A new centre to help Scotland combat natural hazards such as floods and landslides is due to open next month.
The National Centre for Resilience will be based at University of Glasgow's School of Interdisciplinary Studies on the Crichton campus in Dumfries.
The centre aims to bring together expertise in research, training, data management and impact forecasting to enhance emergency planning across the country.
While setting up the new site, researchers have been looking at how to best provide care for vulnerable people during weather emergencies, improving forecasting abilities and developing a tool to maintain community resilience in the face of heavy floods.
In the future, they plan to work with the Met Office, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency and the British Geological Survey to improve forecasting of natural hazards.
Dr Carol Hill, Crichton Institute director, said: "We at the Dumfries campus of the University of Glasgow are delighted to have been awarded the contract to host this multi-disciplinary centre and to be able to play an important part in supporting national planning for resilience to natural hazards."
Scottish Environment Minister Aileen McLeod will attend the formal launch on March 21.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here