Through DART (and it's data repository) we have established an ongoing research relationship with Prof Toby Mottram (professor of automated agriculture) at the Royal Agricultural University (RAU) formerly the Royal Agricultural College) in Cirencester. We are currently collaborating on maintaining long-term soil moisture and temperature measurements which Prof Mottram hopes to extend with distributed soil moisture monitoring techniques. We are also looking at how spatially enabled automated telemetry capture systems on agricultural implements may be used to determine localised soil characteristics (some of which may be indicative of archaeological deposits or may be useful for helping to determine geophysical approaches). The underlying thinking is that farmers can collect useful heritage monitoring data as a by-product of things they already do (i.e. there is no additional effort in the data collection process). The range of potential impacts is likely to improve as farmers and other landholders embrace data rich precision agriculture techniques.

The corollary is to build some form of heritage monitoring system which can be consumed by farmers and others as a another layer in the developing ‘precision agriculture’ framework. This can provide a new way of developing management plans that is more nuanced than ‘preservation in situ’ where subfield heritage mitigation (for example using a rule that says - ‘when within polygon x ensure that the maximum plough depth is 10 cm) can occur using the same technologies that allow fertilizer to be efficiently distributed within a single field.

Such initiatives require (inter?) national data integration, modelling and analysis frameworks that can deal with distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic data (an ideal semantic web problem). To partially address this a pan-european project, THEMATIK, was submitted for an FP7 grant. Unfortunately this was unsuccessful. Thematik had the following aims:

“THEMATIK aims to: 1 develop new methods for monitoring, detecting and characterising heritage landscapes (their nature, location, state and risk position), 2 develop tools to improve the decision making process of managers and policy makers through a knowledge environment and 3 provide data and resources to improve community engagement and SME exploitation.

By using integrated data modelling enhanced by heritage specific monitoring, THEMATIK will improve the understanding of how environmental and anthropogenic processes change the state of heritage landscapes and their potential to be detected, understood and evaluated. Remote sensing derived data and ground-based monitoring systems will be used to assess various types and levels of degradation under different geographic and climatic conditions, to identify changes in state and to deduce the associated risks. This knowledge will enhance the mapping, monitoring and assessment of cultural landscapes in rural environments and provides a better understanding of the historical components of landscapes. Furthermore, tools will be developed that incorporate up-to-date data about the nature and state of the heritage landscape. These will provide derivatives (such as risk status and socio-economic value) to support management and policy making. By enhancing the science-base, THEMATIK can provide a higher resilience to change and better protection and risk mitigation strategies that will improve the protection and management of heritage landscapes. The outputs of THEMATIK can be incorporated into integrated models (e.g. those developed for the FP7 project CLIMSAVE: www.climsave.eu) that will allow policy makers to model the heritage impact of a policy change in another domain (agriculture, water or soil). The data and resources gathered will be made available through open access mechanisms, so that the widest possible audience is reached and the potential for re-use and exploitation by SMEs is ensured.”