PILOTING ENVIRONMENTAL DIGITAL TWINS
Digital twins are becoming increasingly important in environmental science, bringing the potential to inform evidence based decision-making and policy-making across a range of sectors connected with the natural environment. Environmental digital twins will help us to manage natural resources and better understand the interactions between the environment and human activities in a diverse range of areas, including conservation, hazard assessment, renewable energy generation and climate change adaptation.
This project brought together several UK environmental science institutions to advance the field of environmental digital twins through pilot implementations, the development of standards, defining technical infrastructures and community building.
PROJECT PARTNERS
WHAT ARE DIGITAL TWINS?
A digital twin is a virtual representation of a real-world object or system, designed to be sufficiently realistic to support decision-making. The concept of digital twins emerged from engineering, where designs are tested under different operating scenarios. There is a two-way connection between the digital and real-world systems: data from the real-world system feed into the digital twin, which, in turn, informs decisions that affect the real-world system with measurable effects. This feedback loop may be fast or slow, depending on the system and user needs.Research into environmental digital twins is timely as it is supported by rapid growth in availability of live data streams from sensor networks, advances in modelling of environmental processes and ubiquitous access to high powered computing via the cloud.
A NEW DIGITAL TWIN FOR BIODIVERSITY MONITORING
We built a pilot digital twin of the Haig Fras Marine Protected Area (MPA) to support the monitoring of its biodiversity and to create a real-world test of the IMFe recommendations. Monitoring biodiversity is critical to determining whether the conservation objectives of the MPA are being met. This case study is an important exemplar of the application of digital twins to environmental management, and employs seabed imaging, a digital data type employed in marine monitoring that is growing in popularity.
The twin is primarily designed to enable conservation decision makers (e.g. the UK’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee) to assess changes in habitats, biodiversity and species of interest over time, presenting results graphically and enabling a high degree of user interactivity. It allows users to plan more effective future surveys, by helping them to understand the value of existing information and by determining the number of future observations required to make reliable assessments of biodiversity change. The twin integrates seabed imagery and bathymetry with data about biodiversity, habitats, chemistry, geology and human activities, from site-specific and European sources.
Future modifications could include connections between digital twins of multiple MPAs to provide conservation metrics at a regional level, or connections to digital twins of ocean conditions and climate to forecast biodiversity based on a range of possible future scenarios.
THE IMPORTANCE OF INTEROPERABILITY
The vision is to enable a “system of systems” approach, whereby multiple digital twins can work together to yield innovative solutions to real-world problems. To realise this, digital twins must be able to interoperate with each other, implying adherence to common standards and principles. A previous influential study published a set of recommendations (Siddorn et al, 2023) for developing an information management framework for environmental digital twins (or “IMFe”), based on requirements from several related environmental digital twin projects, including IceNet from the British Antarctic Survey and LandInsight from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
IMPACT FINDINGS
The outcomes of the project have been presented and discussed with multiple stakeholders in government and industry. In particular, the demonstrator digital twin of the Haig Fras Marine Protected Area has been co-designed with potential end users in Defra and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, the body responsible for monitoring the UK's MPAs. Additionally, the project facilitated discussions with a wider range of stakeholders, including the Met Office, the Digital Twin Hub, the Alan Turing Institute and others. These discussions are being sustained through follow-on projects funded as part of the NERC/Met Office TWINE programme.
