Citizen Sourced Solutions to Local Landscape Challenges (CiSSLL)

Total Value

£62,157

Team

Donna Udall (Principal Investigator) and Joanne Noone (Project Officer)

Collaborators

Pori Natur A Threftadaeth Ltd (PONT)
Ben Cook (filmographer)

Duration

1st December 2022 to 31st January 2024

Project overview

The south-central Wales Area Statement states that there is a pressing need to ensure that we improve people’s connection to, and appreciation of, the natural world. This holistic project therefore aims to engage with local people (our citizen scientists), to understand how they feel about local natural landscapes and communicate how they have changed over the decades. Then they will be asked to tell us the risks and challenges posed by these changes and, working with local experts, suggest solutions to these through a range of media. The overarching aim of this project is to create better connection with and, shared understanding of, the challenges of management of these landscapes between locals, government and the bodies responsible for landscape management.

Initial project kick-off meeting date: Friday 5 May 2023

Project objectives

• Engage with local people to understand how they feel about local natural landscapes.
• To encourage our citizen scientists to communicate how important local landscapes have changed over the decades.
• Through training and feedback from experts to ask our citizen scientists to consider risks and challenges of landscape management and suggest shared opportunities and solutions.

Impact statement

The project is designed to reach local people who would not normally associate with landscapes and landscape management. Key outcomes will include;

1. Knowledge transfer from landscape management experts to local people of the role of these landscapes in providing health benefits, food, water and climate change mitigation and the challenges of managing them.
2. Knowledge transfer from local people to landscape management experts of their need of these landscape and the challenges to accessing them and feeling safe.
3. Knowledgeable local people able to articulate their needs of the landscape and suggest/support landscape management interventions.

Outputs

Uniquely, most of the outputs from this project will be from the citizen scientists themselves. They will produce postcards showing and detailing how the landscape used to be, how it is now and how that change has affected them. They will also produce ‘Solution Shorts’ – very short video’s capturing a challenge they have with the landscape and how they would fix it.  The ‘Solution Shorts’ will be amalgamated into a film and the film and the postcards will be put on display in a glass installation at an appropriate venue.