# Approach and Methodology

## Table of contents

- Executive Summary
- Background
- Overview of the current EMD
- Approach
- General context
- Business and process requirements
- Objectives
- Guiding principles
- Technical and technological considerations
- Other considerations
- Methodologies
- The FLE^5SH framework
- ...

## Executive summary

_Natural England_ (NE) manages a substantial programme of _Monitoring & Evaluation_ (M&E) of _Agri-Environment Schemes_ (AES) on behalf of Defra, the UK Government Department responsible for the environment, food and farming and rural affairs. The datasets generated by the projects delivered within the M&E programme include biological and social data such as the presence and abundance of species, soil characteristics and attitudinal surveys.

Natural England has published a Request for Quotation (RfQ) for a 5-month scoping study on the management of Agri-Environment Schemes (AES) monitoring data.

Reckon Digital is pleased to submit this Approach and Methodology document as part of its response to the RfQ which fully meets the requirements of the proposal. It also aims to highlight:

- The company's track record of successful projects, some of which with strong similarities to Natural England's scoping study
- The team of experts that have been selected both from within company personnel and from its partner collaborator: University College London (UCL)
- The convincing approach and methodologies, as presented in this document
- The carefully structured implementation plan, as detailed in the accompanying Ability to Deliver document.

If awarded this work, Reckon Digital will

- Explore Natural England's requirements for managing and reporting using AES monitoring data
- Identify solutions that are flexible, easy to use, and in line with Natural England's needs and principles
- Present its findings in final reports as per the requirements set out in the Request for Quotation.

## Background

Natural England (NE) is an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). Defra's priorities are to "secure a healthy natural environment; a sustainable, low-carbon economy; a thriving farming sector and a sustainable, healthy and secure food supply". As the government's advisor for the natural environment in England, NE helps to "protect England's nature and landscapes for people to enjoy and for the services they provide". In essence, ensure the land, flora, fauna, freshwater and marine environments, geology, and soils are protected and improved as well as assist in the enjoyment, understanding of and access to the natural environment.

NE's Action Plan 2019/2020 (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/natural-england-action-plan-2019-to-2020) focuses on _greener farming and fisheries_ ("supporting those who manage land and sea to operate in harmony with the environment"), _sustainable development_ ("creating great places for people to live and work"), _connecting people with nature_ ("promoting health and wellbeing through the great outdoors") and _resilient landscapes and seas_ ("protecting and restoring wildlife and natural beauty for future generations"). The work will be delivered by

1. Building on the quality of our local and national relationships; acting as convenor to bring partners together to agree and deliver shared priorities,
2. Providing leadership using recognised environmental expertise to set the agenda and bring in new players, and
3. Identifying best practice in environmental management and accrediting others who work to those high standards.

The substantial programme of Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) of Agri-environment Schemes (AES) that NE manages on behalf of Defra, generates _biological_ and _social_ data ranging from the presence and abundance of species through soil characteristics to attitudinal surveys. Typically, individual projects involve exercises which measure one or more aspects of the Earth System (the biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and lithosphere) with activities producing one-off or repeated observations.

Overall, NE/Defra requires cyberphysical systems for handling M&E output in general and for storing, accessing and analysing semi-structured text, image, video, audio, geospatial, and temporal heterogenous data in particular. This ecosystem should be capable of handling not only legacy data from the late 1980s but also data from projects currently in the pipeline, programmes associated with the government's 25 year environment plan (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/25-year-environment-plan) and other as yet-undefined endeavours.

## Overview of the current EMD

_Surveys_, _Projects_, and _Methods_ are the three essential entities in EMD that allow AES data to be stored. Each _Survey_ has its own collection of Primary Sampling Units (PSUs), permanent spatial units corresponding to a subset of, one or multiple real land parcels such as fields or grazing units. Each PSU has one or more permanent or temporary Field Survey Units (FSUs), object on the ground from which the actual field data are gathered such as 1m x 1m quadrats, a 10m length of ditch or a whole field for recording counts of bird species.

PSUs and FSUs have fixed characteristics (unchanging factors such as a unique ID) and temporal characteristics (ephemeral factors such as bird count and soil pH). _Datasets_ are the primary unit of data storage: a 2D matrix whose columns are _Variables_ (different types of data such plant, soil or weather measurements) and rows are _Spatio-Temporal Containers_. A _Surver_ can contain any number of the five fundamentally different types of _Datasets_ whic can be created (_Classification_, _Non-Taxonomic_, _NVC_, _Personnel_, _Taxonomic_). Different _Workers_ (Full Workers, User-define Workers, Catalogue Workers) have different levels of access to the data.

## Approach

Reckon Digital's approach is to tackle the scoping study through a series of project phases, starting with an initial exploratory phase to develop a refined definition of objectives and requirements then moving on to an analysis of relevant tools and technologies and ultimately proposing a number of alternative solutions.

If selected, Reckon Digital will base its analysis on a small number of guiding principles that are tentatively set out in the corresponding section of this document. These principles will be revised and confirmed with the client as part of the project initial meeting.

### General Context and the Current Solution

The scoping study will start with an exploratory phase aimed to perfect Reckon Digital's understanding of Natural England, its general objectives and its place within the broader landscape of UK environment and heritage agencies, such as English Heritage, Natural Resources Wales, and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). This will be the basis to fully understand the project requirements and to formulate effective solutions.

In order to help NE/Defra manage their data and other associated M&E outputs more effectively, we will assess current methods for

- Storing data
- Making datasets available for analysis and reporting
- Ensuring project outputs are identifiable, locatable and accessible

### Business and Process Requirements

Based on discussions with different stakeholders, Reckon Digital will elicit the following.

- The current data life cycle, focussing on data quality/assurance
- The strength and weakness of the EMD in addressing the mission of Defra and NE along the axes of _content_ (datasets) and _infrastructure_ (software for managing, storing, querying and analysing data).
- A set of critical, essential, desirable and optional enhancements to the content and/or infrastructure of the extant EMD system; within each of these four categories, the enhancements would be ranked and/or priortised and then evaluated in terms of finanical cost, time required, technical feasibility, and implementation challenges.
- A set of critical, essential, desirable and optional infrastructure and content that an entirely new EMD replacement system should have in order to enable, facilitate and enhance NE's activities and resources, thereby delivering on its four strategic outcomes (a healthy natural environment; enjoyment of the natural environment; sustainable use of the natural environment; and a secure environmental future).

New functionality could include modules centred on hypergraphs for visualising, navigating, understanding and undertaking semi-qualitative analysis of complex heterogenous datasets; and submodular functions for producing non-redundant representative datasets suitable for downstream analysis.

### Guiding principles

The following principles will guide us throughout the different phases from the exploratory phase to the drafting of the final reports.

- [FIXME: Saira/Emre] Ethics of datafication, data openness, social impact. Free and open source software. General assessment of the project through the FLE^5SH framework.

- [FIXME: Saira/Emre] Sustainability and green computing. Resource efficiency to be a guiding principle during the design phase. The ideal solution will be energy efficient and will make it clear to the users what the trade-offs can be between computational speed and environment footprint. Cloud computing and choice of hosting provider.

- We will ensure that all our proposals account ensure that high priority is given to security, privacy, high availability and disaster recovery.

- Our aim to ro propose solutions that are buildt on a modular and future-proof architecture in order to make it possible, within reasonable limits, to evolve the system over time. Changes could include the accommodation of new data types, different workflows, different UIs and visualisations.

### Technical considerations

[FIXME: Fabio to slightly rephrase these points (in the technical part, use keywords such as "whether", which", "how", ...)]

The following technical areas will be explored during the project initiation phase.

- Federation of database/datasets
- Data types: semi-structured text, image, audio, video, geospatial, temporal data
- Exploratory Data Analysis
- Submodularity: generate non-redundant representative set of objects for downstream analysis
- Hypergraphs: generation, visualisation, navigation and analysis https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.11695 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.00190
- Privacy, security, differential privacy (adopt ideas/practices from "personal data" in medicine), GDPR
- Curricula for machine learning summer school(s): end-users include NE/DEFRA employees, small farmers, gardeners, university students
- Open source software for creating presentations, documents and so on such as Lyx, Jupyter notebooks,
- Data will be accessible from a wide range of platforms, including PCs, tablets, phones.

### Technologies

While identifying possible practical solutions, the following technologies will be considered.

- [FIXME: Fabio]

## Methodologies

[FIXME: Saira/Emre to suggest a couple of points here and provide a couple of sentences for each one?]

- The FLE^5SH framework
- ...