Project highlights

  • Build a high-resolution model of a village community’s interactions with its local biosphere 
  • Evolve strategies for enhancing biodiversity and a seamless connection between the urban and countryside 
  • Work with a village community to plan strategies that will enhance biodiversity for many generations to come, and through stakeholders apply your strategies in other contexts 

Overview

Dunton Bassett, a village striving to be sustainable in the Anthropocene: 

What does a sustainable relationship between people and the biosphere look like? Is it a commodified relationship in which electric cars, heat pumps and solar cells become the solution to rapacious energy consumption? Or is it one where we re-examine our deep relationships with the biosphere, and accept that urban ecologies must function more like natural ones if we and the biosphere are to thrive? Here we take a single Leicestershire village as a Living Lab to test ideas about sustainability, with a special focus on the biosphere. Our model is Dunton Bassett (Fig. 1), a village of ~330 households about 15 km south of Leicester. Dunton has a long history of occupation with evidence for humans in this landscape since the Palaeolithic, and the village has actively engaged in helping its environment through the ‘Dunton Goes Green’ group. Dunton sits in the wider Leicestershire landscape, one of the most heavily degraded ecologies in the UK, with minimal natural tree cover. The village is surrounded by farmland and to the east are the M1 and A426 trunk roads. 

Living labs integrate research and innovation processes in real life communities and settings. By viewing Dunton as a Living Lab, we will build a holistic model of the village’s relationship with its environment that examines past, present- and future change. We will investigate diverse archives of environmental context including historical (archival, archaeological), sedimentological (ponds, rivers) and dendrochronological sources (tree rings, their carbon isotopic signature) to give an understanding of how the village has interacted with its environment over centuries and to enhance the sense of ‘place’ for its community. By working with the village community, we will conduct surveys of its present environments, from gardens, footpaths, farmland, and waste ground, to assess biodiversity and biodiversity threats and co-create strategies for an improved local biosphere and a deeper human connection with this. We will use our analysis to empower the village community to plan strategies to enhance future biodiversity, working closely with Earthwatch Europe and Leicestershire County Council, and co-develop strategies and policies that can be applied more widely in village and urban settings.  

A photograph for context of buildings in Dunton Bassett, Leicestershire, featuring the Village Hall.

Figure 1: Dunton Bassett, a village striving to be sustainable in the Anthropocene. Image of the Village Hall by Mat Fascione,Dunton Bassett village hall – geograph.org.uk – 718841.jpg 

Host

University of Leicester

Theme

  • Climate and Environmental Sustainability
  • Organisms and Ecosystems

Supervisors

Project investigator

Co-investigators

How to apply

Methodology

Youll join an active group researching Holocene-Anthropocene landscape evolution. Youll develop a multi-centennial history of environmental change using tree, river- and pond archives, historical and archaeological datasets, and develop core skills in dendrochronology, palynology, and stratigraphy. Youll couple archival records with surveys of present biodiversity, engaging Dunton’s residents as citizen scientists to collect and interpret the data, and establish baselines for botanical, faunal, soil and aquatic ecologies that include assessing soil and water quality, and interactions of native and non-native species. Youll identify ecologies especially human-nature interactions that thrive and are resilient to change and co-develop strategies for enhancing future biodiversity.  

Training and skills

DRs will be awarded CENTA Training Credits (CTCs) for participation in CENTA-provided and ‘free choice’ external training. One CTC can be earned per 3 hours training, and DRs must accrue 100 CTCs across the three and a half years of their PhD.  

You’ll receive detailed training in palaeoecology, including palynology and tree ring analysis, and stratigraphical approaches to reconstruct late Holocene-Anthropocene environmental change: these are core skills for careers in geological, geographical, and archaeological contexts. Working closely with Earthwatch and Leicestershire County Council you’ll engage the citizens of Dunton Bassett in co-creating surveys to establish biodiversity baselines (e.g., botanical datasets, non-native species), and identify and implement strategies that can best support the local biosphere in coming decades. These skills are germane to careers in conservation and environmental science. Further skills will be developed in archive analysis, computer modelling, GIS, and integrated datasets.  

Partners and collaboration

We forge a strategic alliance with Earthwatch Europe, Dunton Goes Green, and Leicestershire County Council (LCC). Earthwatch build meaningful relationships between people and the natural world, and bring a range of key skills to this project including a deep understanding of farming with nature, soil profiling, nature corridors, freshwater quality, and working with citizen scientists. LCC provide a depth of understanding of biodiversity and biodiversity risks in the Leicestershire context, and are custodians of key databases such as about ancient trees. The project depends on the central relationship with the Dunton community, empowering them to develop research questions and methods.  

Further details

For more details, please contact Mark Williams ([email protected]), Juan Carlos Berrio ([email protected]) and Martin Phillips ([email protected]) at the University of Leicester.

To apply to this project: 

  • You must include a CV with the names of at least two referees (preferably three) who can comment on your academic abilities.  
  • Please submit your application and complete the host institution application process via: CENTA PhD Studentships | Postgraduate research | University of Leicester.  Please scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the “Apply Now” button.  The “How to apply” tab at the bottom of the page gives instructions on how to submit your completed CENTA Studentship Application Form 2025, your CV and your other supporting documents to your University of Leicester application. Please quote CENTA 2025-L20when completing the application form.  

Applications must be submitted by 23:59 GMT on Wednesday 8th January 2025.  

Possible timeline

Year 1

Building on existing interactions with the village community, investigate and analyse local archives of environmental change in and around Dunton Bassett, to include coring of ponds and other sediment archives for palynology, tree ring analysis including carbon isotope analysis for climate. Combine these with historical (including church) and archaeological records of change to build up a long history of human-landscape interactions over centuries. Use these data to give an enhanced sense of place for the village community. Co-design ecological surveys with the village community drawing on their expertise and existing datasets, and in collaboration with Earthwatch and LCC, to gather, for example, data on soil quality and biota, water quality and biota, land-use to include farms, pathways, roadsides, gardens, and disused land, and potentially the interaction of buildings with fauna and flora. Gather qualitative and quantitative knowledge from the village community of why certain practices prevail (e.g., excessive mowing of grass) that may adversely affect biodiversity, and vice versa (e.g., leaving spaces in gardens to rewild).  

Year 2

Continue to build-up the databases for which data collection commenced in year 1. Use the data to establish a baseline for understanding the evolution of Dunton Bassett’s environments on centennial scales, but with a particular focus on the recent, and especially to establish which ecologies are flourishing and which are not. Determine any conduits for the ingress of non-native species (e.g., roads and pathways, garden centres), and define baselines for soil quality, water quality and biodiversity using citizen science tools and methods. Establish which practices in the village are encouraging biodiversity gain at the household, farm, or estate-level, and those which are not, and through interactions with the community, including surveys, seek to understand these patterns, as well as potential barriers and how to overcome them

Year 3

Use the integrated datasets to identify those ecologies that have been and are resilient to environmental change, those which preserve and enhance biodiversity, and which encourage successful cohabitation between humans and multiple species. Identify ecologies which have benefitted from species introductions and those that have not. Identify those ecologies that are threatened by, for e.g., poor water or soil quality and seek – through close interactions with the community – to develop interventions that can improve this situation, e.g., curbing the use of artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Co-identify with the village community and other stakeholders those human-multiple species interactions that actively foster the development of ecological resilience, both rural and urban, including resilience to the influx of non-native species, and those that actively improve biodiversity for the local biosphere in a sustainable way. Use your findings to develop best-practice recommendations and guidelines, and disseminate findings for other urban communities in Leicestershire and beyond to foster and nurture biodiversity in the Anthropocene landscape.

Further reading

Background on Earthwatch Europe. Available at: https://earthwatch.org.uk/ 

Some references to get into the mindset of your supervisors 

Phillips, M. et al. (2008) ‘Diversity, scale and green landscapes in the gentrification 

process: Traversing ecological and social science perspectives’, Applied Geography, 28, 54-76. 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0143622807000197 

Thomas, J. A. et al. (2020) ‘The Anthropocene: a multidisciplinary approach’, Polity books. 

Williams, M. et al. (2024) ‘The fossils being formed today will show how humankind disrupted life on Earth’ Available at: https://theconversation.com/the-fossils-being-formed-today-will-show-how-humankind-disrupted-life-on-earth-229092 (Accessed: 19 August 2024). 

Wilson, E. O. (2016), ‘Half-Earth: our planet’s fight for life’, Liveright.