Abstract/Summary

The past decade has seen a growth of natural capital accounting both internationally and nationally. The term natural capital refers to the elements of nature that directly and indirectly produce value or benefits to people, including ecosystems, species, freshwater, land, minerals, the air and oceans, as well as natural processes and functions (Natural Capital Committee 2014). As an approach it emphasises the process of valuation, namely estimating the relative importance, worth, or usefulness of natural capital to people, typically to enable better governance. In this thesis, I explore the potential of big data and associated techniques to operationalise the natural capital framework at a national scale in England, through a better understanding of the relationship between natural capital assets and the benefits that flow from them. I take an interdisciplinary approach, using the literature review in Chapter 1 to identify key gaps in the state of the art, and addressing these gaps in the following chapters, finishing with a discussion of the implications of these findings in the final chapter (Chapter 5). The results from this thesis demonstrate how diverse and emerging environmental datasets can capture important aspects of sociocultural value that are otherwise hard to include in a formal valuation process (Chapter 2), enable spatially targeted management (Chapter 3), and facilitate natural capital monitoring (Chapter 4). In Chapter 2, I demonstrate the potential of crowdsourced data to capture the sociocultural value of designated areas and show that species richness has a significant positive effect on public interest in designated areas. In Chapter 3, I show that population density is a driver of the relative importance of agricultural land use as a source of N and P in river catchments in England. In Chapter 3, I demonstrate that significant dependency exists between the quantity, quality and spatial configuration of green spaces in London, and that there is potential to maintain highly biodiverse areas in cities, without assigning large areas to this. Taken together, these results realise some of the potential of the big data era to support the natural capital framework and its implementation, as well as pointing to some of the limitations of this approach.