In recent years, there has been a move to encourage public and stakeholder participation in decision-making processes relating to landscape protection and enhancement. Consensus building and a common vision will become increasingly important to ensure conservation of valued aspects of local environments as the additional stresses of climate change take hold in a land already under pressure from a variety of competing interests. This project is investigating the practicalities of reinterpreting the available climate change impacts information from existing research (frequently at the national scale, or related to specific sectors) at a scale more useful to local stakeholders/policy makers. In this project, the subject is the rural landscape and how climate change will interact with changes in farming practice, and the consequences for water supply and demand, soils and biodiversity. The form of output for the project provides the second element of the research - that is, the use of visualisations as a medium for communicating climate change impacts information. Landscapes from study areas included in the Countryside Agency's Land Management Initiative project provide the subject for this research.

The approach taken in the research is the development of landscape-scale ‘scenarios’ of climate change impacts derived from policy guidance documents and the climate change impacts literature, expressed as visualisations of potential future landscapes. Visualisations are mainly in the form of digitally-altered photographs but for landscapes in Norfolk and the Humberhead Levels, we are also developing computer-generated visualisations derived from a GIS database. For these sites in addition, we will be producing VRML ‘Virtual Reality’ models which offer the possibility for a user to ‘fly through’ the landscape or ‘visit’ particular locations of interest to them. The work is being funded by the Jackson Foundation and the Countryside Agency.

Contributors to this research are myself (Trudie Dockerty); Dr. Andrew Lovett; Alexandra Bone; Katy Appleton; Gilla Sunnenberg and Prof. Martin Parry.

The research will give rise to a number of academic publications and conference presentations (see below). Other outputs from this work will include -

• Virtual Landscape representations (which will be displayed in the new Virtual Reality Theatre in the School’s ZICER building, in 2003)
• A fully illustrated Research Report (funded by the Jackson Foundation) featuring the photographic representations of potential future landscapes in the 2020s.

Dockerty, T, Parry, M & Bone, A (in prep) ‘Landscapes of Climate Change: Visualising the potential impacts of climate change on England’s rural landscapes’ (Research Report)
Dockerty, T Lovett, A, Bone, A, Appleton, K J, & Sünnenberg, G (in prep) ’Climate change impacts on landscape: developing landscape-scale scenarios of potential climate change impacts’ (Working Paper)
Dockerty, T Lovett, A, Appleton, K J, & Sünnenberg, G (in prep) ‘Visualising the potential impacts of climate change on rural landscapes’ (paper for special issue of Computers, Environment and Urban Systems)
Appleton, K J; Lovett, A A; Sünnenberg, G and Dockerty, T (2002) 'Rural landscape visualisation from GIS databases: A comparison of approaches, options and problems', Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Vol. 26, pp.141-162.
Lovett, A; Sünnenberg, G and Dockerty, T (2002) Landscape Change in the NALMI Area: Construction of a GIS Database Project Report to the Countryside Agency. Working Paper No. 15 Jackson Environment Institute, University of East Anglia, Norwich.
Lovett, A; Sünnenberg, G; Dockerty, T; Dolman, P; Cobb, D; O’Riordan, T (2002) 'The Use of VRML in Landscape Visualisation'. In: Buhmann, Nothhelfer & Pietsch (eds) Sites in Sight: Trends in GIS and Virtualisation in Environmental Planning and Design. Wichmann, Heidelberg.
Dockerty, T, Lovett, A A, Appleton, K J, Sünnenberg, G (2001) Climate Change Impacts on Landscape: New Approaches to Visualising Rural Landscape Change Working Paper No. 9 Jackson Environment Institute, University of East Anglia, Norwich.

Conference Presentations

D. Viner & T. Dockerty (2002) 'Impacts of Climate Change on Landscape & Agriculture' presentation to the European Landowners Association meeting at UEA, April 2002.
T.Dockerty, A.A.Lovett, G.Sünnenberg, K.J.Appleton & M.Parry (2002) 'Visualising the potential impacts of climate change on rural landscapes', paper presented at the Royal Geographical Society - Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference, Queen’s University Belfast, January 2002.
A.A.Lovett, G.Sünnenberg, K.J.Appleton, T.L.Dockerty, P.M.Dolman, R.N.Cobb & T.O’Riordan (2001) 'The use of VRML in landscape visualisation', paper presented at the Virtuality in Landscape Architecture conference, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Bernberg, Germany, May 2001.
A.A.Lovett, T.Dockerty, K.Appleton, G.Sunnenberg, M.Livermore & M.Parry (2000) 'The use of Visualisation/Virtual Reality Modelling to Illustrate Climate change Impacts' Computer demonstration of virtual reality models, at the opening of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. 9th November 2000.
T.Dockerty, M.Livermore, A.A.Lovett, M.Parry and G. Sünnenberg (2000) 'Examining climate impacts at nested scales and the use of visualisation/virtual reality modelling to integrate information on effects', paper presented at the Climate Impacts LINK Project 4th Workshop, University of East Anglia, September 2000.