5th UKEOF conference | 13 February 2025 | Online
Title: Climate change: evidence and impacts on UK environments and resources
When: 13 February 2025, 09:00 - 15:45
Where: Online
Registration fee: FREE
Social media: #ukeof2025
Introduction
This year the focus of the annual UKEOF conference is on climate change impacts on the natural environment in the UK. The meeting will involve experts from academia, research institutes and government bodies, and will include a mix of presentations and interactive Q&A sessions.
We are very pleased to welcome Professor Beth Scott (University of Aberdeen) and Professor Ed Hawkins (University of Reading) as keynote speakers, together with a broad range of other specialists from across atmospheric, terrestrial, freshwater and marine domains.
The goals of the conference are to:
- demonstrate how environmental observations are informing our understanding of the impacts of climate change on UK ecosystems, biodiversity and natural resources
- consider the need and potential to respond/adapt to such changes
- identify areas where greater observational effort and data integration is most required.
The event is relevant to all with an interest in tracking, understanding and responding to climate change impacts on the UK’s natural environment.
You can find the programme below. We recommend subscribing to our mailing list so that we can keep you informed.
Programme
| 09:00 | Introduction and first polling session |
| 09:20 | KEYNOTE 1: Types of tipping points, climate change and the future of offshore energy - Professor Beth Scott, University of Aberdeen |
| 09:40 | Climate trends from UK to global - Dr Kate Willett, Met Office |
| 09:55 | Q & A panel |
| 10:05 | Evidence to support flood and drought management: Floods and Droughts Research Infrastructure - Dr Gareth Old, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) |
| 10:20 | Evidence of change in hydrological systems - Jamie Hannaford, UKCEH - with Environment Agency input |
| 10:35 | Building the evidence for nature-based solutions - Dr Mike Morecroft, Natural England |
| 10:50 | Q & A panel |
| 11:00 | BREAK |
| 11:10 | From macro to micro climate - Dr Debbie Hemming, Met Office |
| 11:25 | Climate change impacts on UK habitats: Biological records data and evidence - Dr Oli Pescott, UKCEH |
| 11:40 | Climate impacts on UK freshwater ecosystems - Dr Steve Thackeray, UKCEH |
| 11:55 | Q & A panel |
| 12:05 | Buffering climate-driven extinctions in a montane butterfly: are there genetic refuges? - Dr Melissa Minter, RSPB |
| 12:20 | Phenology shifts, trophic match/mismatch and buffering in a forest food web - Dr Ally Phillimore, University of Edinburgh |
| 12:35 | MarClim: marine biodiversity and climate change - Dr Nova Mieszkowska, Marine Biological Association |
| 12:50 | Q & A panel |
| 13:00 | LUNCH |
| 13:40 | KEYNOTE 2: The value of climate data rescue - Professor Ed Hawkins, University of Reading |
| 14:00 | Net Zero policies and land-use: what are the implications of climate change? - Dr Amanda Thomson, UKCEH |
| 14:15 | Modelling crop response under climate change (and beyond) - Dr Mike Rivington, JHI |
| 14:30 | Q & A panel |
| 14:40 | Understanding the effect of historic climate change on pathogens and vectors in Europe - Dr Dominic Brass, UKCEH |
| 14:55 | Modelling lake thermal responses to climate change - Dr Iesytn Woolway, Bangor University |
| 15:10 | Accounting for land cover in a habitat specific analysis of the responses of British birds to future climate change - Beckie George, University of East Anglia |
| 15:25 | Q & A panel |
| 15:35 | Final polling session |
| 15:45 | Wrap up and conference close |
About the speakers / abstracts of talks
| About | abstracts |
|---|---|
| Beth Scott is a Professor in Marine Ecology, University of Aberdeen. She conducts multi-disciplinary research in marine ecology with focus on using combinations of instrumentation for identification of critical marine habitats and temporal clues where/when mobile predator and prey species interact. Her recent research portfolio has been directed at the understanding of the effects of marine renewable energy systems on multi-trophic interactions to better incorporate ecosystem service and climate change knowledge into effective policies. | The talk will cover 4 main points. The first will be exploring how to use marine environment relationships to predict critical tipping-points of habitat values that are important to predator-prey relationships (e.g. seabirds & fish /prey). The second explores effects of climate change on point 1 – and focuses on what are likely changes and important tipping points between predator-prey spatial overlap? The 3rd explores if ecosystem approaches can identify tipping points from the combination of climate change and offshore wind effects on population trends? The last asks the question if there are tipping points in climate change-oriented policy making? |
| Kate Willett is an Expert Scientist in the Climate Monitoring and Attribution team within the Met Office. She has worked extensively with observations from weather stations and ships across the globe with a particular focus on humidity and humid-heat. She has lead, and now co-edits, the Global Climate chapter from the internationally acclaimed Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s annual State of the Climate reports and contributed to several IPCC reports. | Climate change is everywhere. Even in the UK’s more moderate climate there are damaging events that would be extremely unlikely with pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases. We have observed climate change in warming oceans and air, rising sea levels, melting sea ice, more moisture and heatwaves, heavier rainfall, widespread droughts and wildfire, and changing weather patterns. But there are observation gaps in time and space, and quality issues, limiting our ability to fully understand extremes and their impacts on society and the environment. Here I present an overview of the observing system from global to the UK scale. |
| Gareth Old is a principal hydrologist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. His research has focused on catchment hydrology, observing hydrological processes under extreme events. Through projects for Defra, the Environment Agency and Natural England he has synthesised evidence for the effectiveness of agri-environment schemes and specified appropriate future monitoring programmes. His current research focuses on the effectiveness of nature based solutions in mitigating hydrological extremes and the development of monitoring infrastructures to enable further research and innovation. | The UK continues to be a global leader in hydrology with excellence in field observations, data science, and modelling. With widespread anthropogenic impacts on our landscape (including land use and management change) and our rapidly changing climate, the need to fill key knowledge gaps in hydrological understanding has never been greater. Organisations charged with developing and implementing policies to mitigate impacts of hydrological extremes on UK environments and resources require a robust evidence base to inform decisions and enable their future evaluation and adaptation. The NERC funded UK Floods and Droughts Research Infrastructure will help address this need. |
| Mike Morecroft is Deputy Director for Climate Change Science at Natural England. He leads the Nature Returns programme on nature-based solutions, which brings together science, land management, green finance and community engagement. Mike was Coordinating Lead Author on ecosystems for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) most recent assessment report and is a Visiting Professor at Reading University. He did his PhD at Cambridge and led a research group at the UKCEH before joining Natural England. | Nature-based solutions (nbs) aim to tackle societal problems in ways that benefit both people and nature. They have the potential to contribute to climate change adaptation and mitigation at the same time as supporting nature recovery. I will give an overview of the concept of the nbs, its international context, potential and some of the challenges, before going on to talk about how we are building the evidence base through the Nature Returns programme, working with local partnerships that are creating habitats around England. |
| Deborah Hemming is the Scientific Manager of the Vegetation-Climate Interactions team at the Met Office Hadley Centre. She completed an MSc in applied meteorology and climatology and PhD in plant science followed by two post-doc posts in Arizona, USA and Israel monitoring and modelling tree and forest ecosystem responses to climate extremes. Since joining the Met Office, she has focused on improving understanding and modelling of vegetation-climate interactions and providing useful tools and services for end users. | A key challenge for understanding species and ecosystem responses to environmental changes is bridging the gap in scales between the microclimates in which most organisms live and the meteorological observations and models used to study these responses. This presentation will highlight some of our recent work with colleagues from Defra's Plant Health team, Exeter University, Forest Research and Royal Botanical Gardens Kew to improve the estimation of plant pest risks by modelling and monitoring microclimate variables within pest habitats. Monitoring microclimates to validate model estimates proved particularly challenging, although rapidly evolving 'internet of things' technologies may address this need. |
| Oli Pescott is a plant ecologist specializing in volunteer-collected botanical datasets ("citizen science"), with a focus on bias assessment. He developed ROBITT, the first "risk-of-bias" tool for ecological descriptive inference. His expertise spans field and analytical ecology, contributing to the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 as a surveyor, analyst, and editor. He is Recording Secretary for the British Bryological Society, BSBI referee for alien grasses, and Oxfordshire's bryophyte recorder. His interests include invasive species, biodiversity change, and uncertainty communication in trend analyses. | Volunteer-based plant and habitat monitoring provide crucial evidence for assessing biodiversity trends and environmental change. Primarily using data from Plant Atlas 2020 and the National Plant Monitoring Scheme (NPMS), this talk will highlight key findings and resources relating to species distributions, abundance trends, and habitat change across the UK. Results reveal shifts in plant communities linked to climate change and land use, with distinct patterns across habitats. Climate exposure assessments show varying impacts on monitored sites, informing future conservation priorities. While volunteer datasets have limitations, targeted improvements in coverage and design can further enhance their power for ecological inference and policy development. |
| Steve Thackeray is a freshwater ecologist and leads the Lake Ecosystems Group at UKCEH. His research focuses on long-term change in lake ecosystems, in response to multiple pressures, and he has a particular interest in the ecology of plankton communities, and changes in the seasonal behaviour (phenology) of lake ecosystems. He is freshwater co-chair of the Aquatic Ecology Special Interest Group of the British Ecological Society. | Freshwater ecosystems host disproportionately high biodiversity, globally, and provide society with many benefits. However, they are imperilled by multiple pressures, not least the impact of a changing climate. This talk will show evidence of climate impacts on UK freshwater ecosystems, taking examples from rivers and lakes, and using both long-term and high-frequency monitoring data. Climate impacts are already discernible over decadal, seasonal, and episodic scales, but there exist many challenges in picking apart the complexities of these freshwater ecosystem responses. An open question is whether we can integrate diverse data sources to better understand these impacts. |
| Melissa Minter is a Conservation Scientist at RSPB, working on future scenarios of treescape expansion to meet net zero targets. Previously, she was a PhD researcher at the University of York, with NatureScot and Natural England. Genetic diversity allows species to adapt to future changes, and cold-adapted montane species are at the highest risk under future climatic changes. Her PhD aimed to examine the genetic diversity of the mountain ringlet butterfly Erebia epiphron in relation to past and future climate change, in order to inform conservation interventions. | Many cold-adapted montane species are at risk from climate change, and have experienced extinctions at their warm low elevation range margins. Genetic diversity allows species to adapt to future changes, and so I use DNA sequencing and species distribution modelling to understand past, present and future distributions of genetic diversity of the montane butterfly Erebia epiphron across Europe. I then explore populations in the UK, to identify any genetic refugia or at-risk populations under future climate change. While this is one species, these results are applicable to other montane species which conservation interventions of at-risk populations will be necessary to ensure the survival of genetic diversity under future climate change. |
| Ally Phillimore's major focus is on predicting how climate change will impact on forest food webs. Specifically, he's interested in identifying how spring temperatures impact on species phenology and how this in turn influences trophic interactions, fitness and population trends. Together, with colleagues on the phenoweb project, Ally has been studying the spring phenology of trees, caterpillars and blue tits across 44 sites in Scotland since 2014. | Given widespread evidence that the phenology of many species is shifting as temperatures rise, there has been mounting concern that trophic interactions will become mismatched. I will discuss the data available for examining the prevalence and consequences of such mismatches. My talk will draw on insights we have obtained from our work on forest food webs that have typically been thought of as particularly susceptible to mismatch. Our work has identified buffers that may make foster resilience in food webs. I will discuss the data we need to better understand how fragile or resilient interactions are likely to be. |
| Nova Mieszkowska is a Reader at the University of Liverpool and Senior Fellow at the Marine Biological Association. She has two and a half decades of experience intertidal surveying and research, and runs the MarClim long-term time-series, tracking and forecasting changes in biogeographic distributions of rocky shore invertebrates and algae around the UK coastline. Her work has taken her to the forefront of UK and European policy and conservation: authoring and editing assessments, developing GES indicators, and providing evidence for UK MPA designation. | MarClim is a government-funded monitoring, forecasting, and assessment project that tracks the impacts of climate change on the abundance and distribution of rocky intertidal species. The time-series dates back to the 1950s, with annual data at 100 sites around the UK coastline since 2002. MarClim is the most spatio-temporally extensive time-series globally, and records data on the abundance and distribution of 82 species of macroalgae and invertebrate of boreal, lusitanian, and invasive origins. It has shown some of the fastest shifts in biogeographic distributions in response to climate change in any natural system, and species-specific responses that are altering ecosystem structure. |
| Ed Hawkins is a climate scientist in the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 6th Assessment Report. His research examines how and why the climate has changed since the industrial revolution, including examining historical extreme weather events. He also leads Weather Rescue - a set of citizen science projects involving thousands of volunteers - which are recovering millions of lost Victorian-era weather observations from hand-written archives and turning them into invaluable digital data. He also developed the 'warming stripes' visualisations of global temperature change. | n/a |
| Amanda Thomson (UKCEH) has worked on the development and delivery of greenhouse gas emissions and sinks from land-use for 20 years, as lead scientist for the land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector of the national GHG inventory. Her current work focusses on the contribution of LULUCF-related activities to Net Zero GHG mitigation targets in the UK and abroad, providing scientific and policy analysis/advice to the UK and devolved governments, the Committee on Climate Change and local authorities. | The UK has ambitious GHG mitigation targets for Net Zero in 2050, and the national UK greenhouse gas inventory is used to track progress on these targets. Work on emissions projections and mitigation scenario pathways to assess the impact of land-based policies is starting to consider climate change impacts as well. So far impacts have limited visibility in the inventory, but have significant potential to derail progress towards Net Zero without adaptation. |
| Mike Rivington studies how climate change impacts land use, Natural Capital and ecosystem services using climate projections to visualise the future through spatially applied crop simulation models, agrometeorological indicators and Land Capability for Agriculture. He is the Scottish Government Strategic Research Programme Theme Lead on ‘Human Impacts on the Environment’. He has written UNEP policy briefs on ecosystem-based adaptation, US National Climate Assessment chapter on agriculture, UK-US tasks force member on extreme weather and resilience of the global food system. | We will explore challenges of applying crop models spatially under a future climate. Specifically, we consider the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle: field-scale farmer supplied observations on management and crop growth that enables model calibration and testing. We present a new online free to use data exchange, crop monitoring and decision support platform – Our Smart Farm to help overcome this issue. We use this platform and examples of spatially applied crop modelling to flag the need to change the culture of data exchange and sharing to address the current climate, biodiversity and food security (poly)crises. |
| Dominic Brass is an epidemiological modeller at UKCEH, specialising in developing environmentally driven mathematical models for vector-borne disease systems. His work focuses on understanding the population dynamics of mosquito vectors of dengue and West Nile viruses and tick vectors of Lymes borreliosis and tick-borne encephalitis virus. | The epidemiology of many environmentally sensitive pathosystems is currently undergoing rapid change. Understanding how environmental factors drive pathogen incidence is therefore key for enhancing preparedness to future risks. We used two different mathematical modelling approaches to understand how the suitability of the European climate has changed for Ixodes ricinus, the primary European vector of Lyme's borreliosis, and for a range Phytophthora species, plant pathogens which have caused epidemic outbreaks in UK trees. In both cases we demonstrate that multi-decadal shifts in the European climate have resulted in a rapidly increasing suitability in northern Europe and increasing unsuitability in the south. |
| Iestyn Woolway, Reader and NERC Independent Research Fellow at Bangor University, focuses on climate change impacts, particularly on global environmental change. His research supports resource managers in addressing ecosystem climate vulnerabilities for conservation and management. Using cutting-edge methods, he integrates field observations, satellite data, and model simulations to provide insights into how climate change affects lakes, offering strategies to mitigate impacts and enhance environmental decision-making in the face of a changing climate | Lakes are sensitive sentinels of climate change, responding to variations in temperature, precipitation, and wind. This talk explores the use of physical and numerical models to predict lake thermal responses under changing climate scenarios. We’ll examine how changes in surface temperatures, stratification patterns, and mixing dynamics impact lake ecosystems, biogeochemical cycles, and ecosystem services. By leveraging data from high-resolution climate models and observational datasets, we highlight emerging trends and uncertainties in thermal behaviour across diverse lake systems. Understanding these responses is critical for mitigating ecological risks, managing freshwater resources, and informing global climate adaptation strategies. Insights into future research directions will be discussed. |
| Beckie George is a PhD researcher at the University of East Anglia focused on understanding how climate change and land use impact the distributions of bird species in the UK. Her research aims to identify the drivers behind both historical and projected distribution changes to inform strategies that integrate climate resilience into biodiversity conservation and land use policy. | Species distribution models are widely used to explore species’ geographical responses to climate change but often exclude land cover due to data and modelling constraints, leading to overestimation of species’ ranges and adaptive capacities. First, the global climate envelopes of British breeding birds were modelled and projected under climatologies centred on six warming scenarios. Projections were then refined based on the suitability of current land cover for each species, and projected changes in species richness calculated for each habitat-associated bird community. Climate change exposure varied across habitats, but variation in projected species gains and losses was greatest between UK regions. |
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Graphic
The conference graphics incorporate images sourced from PhyloPic.org. We are indebted to all contributors to Phylopic.org. The photograph of the sky is by Ritam Baishya on unsplash.com. Graphics by Andrew Sier, UKCEH.