Our Living Laboratory

The People and Nature Lab is based at UCL East, in the heart of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Green spaces, waterways, and the built environment sit side-by-side in an area where sustainable development is seen as a priority. All new developments in the area – the UCL East campus included – must demonstrate a commitment to improving the area for people, wildlife, and the environment. This means that the UCL East campus and its surrounds provide the perfect setting for our experimental work.

On Campus

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The People and Nature Lab’s home at Pool Street West has been purpose-built. We have access to modern facilities including research laboratories, collaborative workspaces, and our own experimental roof terrace where we can trial new technologies and ideas in a controlled environment.

The centre sits alongside complementary research centres including Robotics and Autonomous Systems, the Global Disability Innovation Hub, and the School for Creative and Cultural Industries. Workspaces like the Urban Room and Memory Workshop, the Object Learning Studio, and the cinema provide new ways for researchers to engage with the public, ensuring that our work is relevant and embedded within the local community. You can find out more about the UCL East campus here.

In the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Development of blue-green infrastructure and public access to green spaces are an important element of urban planning in and around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. These initiatives range from removal of pollutants using Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SuDS) and ‘urban greening’ to facilitating sustainable lifestyles for residents and supporting digital infrastructure.

This gives us the opportunity to directly survey, monitor, and research the interactions between people, wildlife, and the environment in a unique real-life setting. Over time, we will develop projects that use various sites and initiatives within the park to explore our research themes.

Our first project is already in place. While the new UCL East campus was being built the People and Nature Lab worked with colleagues at Intel to develop the world’s first automated smart detectors for monitoring bats through their echolocation calls. Our ‘Echo Boxes’ continuously record and identify bat calls using machine learning across the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park sending the results back in real-time to understand the health of the environment. You can find out more about the project at the London Legacy Corporation Local Plan.

The People and Nature Lab’s rooftop garden at UCL East, 1 Pool St within the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, is a vibrant hub of ecological research and community engagement. This innovative space is designed to explore the relationship between urban environments and biodiversity through a variety of cutting-edge experiments and monitoring systems. The garden features a wildflower meadow with 38 native species, a pond seeded with sediment from a restored “ghost pond” in Norfolk, and diverse insect habitats. It is equipped with bat and bird acoustic sensors, a smart wasp nest enclosure, automated and traditional moth traps, a weather station, soil moisture sensors, and a flight tracker. These tools provide comprehensive data on wildlife activity and environmental conditions, making the garden a dynamic outdoor laboratory for studying urban biodiversity. Here’s a look at the diverse research activities taking place in this green sanctuary.