In the early to mid-twentieth century, women had limited opportunities to develop and practice as scientists and, when they did, were often marked out: regarded as odd or remarkable because they were women with scientific commitment, in contrast to their male counterparts. Opportunities for women in freshwater science arose in Britain in interconnected institutions centred on the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA) founded in 1929. Several women scientists, pioneers in their fields, were nurtured by the FBA, such as the early freshwater researchers Penelope Jenkin, Marie Rosenberg and Winifred Frost, the two latter being the FBA's first professional women naturalists. Several universities, such as Queen Mary College, University of London, gave opportunities to women freshwater scientists and had direct links to the FBA. Opportunities also arose for women scientists in British colonies. Other researchers who achieved distinction in their field were also products of the FBA and its imperial and university networks: Rosemary Lowe, Winifred Pennington, Winifred Frost, Carmel Humphries and Maud Godward, for example. We argue that the FBA encouraged scientists in relatively new scientific fields for the most part irrespective of gender. This is notable in a period when women scientists were treated with prejudice in scientific culture generally.

Women scientists have historically been subject to direct and indirect discrimination. This opinion piece argues for a history of freshwater science that recognises the scientific achievements of women. It suggests that lack of opportunity for women scientists in the 20th century is typified by the stereotype that women were naturally predisposed to non-intellectual pursuits and, therefore, ill fitted to science. Freshwater science in Britain possibly provided a distinctive space for women in science, in spite of widespread lack of opportunity. Over 20 women scientists were working in one institution in the inter-war period, and during and immediately after the Second World War. Yet, outside of that specific context, their work is barely known. We give examples of these women and their work and argue that the historical invisibility of women in aquatic sciences needs to be more thoroughly addressed, so as to understand the work of women scientists as having historical, social, as well as scientific, significance.

Mark Toogood highlights the spatial dynamics of the west Highland Survey, conducted by British ecologist Frank Fraser Darling between 1944 and 1955. The Survey advanced a comprehensive understanding of ecology, recording population, land use, soils, vegetation, and environmental history. In the process, the Highlands were constructed as a region of degradation in which population decline was explicitly linked to a story of environmental misuse. Darling appraised the Highlands as ecologically and historically a “devastated terrain,” and identfiied deforestation and overgrazing as responsible for the space’s decline. The Survey, then, was presented as a basis for a new polity, and Darling optimistically looked to nascent state institutions of ecology and planning in Britain to lead the way to support alternative land uses. All of this was not without political consequences. The chapter discusses the Survey, as an infrastructure for fieldwork, as a politically resonant project, and as the centerpiece of a spatio-epistemic process that reshaped the region.

Sustainable transformation to energy efficient housing remains very challenging. While implementing effective governance remains specific to local and global contexts, more encompassing interrelated essential conditions have emerged which serve as prerequisite to varying degrees in implementing strategies for energy efficient housing in Europe. Notably, the existing English housing system has incorporated these critical drivers to leverage effective governance for energy efficient housing environments. Whilst these are important, there is a paucity of work on the understanding of 'barriers' against the backdrop of these prerequisite essential conditions from the whole system-wide stakeholders' perspectives. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues and identify a list of correlated and commonly agreed barriers from the stakeholders' perspectives. From the initial set of 40 barriers, this research identifies ten, as prioritised by online survey respondents. The paper, therefore, directs future research to investigate strategies that can overcome these key barriers.

This study sought to investigate the behaviour and attitudes of dog walkers to picking up and disposing of dog foul, with a specific focus on bagged dog waste. Two research methods were utilised. The first explores locational and social factors influencing dog walkers' behaviour in picking up and disposing of dog faeces. Dog waste audits were conducted on popular dog walking paths in Lancashire. Secondly, the results were used to deliver an online national dog walking survey. Results of the audits suggested that availability of bins, path morphology, visibility, and path location are key factors in determining the occurrence of dog faeces. In the survey a key factor influencing behaviour was the belief that clearing up after dogs is the 'right thing to do' and this was associated with an awareness of health risks. Dog walker typologies are also proposed heuristically, ranging from those dog walkers that are 'proud to pick up' who will pick up in any location, through those who make contextual judgements about where and when it could be permissible to leave dog waste, to the 'disengaged' who will not pick up even if they are aware of the health and environmental consequences. The study advocates active engagement of dog walkers in tackling this contested, potentially environmentally damaging issue.

The United Kingdom building sector has been challenged to retrofit a huge stock of existing buildings in order to increase its adaptive capacity for climate change impacts. Addressing such challenges will require systematic structural changes in both, socio-technical and socio-political infrastructure. A numbers of studies have suggested the approach of strategic niche management of transition for sustainable technological regimes. Accordingly, any such transition would follow processes: early stages of niche formation; creation of policy mechanism required to harness the niches; niche expansion into incumbent regime; and the regime transition into more sustainable technological regime. Following this, the UK Government has introduced a raft of initiatives; one of which is “Green Deal” to enable buildings to become energy efficient through retrofit technologies, ultimately contributing towards the national goal of achieving 80% reduction in carbon emission by 2050. This paper serves three purposes. First, the paper introduces multi-level socio-technical system for construction/retrofitting in building industry. Second, the ex-ante strategic niche management approach has been used to analyse the dynamic of “Green Deal” initiative. Thereby the paper would critically assess technological, organisational and institutional reforms undertaken for the initiative in the processes for sustainable socio-technical transition. Third, the paper would contribute towards strategic niche management literature which lacks in practical examples of using it as an ex-ante tool for niche building and regime transition.

AbstractThis article addresses issues surrounding the role of public participation in expert‐driven biodiversity monitoring and research, reviewing a range of cross‐disciplinary insights and critiques that are important for recent debate in environmental geographies. The paper identifies normative, instrumental and substantive motivations dimensions of such initiatives and examines the tensions within these. A key focus concerns the ‘win–win’ model of public participation in scientific research (PPSR); claims of multiple benefits from PPSR, such as increased knowledge of biodiversity issues and of participants’ local environments; claims that doing PPSR is a form of ‘social learning’; and suggestions that engagement in science will change attitudes and environmental behaviour. The ‘win–win’ model is found to veil important issues about the politics of knowledge. These include the framing of citizenship in ‘citizen’ science, the production of certain kinds of scientific subjects within PPSR, the framing of relationships between professional and non‐professional parties, assumptions about the role of ‘data’ in the rational evidenced‐based process and anxieties amongst professional scientists around relations between data quality and the breadth of participation. Whilst the affective engagement with subject and the non‐human world in PPSR is rich and diverse and the expert, non‐expert boundary a mutable one (particularly in natural history), there is increasing contention that the win–win model for PPSR only works if we overlook aspects of these knowledge politics.

Examines the historical construction of Kenyan Maasai people and 'Maasailand' in the context of the interrelated networks of knowledge and practice in development, ecology and conservation and safari tourism.

The Open Air Laboratories network, or OPAL, as it quickly became known, was launched in 2007 following a successful application to the Big Lottery Fund It was the first time that Big Lottery funding on this scale had been awarded to academic institutions. The University of Central Lancashire led by Dr Mark Toogood was responsible for understanding public engagement with OPAL. The Open Air Laboratories (OPAL)network is a nationwide partnership comprising of ten universities and five organisations with grants awarded totalling £14.4 million. • Over half a million people have participated in the OPAL programme. OPAL activities are carried out by people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities, including 10,000 people in ‘hard to reach’ communities. • OPAL opens people’s eyes to the natural world. Nearly half (44%) of OPAL survey participants said that this was the first time that they had carried out a nature survey. 90% of participants have learnt something new. • OPAL has the ability to change people’s behaviour. Almost half (43%) of respondents said OPAL had changed the way they thought about the environment and more than a third (37%) said they will change their behaviour towards it. • In addition to raising environmental awareness, OPAL also improves personal well-being by motivating people to spend time outdoors doing something positive, while connecting with people and nature.

The emergence and organisation of amateur networks of observation in Britain in the period between 1920 and 1940 are addressed in this paper. It examines the geographical, organisational and epistemological associations between networks of ornithological observation (traced through the British Trust for Ornithology), which emerged from the 1920s, and amateur ethnography (traced through Mass-Observation) which emerged in the late 1930s. I approach these ‘observational cultures’ as spaces which brought together new concepts of the local, of everyday nature and society, as well as the possibilities of changing the everyday. The paper suggests that popular observation during the period partly constituted a reframing of ways of knowing Britain differentiated through the everyday production of natural and social knowledge and the construction of the active citizen and new communities of practice.

This paper traces the distinctive shifts in ecology and conservation in Britain during the late 1950s and 1960s. These were the last six years of the Nature Conservancy, the state research council responsible for ecological research, the conservation of nature, and for providing expert advice. Drawing on work in science studies and the geography of science, the paper addresses the changing spatialities of official ecological knowledge and the ordering of nature in this period of British modernity. The paper examines the Conservancy's construction of the form and relationship of research to practice: the connections between local spaces of research – the laboratory and the nature reserve – to the ‘right’ government of land and management of resources more universally. This putative ‘single great mission’ is traced through examination of the politics and practices of doing ecological research at the time, including the creation of a new Experimental Station, the growth of ecology as public discourse, and, importantly, government reviews of science. The paper concludes by considering how this mission was tempered and reconfigured by institutional change.

This article reports the major findings from an interdisciplinary research project that synthesises key insights into farmers’ willingness and ability to co-operate with biodiversity policies. The results of the study are based on an assessment of about 160 publications and research reports from six EU member states and from international comparative research.We developed a conceptual framework to systematically review the existent literature relevant for our purposes. This framework provides a common structure for analysing farmers’ perspectives regarding the introduction into farming practices of measures relevant to biodiversity. The analysis is coupled and contrasted with a survey of experts. The results presented above suggest that it is important to view support for practices oriented towards biodiversity protection not in a static sense – as a situation determined by one or several influencing factors – but rather as a process marked by interaction. Financial compensation and incentives function as a necessary, though clearly not sufficient condition in this process.

Drawing on the painting, constructions and writing of the British artist Peter Lanyon, we explore how geographical knowledge is represented in modern abstract art. Lanyon had a deeply felt sense of Cornish identity and attachment to the history, people and place of West Cornwall. He also adopted particular practices - such as gliding - in which he experimented with bodily position and experience. We examine how these practices and cultural identity flowed together, constituting a kind of knowledge which was transposed into his art, the making of which was also an integral part of this dynamic process. We conclude that Lanyon’s perspective departs from the surveying gaze of traditional landscape representation, and also from the autonomous aesthetic common to abstract expressionists. Lanyon’s historical and cultural conception of landscape, as well as his spatial practices, suggest an awareness of landscape as socially defined. So, in a wider sense, we regard Lanyon’s geographical knowledge as a distinctive exploration of the relationship between individual, society and space.

Conservationists proposals for the regeneration of Caledonian forest and the reduction of red deer populations in Scotland has aroused considerable debate. In this context, this paper examines ecological discourses and representations of nature, landscape and society as presenting alternatives to hegemonic place myths and traditions of the Highland estates.