The Development of Ecological and Hydrological Integrated Environmental Data Sets Within the UK and the Establishment of an Environmental Change Network

There is a long history of monitoring, transmission, validation and archiving of ecological and historical data within the UK. The NERC’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology is one of the principal custodians of the terrestrial and freshwater data. In addition, it manages the UK’s multi-agency corporative Environment Change Network (ECN) and, using high speed computing and GIS, has developed advanced systems to integrate and disseminate the ECN multidisciplinary data and many of the other CEH Data holdings. The integration of data in this way is leading to new scientific insights in environmental processes and to the development of predictive models for use by policy makers.