bodies, man, animals, plants and minerals. Each animal is fixed on a rung in order of perfection (upwards towards man). This sort of hierarchical organisation of life laid the groundwork for the development of biological classification systems and ultimately evolutionary trees.

Great Chain of Being, Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi majoris scilicet et minoris ... Oppenheim; Frankfurt, 1617

In On the Origin of Species (1859, 1^st ed) , Charles Darwin famously used the metaphor of a tree to articulate his ideas around evolution.

‘The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree… The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during former years may represent the long succession of extinct species. From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these fallen branches of various sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no living representatives, and which are known to us only in a fossil state… As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.’

Darwin's diagram picturing his ideas of evolution from On The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, 1850

German scientist (and talented illustrator) Ernst Heckel was greatly inspired by Darwin’s ideas and sought to devise a great number of trees organising all life on Earth. In The Evolution of Man, Haeckel illustrates the evolutionary history of humans with a great tree, whose trunk represents our ancestral history, as our progenitors moved through stages, such as primitive worms, amphibians and apes. This tree reflects Haeckel’s (albeit not terribly Darwinian) belief that evolution was a process of perfecting, and that humans represented the pinnacle of evolution. Although the diagram reflects the attitudes of its time, it may be seen as a link between the early attempts to hierarchically organise life and contemporary approaches based on ancestral relationships and genetics.

The Pedigree of Man. Ernst Haeckel, The evolution of man. London, 1879.

Whilst the relationships pictured in early evolutionary trees were generally based on inference and shared traits, today’s phylogenetic trees are based on vast amounts of genomic data. In Beautiful Science, we show a ‘molecular time tree’ depicting the evolutionary relationships of all 9,993 living species of birds, illustrating when individual species diverged. The oldest species diverge closest to the centre of the circle, with more recent diversification closer to the edge.  Although modern birds first evolved some 145 – 66 million years ago, this diagram shows that they began to diversify exceptionally rapidly about 50 million years ago. This is particularly apparent for the songbirds, waterfowl, gulls and woodpeckers.

Avian Tree of Life (c) Gavin Thomas, Walter Jetz, Jeff Joy, Arne Mooers, Klass Hartmann, 2012. First published in Nature.

And, indeed here we are dealing with such vast amounts of information that one might begin to wonder whether there were any way in which we could meaningfully depict all of life on Earth on an A4 sheet of paper. There have been some attempts—but Imperial College London researcher James Rosindell has come up with an ingenious solution. One Zoom Tree, an interactive tree of life, allows viewers to zoom into the tree of life and explore the evolutionary relationships between tens of thousands of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians.  It  uses a branch of mathematics known as fractal geometry to create an attractive visualisation that can be explored by zooming in, to get ever more detail.  The data includes sounds from the British Library’s collections and evolutionary data from scientific literature including the ‘Avian Tree of Life’ showing how the same data can be pictured in different ways.

James Rosindell, Imperial College London, One Zoom Tree, http://www.onezoom.org

Highly engaging, One Zoom Tree shows how far we’ve come in our ability to rationalise our relationship to the rest of life on Earth.  As you move along the trunk of the tetrapod tree, you see where different branches diverge, and can see relationships between different species. Did you know that the elephant’s closest relatives are hyraxes and sea cows?

Darwin wrote at the end of On the Origin of Species,

“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

These new ways of picturing phylogenetic data are allowing us to better understand this beautiful, messy, complex tangled bank of life on Earth- and equip us with new ways for protecting its incredible biodiversity.

 Beautiful Science, sponsored by Winton Capital Management, is on display at the British Library until 26 May 2014 in the Folio Society Gallery. Admission is free.

Working with the British Library’s science collections, Natalie Bevan has been getting acquainted with collections that librarians refer to as ‘Grey’, but which are really hidden gems.

Grey literature is a dull name, but this particular part of our science collections is anything but ashen. It encompasses dynamic, new and emerging ideas and dialogues that are often never published in the conventional sense. Such outputs could be in the form of reports, newsletters or conference proceedings, for example. The information they contain might be transient, ephemeral and, very likely and often infuriatingly, nigh on impossible to track down. These factors make it vital for the Library to collect this research material and make it accessible to our users.

Part of my role on our Environmental Sciences beta project, Envia (see Johanna Kieniewicz’s previous blog post for further information on our project), involves making parts of the British Library’s comprehensive grey literature collections more accessible for the environmental science community.

The search interface for Envia, the new environmental information discovery tool from the British Library.

This work involves drawing together different content strands into one new resource discovery tool and dealing with the problematic nature of some of this grey material.

Flooding in York. (Copyright: ronfromyork: Shutterstock)

Envia’s subject focus is initially on the broad topic of flooding. To get an idea of the sort of material you’ll find, here are a few examples:

• Michael Pitt’s Final Report on the 2007 floods;  

• DEFRA’s Flood and Water Management Act 2010 Progress Report;

• the Environment Agency’s recent report on climate change approaches in water resources planning;
  

• the Final National Report on Exercise Watermark

Thames Barrier. (Copyright.Radoslaw Maciejewski: Shutterstock)

Envia currently includes UK PhD theses, UK reports and data resources, covering topics such as coastal zone management, the social impact of flooding in local communities, flood risk assessments, the implementations of the Water Framework Directive, hydrological appraisals of past flood events, the ecology of floodplains, data on weather patterns, climate modelling and flood forecasting, to name a few.

The individual record display interface in Envia.

It is just one way that we are attempting to make these important but often ‘hidden’ collections more easily accessible for research, practice and use.

We are currently adding content to Envia and welcome feedback on this beta service, so please try it out and let us know what you think.

Johanna Kieniewicz writes on her impressions from the Living With Environmental Change partnership’s annual assembly.

At the Living With Environmental Change partnership’s annual assembly, Defra’s Chief Science Adviser, Dr. Ian Boyd, presented a stark statistic: in a recent Defra focus group, two thirds of the participants reported that they distrusted scientists. Although we didn’t discover the context for this revelation, many of us walked away from the meeting thinking about how we could do better. How can we ensure more policy-relevant science? How can we communicate it better? And how can we reassure the general public that uncertainty in science is perfectly normal and is not a reason for distrust?

At this same meeting, I was delighted to present on the Science Team’s Envia project. Envia is a tool to improve the discovery and access of environmental information, and it fits the aims of this meeting nicely: that is, to provide researchers, policymakers and practitioners with the evidence and tools they need to make sound decisions in an uncertain world. With a general theme of ‘decision making in the twilight of uncertainty’, the LWEC Assembly brought together a wide range of academics, representatives from research councils and government bodies such as Defra and the Environment Agency, to discuss challenges pertaining to uncertainty and how they might be overcome. Perhaps most importantly, how can we best equip our decision makers with the evidence they need to make sound decisions pertaining to climate change, bovine tuberculosis, or our energy future—when the repercussions of actions taken in any of these areas are far from certain?

Dave Rafaelli (U. York) presenting at LWEC 2013

So, while we at the British Library would like to think that we are doing our part around developing an evidence base that is suitable for use by researchers and practitioners alike, we recognise this is one small part of a much bigger picture. Ultimately, this information must be drawn together, synthesised in a way that enables policymakers to make sound decisions based on all the available evidence. And areas of uncertainty should be laid out clearly. Boyd emphasised the importance of scientists presenting balanced arguments, where all evidence is laid bare.  Although we, as scientists (who are also citizens), might personally advocate a particular solution, when communicating in a professional context we must remain unbiased. To be clear, there needs to be the appropriate weighting given to evidence – if 95% of the evidence points one way, we wouldn’t expect the small proportion of contrary evidence to be given the same level of attention. In order for the public to trust scientists, they need to know that we aren’t reading the evidence to see only what we would like to see in it.

With presentations looking at how individual research projects are dealing with uncertainty, including perspectives from the social sciences, here are a few nuggets of wisdom that I thought it would be useful to pass on:

• Scientists should always be honest about what they don’t know. The sources of uncertainty in their models should be explicit — and they need to communicate those limitations with humility. While it might be tempting to give policymakers ‘simple’ answers, scientists must keep the complexity intact. Politicians are accustomed to weighing up complex situations and multiple sources of data. When it comes to making potentially irreversible decisions pertaining to the environment, giving policymakers the whole story is essential both to sound decision-making and establishing trust.

• Uncertainty isn’t a completely foreign concept to most people. We all live in an uncertain world, and have to make decisions based on our best guesses. From choosing whether or not to bring an umbrella with us when we leave the house, to playing card games, to getting a mortgage on a property, uncertainty is not something that those who claim to be distrustful of scientists are actually unfamiliar with!

• There are things to be learned from other fields, particularly the humanities and social sciences who are thinking about uncertainty in both psychological and philosophical terms. Moreover, economics is a field that that policymakers are often more comfortable with than science, yet it is also rife with uncertainty. Although it can be argued that the studious ignoring of economic uncertainties led to the financial crisis, there are lessons to be learned from that as well.

• There is a huge need for research that straddles disciplinary boundaries. Several speakers pointed out the necessity for social science perspectives on global change issues, alongside the scientific. There is also a need for research that is ‘fit for purpose’ when it comes to policy implementation. However, the speakers pointed out, this research isn’t necessarily considered ‘groundbreaking’; it does not lead to Nature papers —and thus is not the sort of research most ambitious academics are interested in pursuing.

 The audience at the LWEC Assembly took these messages to heart. We in the Science Team at the Library will be thinking about how some of these ideas can be reflected in what we do. And hopefully we aren’t doing too badly. Our Envia pilot project is already improving the way in which flooding researchers and practitioners can find information that is relevant to their work. DataCite, for which we are the UK lead, enables and encourages the citation and sharing of research data. On the biomedical front, we recognise that even when a paper is openly available, that does not mean it is accessible (from the perspective of intelligibility). Our recently launched Access to Understanding science writing competition encourages early career researchers to summarise academic articles in an engaging and accessible manner. And our upcoming Beautiful Science exhibition will be looking at the visualisation of scientific data, encouraging audiences to consider how science is communicated visually. So while we can’t crack the uncertainty in climate models, we would like to think that we are helping researchers and practitioners get the evidence they need for their work and communicate more effectively to policymakers in an uncertain world.

If you are interested in looking into this in a bit more detail, here are a few useful resources for you!

A video of the LWEC Assembly will be posted on the ESKTN TV Youtube Channel

Sense about Science Guide – Making Sense of Uncertainty: Why Uncertainty is a part of science.

David Spiegelhalter’s Understanding Uncertainty website. He also wrote this excellent piece in Nature about interpreting scientific claims

Royal Society meeting proceedings on Handling Uncertainty in Science

Making Science Count in Government – a much debated (also see comments section) piece by Ian Boyd, published in E-Life

Johanna Kieniewicz explores information access across the environment sector, and what the British Library is doing to improve its discoverability.

When I was doing my PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences, I had exceptionally good access to the information required for my research. I was doing my degree at a major US research university that had excellent print and online journal subscriptions - and on the occasion that I required something a little more unusual, such as a PhD thesis, our departmental librarians were only too happy to request it by inter-library loan. And indeed now, working at the British Library, I find myself once again with exceptionally good access to any piece of information I could possibly want.

Researching the information use of researchers and practitioners across the environment sector, I now realise how fortunate I have been. Extensive journal subscriptions are often prohibitively expensive for many charities, small businesses and local government departments. And, while resources such as government reports and PhD theses might be free and contain really useful information, they are often difficult to track down. A couple of years ago, I surveyed a wide range of researchers and practitioners from the flooding sector about their information access. This group included not just academics, but also people working for local government, environmental charities, consultants and small businesses. Were they happy with their current access to information? What barriers did they encounter in trying to get the information they needed for their work?

We asked researchers across the flooding community to rank the factors creating barriers to information. The boxes highlighted as 1st and 2nd indicate their most significant barriers.

Not surprisingly, pretty much everyone reported either money or time as their greatest barrier to the information they needed for their work. However, digging a bit deeper, they also reported difficulty actually discovering the information itself - or filtering through to get at the stuff actually relevant to their work. For a flooding practitioner interested in the impact of Thames flooding on London, their first port of call might well be a Google search: Thames flooding London (or something similar). However, this search would bring back first news articles first, not the Environment Agency report, which is actually what they need.

Our survey also showed that environmental information access is also far from equal. We asked the flooding community what information they now find crucial to their research (red dots below), and what they might potentially use with improved access (yellow dots). While the behaviour of academic researchers might not change that much, that of people working for NGOs/charities, local government, the private sector would change tremendously. While being more financially pressured, they are also often more pressed for time, with tight deadlines, multiple priorities, and little time to spend searching for (letting alone reading) information. We found that government reports, datasets and legislation were real priorities across the board, but also a real interest in less conventional outputs such as PhD theses.

Red dots represent resources that researchers considered crucial to their work. Yellow dots indicate resources that they would use more with better access.

So we in the Science Team at the British Library wondered if we could improve things. As a library, we have a duty to facilitate access to information and help users discover the research they need for their work. But most environmental scientists aren’t interested in coming into libraries - they would like electronic access, pdfs they can download, whether they are in the office, lab or field. Would there be a way in which we could make more of what we already do as a library but make the information available to users electronically, wherever they are?

The search interface for Envia, the new environmental information discovery tool from the British Library.

Envia is a new tool developed by the Science Team, with support from the Living With Environmental Change partnership, to improve environmental information access and discovery. Bringing together often hard-to-find government reports, PhD theses, data resources, and journal articles (soon!), we aim to enable the easy search and discovery of resources relevant to flooding (we thought all of environmental science might be a bit much to tackle in one go, so have narrowed down to flooding for the Beta). Rather than viewing ourselves as a ‘one stop shop’ for flooding information, we view Envia as an important tool for connecting  users to information - whether it’s in the Envia repository or elsewhere on the web. Envia might be accessed through its website at http://www.envia.bl.uk/ - but we also intend it to be used via search boxes embedded in users’ browsers or our partners’ websites.

We have now launched Envia as a Beta service. This means we are still adding content and developing its functionality and looking for feedback from users. So please try it and let us know what you think. User involvement has been integral to the Envia project from the beginning as we are keen to develop a tool that meets the needs of our users - particularly those who don’t have the kind of access to information I was privileged to have during my PhD.

From organising a public debate to writing-up science conferences and festivals, my time as part of the science team at the British Library is at an end. My placement followed on from first BBSRC intern, Catriona Manville who became the ‘poster-girl’ for the BBSRC placement programme in 2012. Even though it was never really a competition, after three months at the British Library could I be the next BBSRC ‘poster-boy’?

Stuart [me], surveying a grazing exclosure on the Beinn Eighe nature reserve in Scotland. Photo by Kyle Munro.

Before my internship I was writing-up my PhD thesis in Biological Science at the University of Aberdeen, but I wanted some experience in science policy. A placement at the British Library was appealing as an intermediary between interacting with policy makers and the general public. To that effect, I have attended as many meetings, workshops, conferences as possible; from the British Science Association Science Communication conference to a day talking to MPs at the House of Commons with the Society of Biology. For many of the events I attended, I wrote articles or blog posts to share what I learned. For example, I attended my first ever festival (and kept my wristband to prove it!) - the Cheltenham Science Festival - and helped write an article in their newspaper, Litmus paper.

Spot Stuart during TalkScience@BL ‘Pollinators and pesticides: is there a plan bee?’ Photo: Peter Warner.

The pinnacle of the placement has been organising TalkScience. This is a quarterly evening event, similar in format to a café scientifique. After reading the news, policy briefings, publications and reports, we decided our next TalkScience topic would be on issues surrounding the potentially harmful effect of pesticides on insect pollinators. “Pollinators and pesticides: is there a plan bee?”  was chaired by Bill Turnbull, BBC presenter and beekeeper in discussion with the panel comprising Dr David Aston (British Beekeepers Association), Dr Peter Campbell (Syngenta) and Dr Lynn Dicks (University of Cambridge). Even greater public outreach was gained via Bill hosting a BBC Horizon programme about demystifying the bees - leading to the event being filmed by the BBC. Keep your eyes peeled on BBC2 on 2 August at 21.00 and you might see a few shots of the event!

Being part of the British Library science team was a large learning curve and has increased my awareness of activities supporting, using and extending scientific research. For example, I gained new insights into Open Access and how recent policy changes are influencing libraries, funders, publishers and researchers. Even on a day-to-day basis, the transition from PhD student to science outreach is a change in mind-set and routine.

•    Preparing for a monthly supervisor meeting to participating in daily meetings with a wide range of people
•    Preparing for a single yearly conference to attending a conference every few weeks
•    Focusing on a single specific area of science to following multiple disciplines
•    Expanding sources of information from primarily research articles to journal and society news, policy briefings and blogs/Twitter!

A typical internship job at the British Library; fixing the life support system in the office to stop rising CO2 concentration killing the team! This was a team away day at the Leicester Space Centre.

Should I become the next ‘poster-boy’? To be honest, as a PhD student, I feel lucky to have experienced my fair share of media engagement with BBC Horizon. There are many scientists, societies and government advisors completely immersed in outreach and policy that deserve more recognition. Undertaking a placement at the British Library has been a rewarding experience in itself and I would encourage future PhD students to consider the opportunity.

Stuart Smith is a PhD student studing the effect of livestock grazing on the carbon cycle at the University of Aberdeen and has finished his internship as part of the BBSRC policy placement scheme.