Co-designing the UK Environmental Exposure Hub: findings and next steps

Evaluating the impacts of chemical exposure on human, environmental, and wildlife health requires the robust integration and interrogation of diverse datasets. However, this process is often challenging due to the varied sources, formats, and quality of available data—demanding a wide range of specialist data science skills and methods.

As part of the National Capability for UK Challenges (NC-UK) programme, UKCEH is collaborating with the wider community to co-design and deliver the first UK digital knowledge hub for aquatic, atmospheric, and terrestrial pollution data. This UK Environmental Exposure (UK-EEx) Hub will serve as a central resource on the chemical state of the UK environment. It will support the visualisation and integration of pollution monitoring and modelling datasets from academic institutions, regulators, industry partners, and other national and regional initiatives.

Here, we report on recent progress, with particular focus on our community engagement event held in December 2025, “A Community Conversation to enhancing discoverability & access to environmental exposure data and methods”. During this event, we showcased new capabilities methods developed for the UK-EEx Hub—now publicly available via the Environmental Data Science Toolbox (https://nerc-ceh.github.io/data-science-toolbox/intro.html), a FAIR repository for discovering and accessing data science methods.

Participants highlighted several priorities for enhancing the Hub’s value and usability, including improving the presentation of uncertainty and metadata; integrating guidance on chemical databases; linking exposure information with biodiversity and sociodemographic datasets; providing intuitive spatial data viewers; enabling access to advanced analytical tools; and embedding systems-thinking in its design and use. Together, these enhancements were viewed as essential for delivering contextualised, transparent, and holistic analyses for UK-EEx Hub users.

The full workshop report is available in the NERC Open Research Archive: https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/541130/