Blenheim Estate: How tech is protecting 'the finest view in England'

Data analysis and a sprawling sensor network are saving money and boosting biodiversity

Data is at the heart of the Blenheim Estate’s efforts to restore and support nature across West Oxfordshire.

Oxfordshire's sprawling Blenheim Estate has been called "the finest view in England." With 12,000 acres of rolling wood- and farmland, it's easy to see why Winston Churchill's father, Randolph, held such a high opinion of his home.

The exact quote refers to the view from the Woodstock town gate across the lake towards Blenheim Palace (I know this as I grew up in the area). Just a few metres from that point, behind a screen of trees, sits the Blenheim Estate Office where I met David Green, Blenheim's head of innovation.

Blenheim has taken many forms through the years. Starting as a hunting estate in Anglo-Saxon times, it has also been used for farmland and grazing pasture, and is now pivoting to prioritise biodiversity and conservation.

Looking after innovation across the entire estate is a massive job, especially as the Innovation team is just two people: David and data scientist Tawhid Shahrior.

Data plays a critical role across the team's three main areas of responsibility: business, land and real estate.

Patterns in data

Through a partnership with Oxford Brookes university, David and Tawhid built a system to predict visitor footfall around the Estate, which "stemmed from having huge amounts of data at Blenheim."

The first step to seeing value from that data was building on on-prem data hub to contextualise and sort it, but that wasn't enough, David said.

"I said, ‘We need to do something a little bit better than this; there are patterns in this data.'"

The Smart Visitor Management System (SVMS), a joint effort by the Innovation team and Brookes business school, was the result. It can help predict visitor numbers and locations, saving money through smarter staff placement, cutting food waste and knowing the areas likely to get busy.

Another algorithm that plays into the SVMS is called Similar Day, an advanced prediction tool that compares upcoming days to the most similar one in the park's history, based on elements like weather, time of year, day of the week, events, pre-bookings and much more.

"If you take that into consideration on the day, you can then predict a graph forward of the busyness of spaces across each of those areas. What was the footfall on that similar day? You've got that data so you can bring that up and you can take an average, or however you want to do it. What were the transactions? What sandwich did we sell? How many ice creams did we sell? What are the opportunities?"

David adds, "We've developed an [internal] app for people to be able to see this in their hands. We've got an alerting mechanic, so you've got the team that make the food; if you're selling more food than expected by a certain time of day an alert gets sent out, so they know ‘We might want to look at this information, we might run out of sandwiches.'"

Land management

On the land and real estate sides, the wide availability of low-cost, low-power, long range sensors has unlocked new possibilities, and Blenheim is investigating all of them.

David uses a LoRaWAN network of sensors to monitor data from around the estate – from tracking visitor footfall, to environmental monitoring in the Palace itself, to measuring water and soil quality.

The network of 220 sensors, covering thousands of acres, is already helping the estate change how it treats the nearby watercourses, as well as ancient protected oak trees on the site.

The Innovation team builds internal apps using Microsoft Power Apps to sort through and use the data from these sensors, and merge it with quantitative data from user input.

"You're getting into twinning territory, but what you're getting is context of why something failed. So, where we might see some biodiversity loss in the area, or a branch failure in one of the trees - what led up to that?

"... We're expanding this network, working together [with community organisations], and it allows us to measure pretty much anything, anywhere - from air quality...through to river level monitoring. This is sort of empowering our communities to have that data, which is good."

David is enthusiastic about the ways Blenheim is using its growing sensor network, but one deserves a special mention: a new field of study called soil eco-acoustics, or "listening to the sound of soil."

"What's powerful about that is that you can potentially evaluate...the health of soils without destroying it. Typical soil sampling is very destructive: dig it up, take it to a lab, cook it and then sample it. What we'll be trying to do is to do this with sound.

"Ultimately, in its simplest form, the noisier the soil, the healthier it is... If we can rejuvenate our soils, and they become noisier, that's really good, longer-term."

Using IoT sensors to gather sound recordings and AI to analyse them is a growing area: we've covered it before for species like squirrels and bats, but Blenheim's tracking of the tiny creatures in our soil is a new application.

Building a home

And finally, real estate. Blenheim isn't just a country park; it also owns housebuilder Pye Homes, building 100-150 houses every year, and has about 450 tenanted properties in the local area. The IoT has changed things here, too.

"I'm using IoT in those sorts of areas as well, to monitor things like mould... We can give our tenants access to information about temperature, humidity, CO2, because a lot of mould buildup is not actually the building's fault, or leaky gutters, it's actually our own living conditions. Indoor air quality is one of the biggest killers in the United Kingdom."

One of David's favourite parts of his job (excluding the mould) is how visual it is, and how the work he's doing now lays groundwork for years to come.

"It's very corny, but actually, all the things that we're doing today add up to something big tomorrow. Knowing that, in a hundred years, someone in my shoes...will maybe look back and go, ‘Thanks for collecting that information, that's helped us secure another 300 years.' That, I think, is powerful."