LOCAR hydrogeological facilities post-LOCAR

Following completion of the LOCAR Thematic Programme in 2006, BGS and CEH were awarded a service level agreement by NERC to manage the future of the individual sites which constituted the LOCAR infrastructure. This involved deciding which sites were to be maintained, which were to be transferred to other agencies (such as the Environment Agency and Universities) and which were to be decommissioned. The appropriate activity for each site was then implemented. For those sites that were to be maintained, NERC Estate Management section and their agents negotiated new access agreements. As the service level agreement between NERC and BGS/CEH was not awarded until the end of November 2006, and because the subsequent renegotiation of leases took a significant amount of time, it was not possible to publicise in detail the ongoing availability of LOCAR sites until the publishing of this report (December 2008); even at this time the transfer of some sites to other agencies has not yet been completed. However, the ongoing availability of some LOCAR sites has been publicised in general terms on the LOCAR research results site (http://catchments.nerc.ac.uk/about/field/ ). Meanwhile it must be noted that, whilst a number of the LOCAR sites are once more available to the scientific community for research purposes through the offices of BGS (hydrogeological sites) or CEH (hydrological sites), the renewed access agreements for most sites only run for a further 20 months until August 2010. The main objective of this report is to publicise the current availability of these sites and flag the fact that should access beyond August 2010 be required then action is needed now to initiate renegotiation of access agreements and locate appropriate funding for them. This report details only those LOCAR sites which contained essentially hydrogeological research facilities. The report describes the thinking that led to the development of the individual sites and groups different sites according to the nature of the possible research areas that they would support and/or the data that they would produce. It should be noted that there will be other potential research opportunities at these sites and potential users should not feel restricted to the opportunities that may be suggested herein.