URSULA Conference 2011

The last of the URSULA conferences was two day event held on the 17th and 18th of November in Sheffield. The theme was 'integrating multiple facets of river corridor development', so there were a diverse set of speakers, from both URSULA academics and students, and also external speakers.

Presentation abstracts and pdfs of slides for the speakers are available below:

Keynote lecture: Rivers Wild, Rivers Urban: How Do We Select Appropriate Restoration Strategies?
G.M. Kondolf

What we call ‘river restoration’ is undertaken in a wide range of environments, from natural parklands in North America that approach wilderness conditions, to dense urban grids in which river channels are commonly viewed as drainage utilities.   Given the vast differences in context of basin alteration, infrastructure needs, social demands of the waterways, and inherent differences in ecological potential, it follows that restoration approaches successfully employed in one context might fail in another.  An analysis of geomorphic, ecological, engineering, and social context should be prerequisite to restoration design.  Yet we often see form-based, bank-stabilized ‘restorations’ undertaken in otherwise natural environments, and riparian thickets proposed for urban neighbourhoods – both inappropriate applications of restoration methods that might be suitable in other contexts.

A first-level assessment is whether there is potential to allow the river to create its own forms through natural channel dynamics: Does the river possess sufficient stream power and sediment load?  Can we set aside a sufficient corridor in which the river channel can migrate, creating channel complexity and promoting riparian vegetation establishment (an Espace de Liberté)?  Or have the river’s flows and sediment loads been so reduced by upstream dams that it can no longer rebuild its naturally complex forms?  Or is it so encroached by urban development that there is insufficient room for a dynamic channel?  Even a highly modified urban river can become a vibrant element in the urban landscape, providing open-space and recreational benefits, along with some hint of wildness in the city.  Viewed on a continuum from the wild to the urban, we can articulate the range of restoration potential for rivers.  When we consider rivers that plot in intermediate positions, wherein some processes have been altered but others remain intact, we are forced to decide whether to accept a given change as a constraint, or view it as a restoration opportunity.  These are value judgments; they can be informed and constrained by science but are not fundamentally scientific questions. 

Guest speaker: Matt Kondolf, University of California-Berkeley
G. Mathias (Matt) Kondolf is a fluvial geomorphologist and environmental planner, specializing in environmental river management and restoration. He is Professor of Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches courses in hydrology, river restoration, environmental science, and Mediterranean-climate landscapes, and serves as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. He is currently the Clarke Scholar at the Institute for Water Resources of the US Army Corps of Engineers in Washington, and formerly served on the Environmental Advisory Board to the Chief of the Corps.  Professor Kondolf lectures and teaches short courses on river restoration in various countries. 

 

Issues in the Don Catchment
S. Ogden

A guided odyssey through the dense jungle of processes and competing priorities facing a local authority project team attempting to implement a progressive river regeneration/flood defence scheme in Central Sheffield.

Simon Ogden
Simon Ogden is a planner, urbanist and historian. For the past 25 years he has worked on regeneration in Sheffield including the renewal of the Lower Don Valley, restoration of the Sheffield Canal and setting up the Five Weirs Trust to reclaim the urban River Don. Since 1995 he has been focussed on transforming the main spaces of the City Centre and was the Project Officer for Peace Gardens and Millennium Square. He leads the Council’s City Development Division, an award-winning multi-disciplinary team specialising in regeneration and public realm which has helped change Sheffield's identity.

 

The wildlife and ecology of an urban river corridor
J.R. Rouquette, M. Dallimer, L. Maltby, P.R. Armsworth, K.J. Gaston, P.H. Warren  

Rivers can be severely affected by urbanisation with major impacts on ecology and wildlife.  On the other hand, urban rivers may offer one of the few opportunities for wildlife to reach into the heart of cities.  This talk will present the key findings of a major ecological survey of the River Don and its corridor in and around the city of Sheffield.  We examine aquatic macroinvertebrates, diatoms, birds, butterflies, dragonflies and plants, as well as a large number of physical and chemical habitat characteristics.  This talk will highlight the diversity of wildlife encountered and the impact of urbanisation.  The key patterns of wildlife distribution will be revealed, along with the factors driving these patterns.  We will examine whether the river corridor acts as a network for plants and animals and address whether different wildlife groups respond in the same or different ways to the impact of urbanisation.  Finally, we examine the impact of river corridor interventions on biodiversity, and outline implications for urban planning.   

Jim Rouquette
Jim originally trained as an ecologist and conservation biologist and has a particular focus on riverine and floodplain ecology and ecosystem services.  He is interested in determining how we can conserve our natural environment in the face of potentially conflicting land use pressures and this has led him to expand his interests to include issues of sustainability, integrated assessment and project appraisal.

Biodiversity and the feel-good factor
M. Dallimer

England is a heavily urbanised country, and for many, urban greenspaces are the only places where they encounter biodiversity.  This is of particular concern because there is growing evidence that human well-being is enhanced by exposure to nature. However, the specific qualities of greenspaces that offer the greatest benefits remain poorly understood. One possibility is that humans respond positively to greater biodiversity. Using riparian areas of the city of Sheffield as a study system, we use in situ questionnaires to assess the psychological well-being gains of human recreational users across a wide array of sites that differ in terms of greenspace structure, habitat type and biodiversity. We demonstrate the lack of a consistent relationship between the number of plant, butterfly, and bird species found in the sites and the psychological well-being of urban greenspace visitors. Instead, well-being shows a positive correlation with the richness that the greenspace users perceived to be present. The apparent importance of perceived species richness and the mismatch between reality and perception could pose serious challenges for aligning conservation and human well-being agendas.

Martin Dallimer
Martin worked as a member of the URSULA team here at Sheffield as an ecologist before moving onto a post at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

 

The hydrological performance of green roofs in a UK climatic context
V. Stovin

Rainfall and runoff data from a UK (Sheffield) green roof test bed has been collected between 01/01/2007 to 31/05/2009.  The monitoring period was fairly typical of the location’s long-term climatic averages, although the data set includes some extreme events in June 2007, which were associated with serious flooding locally.  To focus on the system’s performance under rainfall events likely to be of interest from an urban drainage/stormwater management perspective, return period analysis has been applied to identify those storm events with a rainfall depth in excess of 5 mm and a return period greater than one year.  According to these criteria, 22 significant events have been identified; of which 21 have reliable runoff records.  Overall the roof provided 50.2% rainfall retention, with a total volumetric retention equivalent to 30% during the significant events.  The roof’s finite retention depth means that retention declines as storm depth increases, and retention varied from between 0 and 20 mm, or 0 to 100%.  Some attenuation and delay of peak runoff is observed (on average 60% peak flow reduction for the 21 significant events).  An understanding of the hydrological processes affecting the flux of moisture into and out of the substrate required to explain the observed runoff response. 

Virginia Stovin
Dr Virginia Stovin is a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield.  She has 14 years postdoctoral experience in the field of urban drainage engineering, with a particular interest in stormwater management.  She leads UK research into retrofitting SUDS into established urban areas to address existing stormwater drainage-related problems.  As part of the University’s Green Roof Centre, she is investigating the stormwater retention performance of green (vegetated) roofs.  This work includes a number of instrumented full-scale and test-bed installations, and has EU-funded European industrial collaboration (Marie-Curie programme).  Detailed laboratory tests are being undertaken to develop a complete understanding of how specific green roof components function, supporting the development of a generic green roof hydrological (urban drainage) model.  In addition, ongoing work focuses on the use of computational fluid dynamics to understand and optimise the design of combined sewer overflows, sewer ancillary structures (particularly manholes) and SUDS ponds.
 

Climate and the opportunities to use SUDS
A. Hathway, S. Moore, V. Stovin, S.Sharples

Green and Blue Infrastructure is routinely cited as providing multiple benefits, particularly for climate change resilience. Since there are well known implications of dense urbanisation on both air temperatures and hydrology, it is unsurprising that resilience to heat waves and storm water are two commonly quoted improvements from utilising green infrastructure. This presentation will explore the effects of water on the local microclimate in the UK, including the impact of Sheffield’s rivers on the urban air temperatures. Through the use of different case study designs the interplay between Sustainable Drainage Systems (SUDS) and the local microclimate will be explored. These are used to evaluate the benefits for hydrology and air temperatures of two distinctly different site designs showing differences in SUDS performance and the microclimate with different selections, and layouts of SUDS devices. 

Abigail Hathway
Dr Hathway is Lecturer in Civil and Structural Engineering. Her research focuses on the ventilation and resulting comfort of both indoor and urban environments. Within URSULA she has been involved in field studies investigating the microclimate of Sheffield, alongside the case study work exploring the impact of urban design changes on the Urban Heat Island effect. She is also involved with research into microhydro power.

Integrated Access Assessment
M.Burton

Good access, or ‘connectivity’, is often cited as an essential component of high quality, sustainable urban development.  It is a multi-dimensional and multi-scaler concept that can mean different things to different disciplines and can be described using both quantitative and qualitative measures.    It is influenced by many factors relating to the built and natural environment and by users perceptions and preferences.   This complexity raises issues around how access can be meaningfully ‘assessed’ in relation to sustainable development proposals and how we can design for ‘sustainable’ access.  This paper explores some of these issues and the challenges in creating more accessible sustainable urban river corridor development.   

Mel Burton
Mel Burton is a Chartered Landscape Architect who worked for many years in the public and private sector, particularly in community engagement in design and urban green space regeneration, before joining 'academia'. She currently works for the University of Sheffield as a Research Fellow on the URSULA project and as Project Manager on 'MP4', a European project looking at place-keeping (the long term management of places), as well as teaching in the Department of Landscape.  She has particular interests in ecological design, evaluating landscape quality and community engagement in design and management of open spaces.

 

The impact of weirs in the Don Catchment
E.A. Shaw, V. Kumar, L. Gill, E. Lange & D.N. Lerner
 
Due to the history of industrial activity in and around Sheffield, the rivers and streams draining the Don Catchment are heavily impounded by weirs. Modification of these structures is expected to provide an important way the UK will achieve its Water Framework Directive targets. We review how impoundment by weirs affects river ecology, and river derived ecosystem services (i.e. the benefits people receive from river ecosystems), an evaluatory framework increasingly used to in environmental decision making.

It is found that the costs and benefits of weir modification are multiple, complicated, and not always clear cut. The impact of weir modification is highly dependent on a weir’s biotic, physical, economic and social context, and therefore weir modification decisions must be weighed up at an individual weir basis, whilst maintaining the strategic overview that is essential if the effect of multiple weirs on catchment wide processes is to be accounted for. Weir modification does not necessarily increase the provision of all ecosystem services, and so decision making is about finding the best trade-offs between them. Surprisingly weirs may sometimes have a positive impact on river ecology, though whether and to what degree this is the case is unclear and requires further investigation.

Ed Shaw
Ed is in his final year as a PhD student, here at the University of Sheffield.  He is currently writing up his research on the integrated catchment management of weirs. His interests include freshwater ecology, ecosystem services, and environmental modelling and decision making.

 

Micro-Hydropower – Impacts & Opportunities
N. Johnson and C. Leonard

Micro-hydropower systems use water from rivers to generate electricity (<100kW) for individuals and small communities.  Widely considered as one of the most environmentally-friendly and reliable forms of renewable energy, they are now increasingly regarded as an ideal ‘clean’ solution to our rising energy needs.  As a consequence, a growing number of schemes are being implemented in river systems across the UK.

However, there is increasing concern about noise nuisance.  If micro-hydro is to penetrate into our cities, noise evaluation will become a key issue in choice of potential sites and planning applications.  Currently there is very little available information about the noise generation from Archimedean screw turbines and the resulting propagation of their sound in an urban environment.

The extent and significance of any ecological changes caused by these systems is also currently unknown.  Micro-hydropower schemes rely on the impoundment and abstraction of water – both existing stressors on watercourses, although usually occurring separately.  These structures bring the potential for alteration of local flow regime and habitat availability, potentially affecting ecological community structure and disrupting the ecological functioning of rivers.

Results are presented from work assessing the 1) acoustical and 2) ecological impact of micro-hydropower schemes.

Neil Johnson and Catherine Leonard
Neil graduated from the school of earth and environment at Leeds in 2007 with a BSc (hons) in Environmental Science and worked for an environmental consultant in their planning team, specifically on EIA’s for Energy from Waste projects. He is currently undertaking a PhD in the Acoustics of Micro-hydro at the University of Sheffield.
Catherine is a PhD student in the Dept of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield, focusing on ecological implications of low-head micro-hydropower.  Prior to joining the URSULA team in 2009, Cat graduated with a degree in Marine and Freshwater Biology and has also spent time working as a Freshwater Ecologist in the Environment Agency.

Testing the usefulness of a tool to aid Integrated Catchment Management 
E.A. Shaw, V. Kumar, L. Gill, E. Lange & D.N. Lerner 

Integrated Catchment Management (ICM) advocates the consideration of multiple management objectives together in the decision making process rather than as unconnected separate issues. To deliver ICM, many integrated models are being created to be used as tools that predict how catchment interventions affect multiple management objectives. It is generally assumed that if applied, these tools will improve decision making. The presentation discusses how this assumption can be tested.

A tool was created to predict how weir modifications such as fish passes affect multiple river ecosystem services in the Don Catchment, UK. These ecosystem services included eel productivity, conservation of an endangered and spread of an invasive crayfish, hydroelectricity generation and river quality for canoeing. In an experiment this tool was used to make hypothetical management decisions, and the quality of the decision making was compared to a control decision making process representative of current practice in the catchment. The experiment was designed to evaluate decision quality by gauging efficiency and moderateness of decisions made, and by measuring the confidence and knowledge gained by participating decision makers. Preliminary results indicate that users of the tool learnt less information about the environmental issue of weir impoundment compared to the more conventional approach, but that they made more effective decisions with respect to certain management objectives. These results have implications for the design and utilisation of tools to deliver ICM.

Urban blue corridors & surface water management
M.Timmins

Under the Flood and Water Management Act (2010) and Flood Risk Regulations (2009) local authorities have been given a new set of roles and responsibilities, which include developing Local Flood Risk Management Strategies (LFRMS) to set out how flood risk will be managed in their local area.  Urban Blue Corridors represent a new way of thinking about opportunities and solutions to urban flood risk management and can be applied at the local authority scale (strategic) as well as at a Master planning scale (community / neighbourhood) and site-specific scale. 

Surface Water Management Plans (SWMPs) follow a four phase process to forge partnerships, identify flood risks and management options and develop implementation plans.  An SWMP can help to inform an LFRMS and, to be successful, both studies must identify and take into account links to other strategies and plans relevant to the local area.  Successful flood risk management might include designated overland flow paths, surface water ponding areas, urban watercourse buffer areas and multi-use flood storage areas.  By linking these solutions together, LLFAs can begin to more effectively manage urban flood risk.  The development and delivery of Urban Blue Corridors offers the potential for the delivery of multiple social, environmental and economic benefits from multifunctional land use, and offers the opportunity to deliver climate change resilient development.

Guest speaker: Michael Timmins, URS Scott Wilson
Michael Timmins is currently the Operations Manager for the Water and Environment Team nationally and oversees the day to day running of the business unit.  He has over 12 years of consultancy, water and flood risk management experience both in the UK and internationally.  Michael has project experience with clients from both the public and private sectors.  More recently, he has become involved with Surface Water Management Plans (Leicester, Wolverhampton and Drain London in particular) and the most suitable methods for predicting and modelling surface water flooding.  As Scott Wilson Project Group Manager for the Environment Agency Strategic Flood Risk Management Framework (SFRM2), he is responsible for the smooth running of the framework and for ensuring that projects are resourced properly and delivered to programme and budget.  He has been involved with and project managed several Strategic Flood Risk Assessments at URS Scott Wilson and Strategic Flood Risk Mapping, Flood Forecasting and Catchment Strategies for the Environment Agency.  Many of these studies have involved multiple clients consisting of groups of Councils and other stakeholders including the Environment Agency, local politicians and other consultants.

 

The Network Governance of Urban River Corridors
P.Moug

‘Network governance’ denotes relatively diffuse, informal decision making, problem solving and implementation processes involving state and non-state actors. To some commentators the idea of network governance is argued to be both more effective -  for example, in harnessing the resources of a wide range of actors - and democratic - in the sense that a wider range of ‘voices’ have a say in decision making and action - than traditional, hierarchical ‘government’. However, others question the distinctiveness and novelty of ‘network governance’. The aim of this research is to understand the development of the internal structure and relations of a ‘waterways strategy group’ within the context of an urban river corridor network and to assess whether the above image of network governance can be appropriately applied to this Group.

‘Qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ research approaches were ‘combined’ across the research process in research design, data collection and reporting. For example, data were collected through the simultaneous carrying out of quantitative questionnaires and qualitative interviews with Group members. The research found that to a significant extent the Group is ‘closed’ and ‘close’: members are invited to join; and ‘core’ members tend to share strong interpersonal links developed over many years involvement in river-related activities. Members particularly valued the Group as a ‘meeting place’ or ‘hub’ in the river development network; and most are well connected and central figures in this network. However, actual and aspiring relations were skewed towards those seen as powerful and useful to the Group’s strategic ‘vision’. Relations with actors perceived as less relevant to, or less able and willing to engage in, ‘strategic’ issues were less developed.

The analysis of the Group raises questions concerning the form that river corridor governance ought to take: what (if anything) needs to change? The presentation concludes by arguing for a closer, but context sensitive, integration of ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ individuals, and their knowledge, perspectives and interests, in network governance and decision making.

Peter Moug
Peter is a Social Researcher on the URSULA project. He was awarded a PhD in Politics from the University of Edinburgh in 2008, and his research interests now focus on theoretical and empirical aspects of governance and democracy.

 

Participatory governance in action: the case of the Five Weirs Walk project
E. Sharp

This presentation will explore ideas about participatory governance and active citizenship through a close examination of the development of the Five Weirs Walk, an innovative riverside access project in Sheffield. Originally the vision of a handful of individuals, this ambitious project was developed and steered to completion over more than two decades by a charitable trust, and became a key element in the regeneration of the city’s River Don corridor. This paper will examine who was involved in the project and how they achieved their aims, looking in detail at some particular challenges and how these were overcome. The attributes, knowledge and connections of core activists emerge as a crucial element in the success of the project, highlighting both the politics of expertise and the strategic value of boundary-crossing between the public, private and voluntary sectors. This enabled the project to be positioned at an early stage within the strategic plans of powerful public institutions, and to secure not only help in kind but crucial support in overcoming difficulties related to land ownership and public access.

The project’s wider engagement with supporter constituencies will also be explored, looking especially at the important but intermittent involvement of interest groups and neighbourhood-based organisations. The project’s achievements will be discussed in the light of the widespread assumption that the involvement of people outside government leads to outcomes that are both more democratic and more effective. While such ideas have for some time played a prominent role in policy making, service delivery and academic analysis, it is worth asking how the desire for community-based action sits alongside the practicalities of developing and implementing a major public amenity project, and what light this casts on the nature of participation and active citizenship.

Liz Sharp
Liz Sharp is a senior lecturer in Environmental policy and governance at the University of Bradford.  She has carried out extensive research probing social, institutional and participatory aspects of water management, and has a particular interest in public engagement in water planning and action.  Her research has been supported by the research funding councils, water companies, the Environment Agency and Government. She leads the social science components of the Pennine Water Group, a leading water research group spanning Bradford and Sheffield Universities, and has overseen the ‘People’ theme within the URSULA project.   

Exploring locals' preferences for greening in urban river corridors 
J. Henneberry

Green and blue infrastructure produces multiple economic, social and environmental benefits for urban areas. In order to maximise such benefits, it is important that green investments are designed to meet the preferences of the local communities that use them. The presentation describes the results of two large-scale surveys of residents’, commuters’ and employees’ preferences for and willingness-to-pay for alternative forms of urban greening. The greening related to street trees; to river footbridge, flood prevention and landscaping work; and to the nature of neighbourhood treatments in the Wicker Riverside area of Sheffield. Across the three cases, the greener was the investment the more people valued it, whatever its other characteristics might be.

John Henneberry
John Henneberry is Professor of Property Development at the University of Sheffield, Department of Town and Regional Planning. His research focuses on the structure and behaviour of the property market and its relations with the wider economy and state regulatory systems. Currently, he is exploring the influence of green infrastructure on property values and on the decisions of property developers, investors and users. This work is funded by EPSRC, through URSULA, and by the EC through an Interreg NWE IVB project on Valuing Attractive Landscapes in Urban Economies (VALUE).

URSULA as a collaborative process: accomplishing success
S. Molyneux-Hodgson

Given the attention and funds that are paid to the pursuit of collaborative research, the process and products of such research have themselves become subject to research scrutiny. Concurrently, the character of collective knowledge making is of inherent social scientific interest. We can ask, for example, how do collaborative projects generate valuable knowledge?

The ways in which researchers experience the life of collaborative research is rarely studied. To address this, the URSULA project was explored ‘from the inside’. A sub-set of URSULA researchers conducted a series of interviews with other project participants in order to understand their perspectives and experiences as part of the project. The interviews were transcribed and systematically analysed using an agreed coding frame.

This presentation will focus on one aspect of the analysis completed so far: namely ‘meanings of success’. What counts as success in collaborative work, in terms of institutional structures, an individual’s work life and inter-disciplinary relations within the project as a whole, will be discussed. We posit that the notion of ‘reasoning together’ is an essential aspect of how researchers’ contributions to collective work are made meaningful.

Susie Hodgson
Dr Susan Molyneux-Hodgson is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield. Her main research interests are in the sociology of scientific knowledge production and the emergence and reproduction of scientific communities. Prior to URSULA she was Lead Investigator on ‘Water, Environment and Society’, an ESRC/NERC funded seminar series.

 

Urban Forms and the sustainable living agenda URSULA Case Study: Wicker Riverside, Sheffield
L. Pattacini

The Wicker Riverside along the river Don in Sheffield is earmarked for regeneration with numerous derelict brownfield sites awaiting new development.  The first part of this contribution will briefly introduce the approach chosen by the URSULA design research team for the case study.   The main characteristics of the radically different hypothetical development scenarios will be explained to provide the contextual information forming the basis of the integrated assessment related to sustainability performance.
The second part of this contribution will focus on life between buildings, revisiting the design options from the users’ point of view.   Through references to Interviews with the local community, the comments and aspirations of local users are examined in relation to the aspirations and opinions of the experts to identify the potential discrepancies between quantifiable technical evidence and the human perception and experience of spaces.

Laurence Pattacini
Laurence is particularly interested in spaces and life between buildings.  Through practice, research and teaching she is exploring new forms and ideas to meet the complex sustainability agenda.   She qualified as an architect in Versailles and completed her Masters in Urban Design at Oxford Brookes University.  She has worked in several European countries and has an extensive experience in landscape architectural practice.  She has been teaching for the past twelve years and was involved in several research projects in the UK.    Her main research interests lie in sustainable urban environments, urban forms and people’s perception of landscape.

Developing sustainable urban riversides
J.R. Rouquette, V. Kumar, S. Hornby and D.N. Lerner

Following years of neglect, urban river corridors are now prime targets for redevelopment, offering the opportunity to create mixed use, high-density and high-quality environments.  If carefully designed, with a focus on the river, these urban areas can provide multiple social, environmental and economic benefits to society.  Using a case study site in Sheffield, UK, three alternative scenarios have been developed, incorporating a number of possible riverside design features.  These were focussed around integrated urban water management, microclimate regulation, enhancing public access, and river restoration.  Each scenario was fully designed and visualised using a variety of different media and a sustainability appraisal was undertaken using a broad range of environmental, social and economic indicators.  This talk will focus on the findings of the sustainability appraisal and its use as a tool for sustainable urban design.

Jim Rouquette
Jim originally trained as an ecologist and conservation biologist and has a particular focus on riverine and floodplain ecology and ecosystem services.  He is interested in determining how we can conserve our natural environment in the face of potentially conflicting land use pressures and this has led him to expand his interests to include issues of sustainability, integrated assessment and project appraisal.

 

Integrated modelling for sustainability assessment for urban riversides
V. Kumar

Sustainability Appraisal (SA) is mandatory under the relevant legislation of UK (DCLG, 2008a) and applies to the preparation of Regional Spatial Strategies, Development Plans and Supplementary Planning documents. SA is a complex task that involves integration of social, environmental and economic considerations into a formal plan; it often requires trade-off between multiple stakeholders that may not easily be brought to consensus. Classical assessment can facilitate discussion, but these can only partially inform decision makers as many important aspects of sustainability are too abstract.  Integrated assessment (IA) is a structured process of dealing with complex interdisciplinary issues, using knowledge from various scientific disciplines and/or stakeholders, such that integrated insights are made available to decision makers. IA is based on combining, interpreting and communicating knowledge from diverse scientific disciplines to policy in such a way that an entire cause–effect chain of a problem can be evaluated from a synoptic perspective. Integrating a broader set of studies, approaches and points of view coming from different scientific areas interacting among each other provides more and better information on the issue assessed than single disciplinary studies added up. Such integrated models can be developed using a Bayesian Network (BN), which combine expert opinions, empirical evidence and other information such as model simulation, survey etc. The BN approach is based on a directional graph representing cause-effect relationships in the system. These relationships are specified as conditional probabilities, which can be derived from empirical data or model simulations, or elicited from experts.

This presentation will discuss the work of the URSULA project at the University of Sheffield, in which a participative and integrative approach to urban river corridor development, incorporating the principle of sustainability, was used. The project used a case study site in Sheffield, UK, and three alternative scenarios were developed, incorporating a number of possible riverside design features.  Scenarios were fully designed and visualised using a variety of different media, and a sustainability appraisal undertaken using a broad range of environmental, social and economic indicators. Experts’ assessment logics were captured through mind mapping and further expert elicitation was used to develop an integrated model for SA. The BN approach allows model complexity to be reduced to a level appropriate for the assessment process, whilst still taking complex system interactions implicitly into account. The integrated SA model is used to develop a "better" design by highlighting important elements which can be modified to improve the (re)development plan.

Vikas Kumar
Vikas is currently a research associate in the URSULA Project. He received his first degree with distinction in Agriculture Engineering from the Benaras Hindu University, India. He received the Junior Research Fellowship in Computer Application and completed his Masters in Computer Application from IARI, New Delhi, India. He was awarded the Nehru Memorial Gold Medal for outstanding performance. He obtained his PhD (cum laude) in the area of environmental risk assessment from the University of Rovira i Virgili in Spain.  Vikas has research interests in the area of system modelling, soft-computing, environmental risk assessment, uncertainty analysis, and intelligent data modelling.

Integrating data with interactive visualisations
L. Gill, E. Lange, E. Morgan, D. Romano

Researchers in the URSULA project have produced detailed interactive three dimensional digital models for several possible future scenarios of an area of Sheffield.  These landscape models have been used to conduct research into their position within the landscape design and planning processes.  Topics in this talk will cover the construction of these models and supporting software tools, their usage within the project, novel approaches to communicating these models and how the visualisations have presented a centralised method for integration and exchange of data.

Lewis Gill
Lewis is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield with a background in Computer Science and Geographic Information Systems. In his research, he is examining the role of interactive 3D landscape models in the landscape design and planning process.