Find your issue and your place
Nothing, or a vague sense of what interests you. That is the normal starting position, and it is fine. A couple of weeks from now this decision will have shaped everything, so it is worth taking some time over.
- An environmental issue you can state in a sentence
- A named place you can actually get to
- A rough sketch of the system involved
- Background reading that supports one question, not twenty
Most advice tells you to choose a topic. We think you should choose a place.
A topic gives you something to read about. A place gives you something to measure, people who disagree about it, and a strategy someone is already applying to it. Everything this investigation needs is easier to find once you have stood somewhere specific and asked what is going on here.
You cannot leave this step without all three
Something that is happening, to something, because of something. Biodiversity is a topic. Piste management changing plant communities at a resort that will lose its snow is an issue.
One hillside, one reach of river, one field margin. The place is what makes a real-world strategy findable, and without a strategy there is nothing to write for Criterion B (Strategy).
What comes in, what goes out, what is stored, what feeds back. This is what stops your investigation from being a list of measurements.
Everything below is how we suggest you actually do it.
A topic is not an issue
This is the distinction the whole investigation rests on, and the commonest reason a promising study never quite works. A topic is a subject area. An issue is something going wrong, somewhere, for reasons you can name.
The test: can you say what is happening, to what, and because of what? If the sentence has no verb in it, you have a topic.
You do not need a global crisis. A footpath eroding across a dune system is a perfectly good environmental issue, and a considerably better one than climate change, because you can go and measure it tomorrow.
| Topic | Issue |
|---|---|
| Water quality | Nutrient runoff from arable land is enriching a chalk stream that supports a protected fishery |
| Urban green space | Mowing regimes on a council park are suppressing pollinator plants that the council's own biodiversity plan commits to increasing |
| Biodiversity and skiing | Piste management is holding a montane slope open as grassland at a resort that will not be snow-reliable by 2050 |
Biological and geographical methods are allowed
There is a persistent rumour that ESS investigations must avoid anything that looks like Biology or Geography. That is not what the guidance says, and this may put you off a perfectly good study.
What the official teacher support material says is that investigations focused only on human health, economics, or elements of biology or geography are often unsuitable. It then adds the part everyone forgets: if the environmental issue is made clear in the background, and the relationship to it is explained, those focuses can be appropriate.
So quadrats are fine; a frame of known area you put down and record what is inside. Transects are fine: a line across a place, sampled at intervals. Questionnaires are fine. Water chemistry is fine. What is not fine is doing any of them without an environmental issue wrapped around them.
They give two. "How photosynthesis is affected by the colour of light" is a Biology topic. "The correlation between GDP and electricity usage" is economics or geography.
Neither has an environmental issue. Both could be rescued by putting an environmental issue in there, which is precisely the move this step is asking you to make.
Sketch the system
Somewhere in your background, show that you understand your variable sits inside something larger: what enters, what leaves, what accumulates, and what loops back.
A labelled diagram does this faster than three paragraphs, and it is worth knowing that diagrams do not count against your word limit. Two hundred words of systems prose costs you two hundred words. The same understanding as a diagram costs nothing.
It also pays off twice more: in step 6, where the system is what lets you explain a pattern rather than describe it, and in step 3, where a strategy is always something that acts on a flow.
Winter grooming compacts snow and removes insulation; summer mowing removes woody growth and keeps the canopy open. Light and soil structure change. The plant community responds. Nothing shades out, so no single species dominates.
Drawn as a labelled loop with management at the top, that is one figure and no words at all. It also makes the eventual conclusion legible, because the strategy under debate acts on exactly the arrow at the top of the diagram.
Draw your system rather than describing it: diagrams are outside the word count, prose is not. Check that the arrow your strategy acts on is somewhere in the picture, if it is not, your fieldwork and your argument are about different things.
Background that earns its place
Every paragraph should be there because the research question needs it. The commonest failure is a general essay about the subject area followed by an unrelated question, and it costs marks on both strands at once.
A useful test as you write: for each paragraph, can you say which part of your question it makes possible? If not, it is interesting rather than relevant, and 500 words does not stretch to interesting.
One paper explains how piste preparation changes snow cover, soil temperature and the length of the growing season. That is the mechanism, and it justifies measuring soil and light rather than only plants.
A second, from a resort at similar altitude, found managed slopes holding higher diversity than the surrounding forest. That is the reason the eventual result was not a surprise, and it is why the background had to include it rather than only the paper that agreed with the hypothesis.
Aim for two kinds of source: one that explains the mechanism you are going to measure, and one that reports what happened somewhere comparable. Include the study that disagrees with what you expect; that is what makes it background research rather than a case for the defence.
It is allowed, and it is genuinely useful for the narrow job of working out what to search for; the vocabulary a field uses is often the only thing standing between you and the right paper. What it must not do is stand in for reading: a summary of a study you have not opened cannot be cited, and tools invent plausible-looking references often enough that every one needs checking.
Step 8 covers what has to be acknowledged and how. The companion guide sets out what a defensible level of use looks like for research specifically.
It can help you get your bearings on an unfamiliar issue and suggest the search terms a field actually uses, often the only thing standing between you and the right paper.
It cannot be the source. Everything you cite has to be something you opened, because this criterion wants citations traceable enough for a moderator to follow, and tools invent convincing ones.
Ready for step 2?
0 of 8The last two are practical rather than academic, and they sink more investigations than anything on this page.
Step 2 turns your issue into something answerable with a tape measure. It is one sentence and about fifty words, and it will take longer than any other sentence in the report.
The ski piste investigation used throughout this guide is a teaching reconstruction. The location, sampling design, plant records and soil data come from real fieldwork at Mijoux in the French Jura. Canopy cover measurements were added to illustrate good practice and were not part of the original fieldwork. Photographs are the author’s own, taken at the site.