A new legal requirement for developers to demonstrate a biodiversity boost in planning applications could make a more meaningful impact on nature recovery if improvements are made to the way nature’s value is calculated, say researchers at the University of Cambridge.

From 2024, the UK’s Environment Act requires planning applications to demonstrate an overall biodiversity net gain of at least 10% as calculated using a new statutory biodiversity metric.

The researchers trialed the metric by using it to calculate the biodiversity value of 24 sites across England. These sites have all been monitored over the long term, allowing the team to compare biodiversity species data with results from the metric.

Plant biodiversity at the sites matched values produced using the metric, but bird and butterfly biodiversity did not.

This means there’s no evidence that a 10% net biodiversity gain calculated using the statutory biodiversity metric will translate into real-life gains for birds and butterflies, without additional conservation management.

This is the first comprehensive study of the performance of Defra’s statutory biodiversity metric across England. The results are published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

Plants, birds and butterflies have been comprehensively surveyed in England over many years, and are used as indicators for the national state of nature.

The researchers say the metric must be improved to better capture the intricacies of the different species within an ecosystem.

“The statutory biodiversity metric is a really important opportunity, and has potential to direct a lot of money into biodiversity conservation from developers. It’s the responsibility of conservationists and policy makers to ensure that it provides a reliable indication of nature’s diversity,” said Dr. Cicely Marshall in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, first author of the paper.

She added, “At the moment the metric does capture plant diversity quite well, but it doesn’t reflect the intricacies of ecosystems—species like birds and butterflies use habitats in very different ways.”

The metric, created by the UK Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), was introduced as part of the Environment Act with its legally binding agenda to deliver “the most ambitious environmental program of any country on earth.” It scores the condition and distinctiveness of a piece of land to calculate its biodiversity value in standardized ‘biodiversity units.'”

This allows developers to project biodiversity losses and gains across a site, so they can ensure the development achieves an overall minimum 10% biodiversity gain. Landowners can use the tool to calculate the biodiversity value of their land.

Marshall, who is also a Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, said, “Many property developments have been very detrimental to nature in the past, and it’s exciting that England now has a requirement for developers to leave nature in a better state than they found it. We hope our study will contribute to improving the way nature’s value is calculated, to make the most of this valuable opportunity for nature recovery.”

The results of the study have been used to make recommendations to Defra and Natural England to help improve the metric.

The metric uses habitat as a proxy for biodiversity, scoring habitats’ intrinsic distinctiveness and current condition. Plans for biodiversity gain can involve replacing lost habitat with similar habitat—the researchers say that nature recovery could be improved if the particular species and habitats impacted by a development were also taken into account in this process.

There can be huge differences in biodiversity across habitats like croplands, for example, and these aren’t captured by the metric which assigns all cropland the same condition score. Conventional farms that regularly use artificial pesticides and herbicides have much lower biodiversity than organic farms that do not.

“There are great differences in the ecological value of cropland depending on how it’s managed, but the metric gives all cropland a low biodiversity score. It would be nice to see these differences reflected,” said Marshall.

The UK is committed to building 300,000 homes a year by mid-2020, so the net biodiversity gain requirement is expected to generate a market for biodiversity credits worth an estimated £135m-£274m annually—substantially increasing funding for nature conservation in England.

A total of 4.6 billion people are connected to the internet through their mobile phones. For each of these people, there are more than three devices communicating with the internet. The Internet of Things (IoT) is composed of all connected objects, which are growing in number: today’s 15 billion are expected to have risen to 30 billion by the end of the decade.

The IoT, which includes objects ranging from cars to irrigation sensors, weather stations in remote places and autonomous drones, is opening up countless new opportunities for communications and data. However, it also faces significant hurdles.

One of the main barriers involves how to connect objects to the internet in places where there is no mobile network infrastructure. The answer seems to lie with low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, although the solution presents its own challenges.

A new study led by Guillem Boquet and Borja Martínez, two researchers from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) working in the Wireless Networks (WINE) group of the university’s Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), has examined possible ways to improve the coordination between the billions of connected objects on the surface of the Earth and the satellites in its atmosphere.

The paper is published in the IEEE Internet of Things Journal.

The importance of satellites for the IoT

The Internet of Things’ exponential growth during the last decade has boosted innovation in very diverse fields ranging from logistics to smart cities, agriculture and shipping, among others. To a great extent, the IoT revolution has been made possible by the effectiveness of what is known as low-power, wide-area networks (LPWANs) and the terrestrial infrastructure built for mobile telecommunications.

However, in spite of its great effectiveness, this solution suffers from an unresolved issue: how to connect IoT devices in remote locations and rural areas where this infrastructure is not available.

LEO satellite constellations have emerged in recent years as an alternative solution capable of overcoming the limitations of terrestrial networks. “LEO satellites are particularly relevant when it comes to the IoT because, being closer to the Earth, they need less transmit power to achieve reliable communication. This means that devices can save energy, extending battery life and saving on maintenance costs,” said Boquet.

“Among other advantages, deploying a low Earth orbit satellite is considerably cheaper, which means that connectivity services can be provided at prices that are more reasonable for the IoT.”

Furthermore, LEO satellites—such as the Spacex Starlink and Eutelsat OneWeb satellites and Amazon’s Kuiper project—allow much lower latency (delay between communications) than geostationary satellites, have many more satellites in operation and greater coverage, can be deployed much more quickly and are suitable for use in communications in many sectors. However, using this option for the IoT brings its own challenges.

Challenges of using satellite constellations for the IoT

Using satellites as part of the IoT network presents problems of its own. Some of these relate to the development of the industry (we are unlikely to be able to deploy mega satellite constellations to ensure uninterrupted coverage in the short term due to their low cost effectiveness when used for the IoT), and others relate to limitations linked to the way the technology itself has been designed, such as the increased likelihood of interference between communications, limitations regarding IoT devices’ use of power, and the difficulties involved in synchronizing these devices’ duty cycles with satellite communication availability intervals.

“IoT devices tend to be battery-powered and have regular sleep and wake-up duty-cycling intervals to save energy. These regular duty cycles are commonly used in terrestrial communications, where they are even standardized. However, as LEO constellations don’t provide uninterrupted coverage, what you end up with is short, irregular communication windows,” said Boquet.

“We therefore need to develop more advanced synchronization strategies to ensure reliable communication and access to the connection opportunities provided by the satellite network.”

How to improve synchronization between satellites and IoT devices

The power-saving modes in IoT devices, based on the energy conservation times during which they can extend their battery life by going into sleep mode, rely on regular periods. But this is not how satellite constellations work. To synchronize the needs of connected objects with LEO satellite access times, you must be able to predict where each satellite is going to be and when the communication window will open.

“Our proposed solution is to synchronize the IoT application’s transmission needs and the network’s communication needs on the one hand with the satellite’s availability times on the other. This synchronization is based on the ability to predict these times by using a model of the satellite’s orbital path, starting from a known initial point,” said Boquet.

“However, making predictions has a cost in terms of energy, as it requires regular calculation operations to be made and the predictive model to be updated when it deviates from the actual situation.”

The solution developed by the researchers at the UOC was tested in a real communication situation with the Enxaneta nanosatellite, the first satellite deployed by the Government of Catalonia under its NewSpace project. The results were promising: the satellite access ratio improved by up to 99%, ensuring long-term access to the network while minimizing the device’s energy consumption.

“The next steps are to complete the cost-benefit analysis of implementing the solution, taking into account various applications, service networks, types of satellite constellation, IoT devices and communication technologies; and then to propose and put in place energy-saving modes that automatically adapt to communication needs and the changing conditions of non-terrestrial networks,” said the researcher.

Engineers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have developed a model that combines machine learning and collaborative robotics to overcome challenges in the design of materials used in wearable green tech.

Led by Po-Yen Chen, assistant professor in UMD’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, the accelerated method to create aerogel materials used in wearable heating applications—published in the journal Nature Communications—could automate design processes for new materials.

Similar to water-based gels, but instead made using air, aerogels are lightweight and porous materials used in thermal insulation and wearable technologies, due to their mechanical strength and flexibility. But despite their seemingly simplistic nature, the aerogel assembly line is complex; researchers rely on time-intensive experiments and experience-based approaches to explore a vast design space and design the materials.

To overcome these challenges, the research team combined robotics, machine learning algorithms, and materials science expertise to enable the accelerated design of aerogels with programmable mechanical and electrical properties. Their prediction model is built to generate sustainable products with a 95% accuracy rate.

“Materials science engineers often struggle to adopt machine learning design due to the scarcity of high-quality experimental data. Our workflow, which combines robotics and machine learning, not only enhances data quality and collection rates, but also assists researchers in navigating the complex design space,” said Chen.

The team’s strong and flexible aerogels were made using conductive titanium nanosheets, as well as naturally occurring components such as cellulose (an organic compound found in plant cells) and gelatin (a collagen-derived protein found in animal tissue and bones).

The team says their tool can also be expanded to meet other applications in aerogel design—such as green technologies used in oil spill cleanup, sustainable energy storage, and thermal energy products like insulating windows.

“The blending of these approaches is putting us at the frontier of materials design with tailorable complex properties. We foresee leveraging this new scaleup production platform to design aerogels with unique mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties for harsh working environments,” said Eleonora Tubaldi, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering and collaborator in the study.

Looking ahead, Chen’s group will conduct studies to understand the microstructures responsible for aerogel flexibility and strength properties.