University of Hull PhD Scholarship: Mapping Urban Environmental Assets for Place-based Stewardship

Project:

This PhD project is one of four projects from the ‘Participatory, place-based stewardship for mobilising urban climate action’ cluster. The project focuses on mobilising public participation for a crowd-sourced mapping of environmental/natural assets around the city/urban spaces. New technological applications (iNaturalist, eBird, Seek, etc.) have already made great strides to enhance public participation in the recording of natural history by using smartphones. However, there are still a range of barriers such 1.) sharing information across communities that this is possible, 2.) engaging all members of the community and 3.) raising awareness of the current environmental assets in urban environments, often dismissed as unimportant. The mapping of natural assets will be crucial for conservation, climate mitigation, flood resilience and sensitive urban development and therefore this PhD project will provide important and impactful research.

This PhD project will involve working with urban communities to create an underpinning ethos of knowledge exchange to promote learning from and with its members. This knowledge exchange will focus primarily on what constitutes the environmental commons and local natural assets, how these can be preserved/enhanced and, importantly, how the public can contribute to, access and ‘own’ such knowledge.  It will therefore utilise knowledge and approaches from the natural sciences, education and data science, so that the student can consider a range of different issues such as: how might semantic segmentation, land cover mapping or water/pollution sensor data be used/analysed by citizens?

Supervisors:

Dr. Africa Gómez;  Dr. Temitayo Fagbola; Prof. Kevin Burden

Funding:

• The successful applicant will receive a fee waiver and a maintenance grant / stipend for three years (full-time) or six years (part-time), which covers the research period of the PhD. The fee waiver for 23/24 is £4712 (Home fee) and the maintenance grant is £18622 per annum. If you need to move into a fourth year (full time) or seventh year (part-time) to complete your thesis, please note that you will not receive a tuition fee waiver or maintenance grant during this period and you will be required to pay a continuation fee.

Entry Requirements:

Applicants should have a minimum 2:1 degree in a related subject. A taught MA/MSc or Masters by Research in a relevant subject would be an advantage.

For more details on our entry requirements please visit the postgraduate admissions webpage.

This scholarship is available for full-time and part-time study.

International applicants:

This opportunity comes with a Home fee waiver only, which will not cover the full International fee. You will therefore need to pay the difference between the Home fee and the International fee and will need to provide evidence that you have sufficient funds to cover this.

How to Apply:

You will need to supply a personal statement when applying for this scholarship position. Find out more about writing a personal statement.  

Closing Date: 15^th February 2024

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