Lifelong Learning research project

Learning is a lifelong journey. As we well know, it isn’t defined by a classroom or curriculum or key stage group – we are all learning, every day. And if we’re lucky we get to learn not just on and from the land, but with people who share our passion for the land.

We had this opportunity this week, when some of the team in Gloucestershire met Professor Michelle Jackson, an Associate Professor of Freshwater & Marine Ecology at Somerville College, Oxford, whose work is supported by a long-term research endowment from Ernest Cook Trust.

We had lunch and a chat at Court Farm, before heading for a river walk from Fairford back up the River Coln to Quenington. But even just a few hours was enough to learn a huge amount about her work, where it could take her, and the exciting ambitions we share.

And it’s not in our nature to gatekeep learning… so we wanted to share some of the highlights of our visit and more of what’s to come!

The key focus of Michelle’s research is understanding – and ultimately predicting – the impact of stressors on marine ecosystems. These might range from chemical pollutants to temperate changes. Understanding how stressors change the ecology of freshwater can help mitigate the impacts of a changing environment on one of our most precious global resources.

Her research sites span the spectrum of highly controlled to highly realistic. Whilst some work is computer-generated using data and meta-analyses, other research is carried out in real ecosystems from the Arctic to South Africa and Antarctica! Whilst these real-life settings provide the perfect chance to observe real aquatic ecosystems in real time, there is no control over the stressors that impact the results. So when certain tributaries in the Arctic have a temperate difference of nearly 20 degrees despite being only a few hundred metres apart (all thanks to natural geothermal differences in the ground)… they might also experience different flow rates that impact the animal and plant communities more – or as well.

And given Michelle is particularly interested in interactions among these stressors (so how warming and pollution might combine to impact the ecosystem, for example) she also relies on manipulative experiments in more controlled environments. This way, she can seek predictive rules that might then be tested in real-life contexts.

It’s in the field of “manipulative experiments” that we found the most common ground – and potential to support Michelle. There is freshwater found on all of our 9 estates in various forms… and given we were a stone’s throw from the River Coln during this conversation, we naturally turned to the possibilities there. Whether this means enabling decades-long research access for long-term studies, or a physical intervention that creates man-made channels off the river for semi-controllable testing, there are definitely many ways we can support this research in the years to come.

And thankfully, we ended on a positive note when talking about “the years to come”. Many in the room, including Michelle and our own river, land management, and outdoor learning experts, agreed that there is more good news in the world of freshwater ecosystems than you might think from reading the headlines! Whilst sewage run off and spills are undeniably a problem, they do not happen much more often or worse than in previous decades. And the impact is not directly linked to the dramatic images in the news…

Overall there are many thriving rivers in the UK and as we understand more about the stressors that impact their ecology we are in a better and better place to support them. In addition to researching negative human impacts, Michelle suggested researching the impact of positive management could emerge as a complementary field.

We are excited to work with Michelle and her team at Somerville College for many years to come – not just sharing our land to facilitate her research, but learning from and amplifying her own expertise. And anyone who can spend 4 hours chatting about rivers, freshwater invertebrates and the hope for Britain’s aquatic ecosystems is someone we’re keen to learn from!