Last month, what will become one of the largest environmental science centres in Europe opened its doors in Britain. When it's fully staffed, the Lancaster Environment Centre will employ some 300 scientists, including graduate students and postdocs in five departments.

The facility, costing £25 million (US$46 million), combines five environmental-science departments from Lancaster University with the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, run by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

The centre is designed to emphasize a multidisciplinary approach to environmental science, says its director, Bill Davies. For example, its five departments can approach different aspects of complex problems, such as how the genetic make-up of different plants can affect their nitrogen uptake, or how persistent organic pollutants — volatile compounds released by paints — build up in the atmosphere, move around the world and end up in humans' fatty tissue. The project is noteworthy because of the way it combines both government and academic labs, takes a multidisciplinary approach to environmental science, with a strong social-science component, and creates a critical mass of environmental scientists. “We're one of the biggest groups of its kind in Europe,” says Davies.

The building, funded jointly by the NERC and Lancaster University, includes controlled environment facilities, 15 glasshouses and equipment to allow integrative studies of terrestrial, aquatic and atmospheric systems.

It is also taking the kind of computational approach to environmental science that has been the norm in physics and is becoming increasingly common in biology.

Davies says that he is now recruiting a chair in informatics and wants to develop environmental informatics as a specific unit for the centre, with the possibility of adding a new wing to the centre later.

Davies also envisages spinning out some businesses from the site, in much the same way that biotech companies spring from university life-science departments. For instance, scientists at the centre could do contract work on environmental chemistry, or computer modelling of regional environmental problems such as flood prediction. “We can see ways of building on that commercially,” explains Davies.

→ http://www.lec.lancs.ac.uk