Introducing the CEH 'paperblog'

CEH scientists lead or co-author more than 400 peer-reviewed papers every year in a wide variety of journals. We know that many of you are interested in regular updates on recent papers involving our scientists, so we’re introducing a new regular ‘paperblog’. The intention is to publish a short post every other Friday giving details and links to a selection of interesting research published in the last few weeks. I’ll try to include four or five recent papers, most of which will have a CEH scientist as lead author, although I’ve reserved the right to make exceptions for interesting material our staff have co-authored.

Paperblog No 1 - 21 June 2013

A bumper edition to launch the paperblog covering topics such as Scottish mountain ecology, ecosystem services, evaporation in Britain, health effects of drought, gannets, river pollution, ecological networks and nitrogen deposition.

• CEH scientists have published two interesting papers on ecosystems services in the Journal of Applied Ecology. Lindsay Maskell and colleagues used Countryside Survey data to explore the ecological constraints to multiple ecosystem service delivery and biodiversity within Great Britain. James Bullock and Danny Hooftman mapped ecosystem service and biodiversity changes over 70 years in Dorset (or, in their words, “a rural English county”).

• Another paper to use Countryside Survey data was published in Environmental Pollution reporting on a study led by Professor Ed Tipping. It looked at nitrogen deposition effects on plant species diversity in five habitats: woodland, heath, acid grassland, bog and calcareous grassland.

• Dr Alison Kay, working with CEH colleagues, wrote "A hydrological perspective on evaporation: historical trends and future projections in Britain". The paper is published in Journal of Water and Climate Change and the abstract can be read here.

• Dr Christel Prudhomme worked with staff at the Health Protection Agency (now Public Health England) on a systematic review of the health effects of drought. It’s Open Access and published in PLOS Currents.

• Dr Dan Chapman has a new paper in Global Change Biology reporting on his study using MODIS satellite data to look at temperature sensitivity of mountain vegetation activity on over 2700 Scottish mountain peaks.

• Seabird ecologist Professor Sarah Wanless was one of a large team of authors on a major paper published in the leading journal Science which demonstrated how gannets from different colonies feed in mutually exclusive areas. You can read more about the CEH contribution to the study here.

• Monika Jurgens and CEH colleagues worked with scientists from Lancaster University to publish a new paper in Science of the Total Environment looking at the presence of mercury and other substances in wild fish. The paper abstract is here and the paper has already been covered by the Chemical Watch news website (registration required).

That’s it for our first paperblog. More in a couple of weeks!

Barnaby Smith – CEH Media Relations Manager

Additional information

If you’d like a fuller picture of new papers from CEH, just follow the @CEHPaperAlerts twitter feed, which lists CEH peer-reviewed papers newly published online. Full details of Centre for Ecology & Hydrology science publications including those published in peer-reviewed science journals are eventually catalogued on the NERC Open Research Archive (NORA).

Those of you that follow the scientific literature will know some journal websites require registration and some are subscription-only. CEH, as part of NERC, is working with publishers and funders to make more of our output open access, and we’ll be indicating where this is the case.

We also publish lots of other outputs including biological records atlases and project reports. More details can be found on the publications page of our website.

As always we’re very interested in your feedback, so please let us know what you think and any improvements that could be made by commenting on the blog or emailing us via enquiries@ceh.ac.uk.