Project Team: Meggen Gondek, Stewart Ainsworth & Alex Foster, University of Chester Abstract: Heritage crime is an offence that harms the value of heritage assets and their settings for both current and future generations. Over the past 15 years, Historic England and the National Police Chiefs’ Council have driven improvement in both police training and research that highlights the scale of these complex crimes. The challenge of recording, preventing and prosecuting heritage crime is exacerbated by a lack of standardised procedures across police councils for documenting, analysing and evidencing heritage crime. This project proposed the development of a Virtual Research Environment on the HSDS that utilises techniques and datasets used by archaeologists, particularly in technology-driven recording and analysis, to enable the rapid access, processing and visualisation of point-cloud (e.g LiDAR and laser scanning) and other computer-heavy datasets to support heritage crime investigation. This VRE will break down barriers between sectors to enable collaboration, access to data and foster heritage science research that will have demonstrable social impact to the prevention of heritage crime.