Societal Attitudes to Urban Novel Ecosystems

Project Information

NovelEco

Grant agreement ID: 101002440

DOI

10.3030/101002440

Project closed

EC signature date 17 May 2021

Start date 1 June 2021

End date 31 May 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 999 941,00

EU contribution

€ 1 999 941,00

Coordinated by

THE PROVOST, FELLOWS, FOUNDATION SCHOLARS & THE OTHER MEMBERS OF BOARD, OF THE COLLEGE OF THE HOLY & UNDIVIDED TRINITY OF QUEEN ELIZABETH NEAR DUBLIN
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - NovelEco (Societal Attitudes to Urban Novel Ecosystems)

Reporting period: 2024-06-01 to 2025-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

NovelEco is a five-year research project funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Award to Professor Marcus Collier (School of Natural Sciences and the SFI ADAPT Centre) that commenced on June 1st, 2021. The aim of NovelEco is to explore novel ecosystem theory as a bridging concept and a conduit for rewilding urban society. NovelEco is a citizen science project that will measure for the first time the societal attitudes to informal wild spaces (novel ecosystems) in cities by working with citizens to generate data on urban ecosystems. It will engage citizens in co-creating an online instrument to enable ecological data collection within urban novel ecosystems. During data collection, the citizen scientists will also record their attitudes to novel ecosystems and reveal whether engagement with them alters their values and perhaps even their environmental behaviour. Comparing these data with the wider community this project will be the first to quantify the social and ecological values of novel ecosystems. NovelEco will refine and redefine the novel ecosystem concept and create a new awareness of the transformative potential of urban wild spaces. Whilst only halfway through the project, we have already had significant impact in capturing, documenting and analysing these attitudes. The team has been involved in more than 100 activities across the globe. These have served as platforms to both collect and analyse data as well as disseminate our findings to and help grow the community of practice that is developing around the study of novel ecosystems.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

June 2021 to February 2022: Recruitment of MSc, 2 PhDs, and 2 postdocs
December 2021 to March 2022: Branding, social media, and website
January 2022 to May 2022: case study cites, feasibility studies, PhD training,
May 2022 to December 2023: co-creating research questions, stakeholder mapping, systematic reviews, paper submissions, app development
January 2024 to June 2024: data scientist postdoc, qualitative fieldwork, app testing & launch, MSc submission, conferences
July 2024 to December 2024: qualitative fieldwork (New York, Bogotá, Copenhagen, Melbourne), app use and refinement, paper publication, conferences

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Scientific Impact
The systematic review and synthesis of existing literature has contributed to the body of knowledge available to both scientists and citizens. The use of adaptive, replicable, tried and tested theoretical frameworks ensures that our methodologies are proven and now optimised for use with urban ecologies. We have found, for example, that workshops as opposed focus groups are more productive and yield more impact with heretofore marginalised communities. We have also adapted global Delphi and survey methodologies for our needs. These advanced methods for gathering social-ecological data are, of course, transferable for more efficient and effective engagement, innovation and impact in other disciplines. NovelEco is breaking new ground in transdisciplinary research. We are collaborating with the School of Computer Science and Statistics and the School of Histories and Humanities in TCD, as well as third party suppliers, to develop the NovelEco App (launch March 2024). Together, we have been able to establish how best to leverage AI and machine learning for social-ecological research. We are now able to add natural language processing to the human interrogation of our research generated data and, in our next phase, we will mine social media for previously unharvested data for our research. This body of work is enabling us broaden our impact by analysing data in previously overlooked source locations, uncovering new traits and societal attitudes that we would have otherwise not been able to access.

Societal Impact
NovelEco’s extreme citizen science, co-design approach gives voice to citizen scientists and enables them to have their opinions heard by academics and policy makers alike. This will also have the accumulated impact of stimulating citizens to engage in other similar initiatives. We are offering researchers and citizen scientists a way to collaborate more conveniently and accurately, to share and corroborate data, as well as to develop new social-ecological research methodologies and to encourage citizen participation and engagement in all ecosystems. The opensource nature of the research is growing social capital and building capacity in novel ecosystem related communities of practice. The digital windfall brought the NovelEco app and the use of AI will facilitate social learning and offer a basis to social enterprise. NovelEco is already creating an opportunity for communities and individual citizens in numerous locations to notice wild urban spaces and understand why these spaces are so valuable in the Anthropocene.

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