6th UKEOF conference | 24 February 2026 | Online
Title: Sensing the Environment: Emerging Technologies for Monitoring and Decision-Making
When: 24 February 2026, 09:00 - 13:00
Where: Online
Registration fee: FREE
Social media: #ukeof2026
Scroll down for details and programme. Conference recordings will be available soon.
This year's annual UKEOF conference was Sensing the Environment: Emerging Technologies for Monitoring and Decision-Making. The event aimed to showcase a diverse range of examples of the application of emerging technologies in environmental monitoring and assessment of interest particularly to environmental policy and academic sectors.
The event began with short presentations from representatives of national governments setting out policy perspectives, with speakers including: Professor Anjali Goswami (Defra, Chief Scientific Adviser and Director General for Science, Data and Analysis); Professor Jas Pal Badyal (Chief Scientific Adviser for Wales in the Welsh Government); Patrick Murphy (Chief Scientific Adviser's Office, Northern Ireland), and Claire Young (Marine Strategy & Catchments, Northern Ireland Environment Agency), and Nathan Critchlow-Watton, (SEPA, Head of Environmental Quality). There then followed a series of 15-minute presentations highlighting recent important advances in the development of sensors, sensor networks, molecular techniques and AI systems designed to quantify and track everything from individual species to ecosystems, assess risks to human health and enable early warning capabilities to manage natural resources. Recurring themes included approaches to validation, development of common standards, managing and processing large data streams, the development of sensor networks and the importance of ensuring transparency and data accessibility.
In addition to those highlighted above, our speakers were:
You can find the programme, speaker bios and abstracts below.
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| 09:00 | Chair: Welcome and introduction to first session - Ben Ditchburn, Defra |
| The Policy Need | |
| 09:05 | England - Prof. Anjali Goswami, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra); Chief Scientific Adviser and Director General for Science, Data and Analysis |
| 09:10 | Wales - Prof. Jas Pal Badyal, Chief Scientific Adviser for Wales in the Welsh Government |
| 09:15 | Northern Ireland - Patrick Murphy & Claire Young, Chief Scientific Adviser's Office and Marine Strategy & Catchments, Northern Ireland Environment Agency |
| 09:20 | Scotland - Nathan Critchlow-Watton, Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Head of Environmental Quality; Data, Evidence and Innovation |
| 09:25 | Policy need Q & A |
| 09:35 | Audience poll / Chair's introduction to main session |
| Assessing biodiversity from the detection and processing of biological signals | |
| 09:40 | Learning from the past, looking to the future: Automated monitoring for moths - Grace Skinner, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) |
| 09:55 | MesoScan and ArthroSound: Can machine learning scale soil biodiversity monitoring? - Tim Lukins, Forest Research |
| 10:10 | The NCEA National Woodland Bat Survey: Monitoring woodlands using sound - Dr Lia Gilmour, Bat Conservation Trust |
| 10:25 | Panel Q & A |
| 10:35 | --- BREAK --- |
| Monitoring human environmental exposure and ecosystem health | |
| 10:45 | Low-cost air quality sensor network engaging the community to increase awareness and create local action - Lauren James, Breathe London |
| 11:00 | Molecular applications to monitoring environmental health - Dr Holly Tipper, UKCEH |
| 11:15 | Monitoring ecosystem health from eDNA in water and air - Dr Joanne Littlefair, UCL |
| 11:30 | Panel Q & A |
| Scaling up to assist management and decision support | |
| 11:45 | Automated habitat recognition from ground-based photographs to support Biodiversity Net Gain - Dr James Brown, University of Lincoln |
| 12:00 | Ground-based and remote sensor networks for tree health monitoring - Dr Rachel Gaulton, FERA |
| 12:15 | Integrating high-frequency data and near-term forecasting to advance the management of freshwaters - Dr Cayelan Carey, Virginia Tech |
| 12:30 | Panel Q & A |
| 12:40 | Audience poll / Chair's summary |
| 12:55 | Wrap-up and close |
| About | Abstract |
|---|---|
| Grace Skinner works in the Biodiversity Monitoring & Analysis Group. Her research applies computational methods and novel technologies to challenges in sustainable agriculture and insect declines. She deploys technologies including Automated Monitoring of Insects (AMI) and next-generation LepiSense systems, which combine imaging and machine learning to monitor moths. She is undertaking a part-time PhD with UKCEH and the University of Reading, investigating agricultural and extreme weather impacts on moths and ecological relevance of automated monitoring data. | Learning from the past, looking to the future: Automated monitoring for mothsRapid changes in insect populations worldwide raise concerns for ecosystem health and food security. Traditional methods, such as moth light traps, provide valuable data but are labour-intensive and limited in scale. Automated Monitoring of Insects (AMI) systems address this challenge, combining UV and white lighting with high-resolution imagery and machine learning to detect and classify moths. Deployed across multiple projects and countries, AMI has provided practical lessons for automated biodiversity monitoring. The next-generation LepiSense system builds on these insights, offering a smaller, lighter, more cost-effective, and user-friendly system. This talk will share the journey, lessons learnt, and future directions. |
| Dr Tim Lukins is a Machine Learning Scientist at Forest Research working in soil sustainability and entomology. The focus of his research is in developing novel methodologies for automating identification based on machine learning and contributing to research projects related to biodiversity, soil invertebrate ecology and the early identification of forest pests. His work encompasses building complete end-to-end systems – including aspects of hardware, data capture, training, and deployment – to provide timely, consistent and scalable monitoring insights. | MesoScan and ArthroSound: Can machine learning scale soil biodiversity monitoring?Arthropod biodiversity underpins the healthy ecology of forest and peatland soils. Quantifying this can help us understand how these communities change, and for baselining and monitoring restoration efforts. However, to gather such data is a very specialised and labour-intensive process which, fundamentally, does not scale well. We present some work conducted under the UK NCEA programme to automate both the laboratory-based analysis of soil samples to speed up mesofauna identification with computer vision; alongside recent development of remote, long-term monitoring sensors using a novel design for acoustic pitfall traps to measure soil surface meso- and macro-fauna activity. |
| Dr Lia Gilmour is Research Manager at Bat Conservation Trust. She heads up the strategic work area of 'Ecoacoustics Research and Development' at BCT Science. Her role involves managing development and delivery of the BCT Sound Classification System, alongside applied research collaborations with academia, NGOs, industry stakeholders and SNCBs. | The NCEA National Woodland Bat Survey: Monitoring woodlands using soundThe NCEA National Woodland Bat Survey is the UK's largest acoustic monitoring programme for woodland bats, using passive acoustic sensors and advanced machine learning classification to generate robust, national-scale biodiversity data. Now in its fourth season, the survey has collected tens of millions of bat calls, revealing species distributions, detecting rare species and establishing baselines for long-term ecological change. Alongside core monitoring, the project's innovation research is developing storage solutions, autonomous sensing technologies and soundscape algorithms to capture broader ecological and methodological insights. Integrated with wider NCEA monitoring, this work supports evidence-based conservation and a deeper understanding of woodland ecosystem health. |
| Lauren James is a Senior Policy and Programme officer in the Greater London Authority's (GLA) Air Quality team, leading on data and insight. Lauren is the programme lead for the Breathe London programme, and wider analytical programmes including the London Atmospheric Inventory. Before joining the GLA, Lauren worked across the charity and consultancy sectors, specialising in engagement and behaviour change to reduce tailpipe emissions and improve public health. | Low-cost air quality sensor network engaging the community to increase awareness and create local actionLondon's air quality challenges require high resolution, accessible data to drive effective action. Breathe London plays a crucial role in helping communities, schools, hospitals and Londoners understand air pollution and take steps to reduce their exposure. Its extensive hyperlocal network provides publicly accessible data across the city and supports targeted engagement to champion action on air quality. This talk will introduce the next phase of the Breathe London network, outlining advances in hyperlocal sensing, calibration methods and community focused engagement. Drawing on programme evaluation and wider GLA analytical work, the session will demonstrate the benefits of using high quality data empowers decision makers to target interventions and inform policy. |
| Dr Holly Tipper is a Senior Molecular Microbiologist at UKCEH, specialising in the impact of human activity on environmental health, particularly microbial community and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) dynamics. She has delivered projects for UK Government, environmental regulators, and the water industry, focusing on AMR in the environment and wastewater. She contributed to the UK Government-commissioned evaluation of the UK AMR National Action Plan (2019-24) and is actively engaged in research and policy. | Molecular applications to monitoring environmental healthEnvironmental health is increasingly shaped by microbial dynamics that link ecosystems, animals, and humans. This talk explores how microbial and molecular approaches are used to assess environmental health through a One Health lens, drawing on examples from past and ongoing research projects, and highlighting how molecular approaches such as metagenomics, qPCR, and microbial source tracking can be used to monitor and understand issues like pollution and AMR, and detect emerging hazards, across environmental reservoirs such as water, soil, and wildlife. These approaches demonstrate how integrated molecular and microbial data can inform risk assessment, surveillance, and evidence-based environmental management. |
| Dr Joanne Littlefair is a Lecturer and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow interested in the intersection between biodiversity, technology and society based at the People and Nature Lab at UCL East. She creates and uses new ways to monitor and understand biodiversity using molecular genetics methods. Her background is in developing environmental DNA methodologies for freshwater fish, but has recently pioneered the application of these methods to terrestrial biomes by sequencing DNA from the air. | Monitoring ecosystem health from eDNA in water and airEnvironmental DNA can be a powerful tool for ecologists wishing to increase the spatial-temporal-taxonomic resolution of their data. Informative and generalisable tree-of-life approaches are now possible because of the universal release of DNA. I will give an overview of the technologies and their latest developments, but also highlight some challenges around the data processing and transport of eDNA that practitioners face when using molecular techniques in an applied context. |
| Dr James M Brown is Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Lincoln, and Deputy Director of Research in the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences. His work applies machine learning and computer vision to environmental sensing, biodiversity monitoring and decision support. He leads interdisciplinary research on scalable AI systems and collaborates with academic and policy partners to integrate AI with ecological assessment and national monitoring frameworks. | Automated habitat recognition from ground-based photographs to support Biodiversity Net GainHabitat assessment is central to biodiversity net gain (BNG) and wider environmental policy, yet current approaches rely heavily on expert field surveys. This talk presents AI-Hab, an AI-based system for automated habitat recognition from ground-level photographs. Trained on UK Countryside Survey imagery and validated against experienced ecological interpreters, the model achieves expert-level performance on Level 3 UKHab classes while providing interpretable attention maps. By combining supervised contrastive learning with state-of-the-art vision transformers, the system improves discrimination between visually similar habitats. The resulting API-enabled tool demonstrates how ground-level AI could complement satellite products to support scalable, transparent environmental monitoring and decision-making. |
| Dr Rachel Gaulton is a remote sensing scientist with over 20 years’ experience in applying spatial analysis and sensor technology to ecological applications, with a focus on monitoring of forest and agri-environments. Since 2025, she has worked as a Science Lead and Team Manager in Remote Sensing and GIS, leading research and commercial projects within the Fera Land Use and Sustainability team. Prior to 2025, she held an academic position as Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University. | Ground-based and remote sensor networks for tree health monitoringTrees are at risk across the UK due to a range of pests, diseases and abiotic stresses such as drought and storm damage. The NERC-funded Sentinel Treescapes project, led by Fera, examined the use of in-situ TreeTalker sensor networks, combined with citizen science and remote sensing, to allow early detection of tree stress at landscape scales. The network, deployed in Norfolk, has been running near-continuously since spring 2021, with a similar network now also deployed at a site in Yorkshire. This presentation explores the challenges and potential of combining multi-scale observation networks for monitoring forest health and dynamics. |
| Dr Cayelan Carey is a Professor in Freshwater Ecosystem Science and the Patricia Caldwell Faculty Fellow at Virginia Tech (USA). As Co-Director of the Virginia Tech Center for Ecosystem Forecasting, Carey strives to advance our predictive understanding of freshwaters in a changing world via high-frequency monitoring of lakes and reservoirs; integrating ecosystem data with models; and cultivating collaborative and interdisciplinary teams of scientists, managers, and other community members. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Carey was a 2022 Future Fulbright Fellow at the University of Western Australia and a 2022-2023 Earth Leaders Fellow through the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and Future Earth. | Integrating high-frequency data and near-term forecasting to advance the management of freshwatersWater quality in lakes and reservoirs around the globe is increasingly variable due to human activities, preventing managers from using historical baselines to predict tomorrow's conditions. In response, our team is developing near-term, iterative water quality forecasts in which we predict future water quality conditions with fully-quantified uncertainty. We have created an open-source forecasting system that wirelessly transfers water quality sensor data to the cloud to run ensemble models via automated cyberinfrastructure, delivering daily, real-time forecasts of water quality conditions 1 to 35 days in the future to managers. To date, we have deployed this system in 14 lakes globally, enabling managers to anticipate and preemptively mitigate water quality impairment before it starts. We aim to lower the barrier to forecasting, engage a broad and diverse community of forecast developers and users, and use forecasts to improve our management of freshwater ecosystems in a changing world. |
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