About the projects

the Environmental Virtual Observatory is a new and exciting pilot project which is bringing together environmental data, models and visualisation tools to assist environmental decision making is working with the Demonstration Test Catchment project in the river Eden in Cumbria, UK. The Morland catchment in the River Eden valley is one of three exemplars in the pilot phase of the project being used to demonstrate how the NERC Environmental Virtual Observatory (EVO) will work at the local landscape scale. The pilot EVO is a proof of concept project to develop and exploit the use of new internet-based computing applications for accessing, interrogating, modelling and visualising environmental data. As a whole, the vision of the Environmental Virtual Observatory is to:

• Make environmental data more visible and accessible to a wide range of potential users and free to use for public good applications;

•  Provide tools to facilitate the integrated analysis of data, greater access to added knowledge and expert analysis and visualisation of the results; 

• Develop new, added-value  knowledge from public and private sector data assets to help tackle environmental challenges.

If you would like to learn more about the Environmental Virtual Observatory pilot project, please visit the website: http://www.evo-uk.org/.

The main focus of our work in the Morland catchment of the Eden is developing ways of visualising environmental data collected by the Eden DTC relating to issues such as flooding and diffuse pollution. Through these visualisations, we want to provide information to learn about the local environment, share knowledge between people and assist in decisions made by people within the local community and more widely.

Designing tools to visualise environmental information that is accessible to a wide range of users means that we need the local community’s help to ensure that what we produce is something that is usable and that you would want to use it in the future. We are therefore carrying out a series of workshops in Morland to ask local people to help us do this. If you are interested in getting involved in our project, please contact Ellie Mackay on the contact details at the end of this post. We will use this space on the EdenDTC website to provide updates on how our work in Morland is progressing – so watch this space! We also welcome any comments or suggestions that you have on the project - please leave us a message in the comment section below.

Ellie Mackay, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YQ.
E: e.mackay@lancaster.ac.uk T: 07807 504385      

For further information on EVOp : contact Dr Lucy Ball, EVOp Project Manager,
Tel 01491 692346 – lball@ceh.ac.uk – enquiries to pvo@ceh.ac.uk.