Identifying and understanding multiple benefits and trade-offs – this work aims to have developed approaches that will support integrated decision-making to protect multiple natural assets and maximise benefits in socially acceptable ways. We will have identified and quantified impacts on, and trade-offs among, multiple ecosystem services (ESS) generated by land use and land management change across spatial scales.

This will entail:

The aim of this research is to evaluate the potential to manage trade-offs and deliver multiple benefits from natural assets at the landscape scale. Focussing on agri-environment and woodland expansion schemes, together with integrated catchment management, the research uses practical examples to explore trade-offs and impacts taking into account social and cultural values as well environmental considerations in relation to land use and land use change.

To support the sustainable use and management of Scotland’s soil resource. We will provide new and improved tools to predict how soil functions respond to land use, management and environmental pressures.

To understand how  pressures such as problems arising from agricultural and urban land use and, increasingly, climate change affect the biophysical and ecological processes within our catchments.  The focus of the research is on understanding how the biophysical and ecological processes within water bodies operate and contribute to the delivery of ecosystem function and health.