Access and integration

Land and water managers are facing a complex array of regulatory and societal pressures to meet the challenge of securing greater food and water security without damaging our natural capital and the flow of ecosystem services. For Instance, the idea of Sustainable Intensification (SI) - a means of increasing food production without increasing (or ideally reducing) the environmental footprint of agriculture including diffuse pollution - has emerged as a powerful response to the challenges facing the agricultural industry and the science community. As a complex interaction of internal biogeochemical, ecological and hydrological processes are the fundamentals of catchment science, SI and diffuse pollution issues require representation of these interactions in models and tools if they are to be useful to the wide array of policy, industry and NGOs operating in this area.

The challenge to the community is to develop new integrated data-model systems which are robust, useable and available to the breadth of the user community in the field, while also adequately reflect the mix of abiotic and biotic processes and outcomes which underpin key ecosystem services. There is an opportunity to exploit work ongoing in this field from fundamental biogeochemical and biodiversity research and to exploit the potential opportunities of web-based solutions to enable more integrated community involvement. The primary objective of CaMMP is to provide a forum and platform for the wider community to communicate and engage to create more sustainable, effective and efficient management of catchment resources at the UK scale. 

Expertise and experience

The Catchment Management for Water Quality project has assembled a focussed team with direct experience in water quality and catchment management issues and with a track record of managing large community projects:

• a breadth of the community focussed on research, policy and industry capabilities,
• national coverage and holders and users of many core data,
• ownership models and data which are industry standards( e.g. Farmscoper, SAGIS, LCM 2007), 
• has long experience bringing together the research and enduser community and negotiating licensing and IPR agreements to develop metamodels and modelling frameworks (e.g. Farmscoper, SAGIS, JULES) for the benefit of the whole community
• developing web-based data and model platforms (e.g. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre; Countryside Survey data portal; EVO Global modelling exemplar) 
• international links in the field of integrated modelling (Earthcube; EnSym; SUN SEEA, ESSP etc)