CEH's agri-science research showcased in new timeline

Research carried out by scientists from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology over recent decades is showcased in a new timeline, published by Research Councils UK (RCUK) to coincide with the government's agricultural technologies industrial strategy. RCUK is the strategic partnership of the UK's seven research councils, who annually invest around £3 billion in research.

The timeline, "Growing with agri-science", highlights key research that has taken place since the 1940s, demonstrating the variety of approaches the research councils take to support innovation and deliver long-term impact from the research they fund.

Highlights from CEH include:

• Carrying out the first ever Countryside Survey in 1978

• Training farmers to create bumblebee habitats through Operation Bumblebee in 2008 (a forerunner of Operation Pollinator)

• CEH's work on assessment of agri-environment schemes for Natural England and Defra

• Our major contribution to the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (UKNEA) in 2011

• Our work on assessing the risk to crops from ozone damage (which includes this recent report)

• Development of the MySoil smartphone app with BGS which calls on members of the public to help map soil type across Europe

• Recent research that found that bacteria responsible for Johne's disease (chronic intestinal inflammation in cattle), and also implicated in Crohn's disease in humans, are widespread in UK rivers and soil

• Our leadership of the UK Farm Scale Evaluations, informing UK and EU policy decisions on genetically modified crops

 The timeline can be viewed on the RCUK website.

CEH's research covers agri-science across the landscape

 Related links

UK agricultural technologies strategy

NERC welcomes the UK's strategy for agricultural technologies

Feeding, fisheries and food webs - CEH paperblog 3

Our third paperblog covers cormorants, insect herbivores, England's largest lake, natural capital and water chemistry. (For those who want to know more about our paperblog concept, take a look at paperblog #1 published on 21 June).

CEH PhD student Scott McKenzie has a new paper in the Royal Society's Biology Letters, showing how two insect herbivores, an above-ground aphid and a below-ground vine weevil, may benefit in the presence of one another. According to the publishers, "This is known as feeding facilitation and is rare in nature." Read more in the paper, "Reciprocal feeding facilitation between above- and below-ground herbivores".

Dr Chris Huntingford and Dr Lindsay Banin were co-authors on two of the papers in the recent special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B which looked at change in African rainforests, past, present and future. Many of the papers in the issue are open access.

CEH's lake ecology scientists have published a paper in Global Change Biology on food web de-synchronisation in England's largest lake, Windermere. Read the paper here.

Professor Rosie Hails, CEH's Science Director for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Science, worked with Professor Steve Ormerod of Cardiff University on an editorial for the Journal of Applied Ecology. The editorial, "Ecological science for ecosystem services and the stewardship of Natural Capital", introduced five papers in a Special Profile showing how ecologists in the UK are contributing nationally and internationally to these issues, stemming from the UK National Ecosystem Assessment - the first ever national scale exercise of its type in the world.

Dr Steven Cole of CEH and colleagues from NERC's British Geological Survey have published a new paper in the Journal of Hydrology. The paper uses a novel application of CEH's G2G model combined with geochemical sampling to understand macronutrient fluxes across a catchment.

Staying with catchment water chemistry, CEH Fellow Professor Colin Neal and long-time collaborator Professor Jim Kirchner have published a summary of their work on universal fractal scaling in stream chemistry and its implications for solute transport and water quality trend detection. It can be found in PNAS.

And finally, in the next few months the final outputs from the EU-funded Intercafe project - which aimed to improve European scientific knowledge of cormorant-fisheries interactions - will be made available. Dr David Carss, who led the Intercafe project, has a lead-author paper, "Managing European cormorant-fisheries conflicts: problems, practicalities and policy" in the journal Fisheries Management and Ecology which previews some of the work.

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.

That's it for now, 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 who 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.

Puffin numbers on Farne Islands rebound after 2008 crash

Puffins on the Isle of May NNR (c) A. Takahashi

The National Trust has just released results for this years puffin count on the Farne Islands, one of a small number of significant breeding sites for puffins in the British Isles. One of the other significant sites for puffins is the Isle of May NNR where CEH's seabird ecologists carry out much of their long-term research. 

The Farne Island count recorded an eight per cent increase in breeding puffin pairs since 2008, from just under 37,000 to just under 40,000 pairs of nesting puffins. The BBC Online story is here.

As regular readers will know CEH scientists carried out a similar puffin census on the Isle of May NNR earlier this year. This found that numbers were at similar levels to 2009 despite this spring’s severe weather. Populations on the Farne Islands and the Isle of May recorded a dramatic crash in numbers between 2003 and 2008.

Responding to the Farne Islands count Professor Mike Harris of CEH said, "The Isle of May puffin population, 100 km to the north of the Farnes, has also shown no sign of a decline in numbers following the 2012 to 2013 winter puffin wreck."

Professor Harris added, "Our recent count on the Isle of May showed that puffin survival over the last winter was not exceptionally low, despite fears after the wreck. The wreck was unusual in that it occurred when puffins were returning to their colonies and were close to land.  It's likely that a very high proportion of the total number of birds that died were found, therefore exaggerating the severity of the mortality."

The National Trust Farne Islands Wildlife micro-site has lots more detail on the count including a puffin-cam. More details of CEH's seabird research on the Isle of May NNR can be found here.

Monitoring mercury in the atmosphere

Edinburgh is the venue for the International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant later this month (28 Jul - 2 Aug 2013), and CEH's John Kentisbeer will be among the scientists presenting at the event. Here John tells us a bit more about mercury and also why and how CEH monitors its presence in the atmosphere.

Why does the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology monitor mercury in the atmosphere? Put simply, because it is a poisonous pollutant that needs to be better understood and controlled.

Mercury is a special metal because it is a liquid at ambient temperature and pressure, leading to its nickname of quicksilver. This liquid mercury easily turns to vapour and can exist in the atmosphere for up to a year. It can enter the atmosphere through natural processes, such as volcanic eruptions, but humans add to this by making chemicals, burning coal, disposing of mercury-containing waste, as well as gold mining and many other processes. Have you ever heard of the phrase "Mad as a hatter"? It comes from using mercury in the manufacturing of felt hats in the 19th century. Nowadays, mercury is used in all manner of fluorescent light bulbs and you may even have some in your mouth if you have a filling!

Mapping mercury concentrations in air over Europe

Of course there has always been mercury in the atmosphere, but not as much as there is now. Gold rushes since the 16th century and processes linked to the industrial revolution are among ways that humans dramatically increased the amount of mercury in the atmosphere, leading to a peak in the 1980s before control measures were introduced, curbing emissions and allowing levels in the atmosphere to fall. They have been pretty constant since the mid-1990s.

The reason we should all care about mercury in the atmosphere is that it is one part of the global mercury cycle. It doesn't just stay in the atmosphere; it can be deposited to land and water directly, and in rain. This allows it to accumulate in the environment where it can have a detrimental effect by being transformed into a more reactive form, such as methylmercury. Methylmercury is highly toxic and is easily absorbed in the bodies of animals and humans. If methylmercury enters a lake, it will be absorbed by small fish through their diet, and when the small fish are eaten by bigger fish the methylmercury moves to the bigger fish; this carries on right up the food web, until you get to humans, a process called bioaccumulation. This can result in significant mercury exposure in humans and lead to Minimata disease, which can cause serious neurological damage, insanity, paralysis and, in extreme cases, death. It affects animals too - in one outbreak in Japan it was called "dancing cat fever" because of the effects on cats. For this reason, many countries advise their citizens how much of certain fish, such as tuna, they should eat.

UK monitoring

CEH monitors mercury at eleven sites across the UK to assess the rural background levels. We monitor both the mercury in the atmosphere, as well as mercury in rainfall. Mercury can be present in the atmosphere in three forms: it can be a gas, it can be part of a molecule or it can be stuck to particles. Mercury gas can be present in the atmosphere for up to a year, while mercury as a compound or stuck to a particle has a much shorter lifetime and is easily removed by rain. Gaseous mercury can be changed in the atmosphere to the other two types, but this is generally thought to be quite a slow process. Our monitoring, undertaken on behalf of the UK governments, forms part of a European and global programme for monitoring mercury in the atmosphere to help understand local, regional and global trends.

CEH's atmospheric monitoring site at Auchencorth Moss in Scotland

In order to work out how much mercury is in the air, we have to capture it, which we do using gold. We pass air across a gold surface, to which the mercury sticks as it forms an amalgam. Once we have finished sampling a known volume of air, we heat the gold up and the mercury is released from the surface and is sent to the analyser, which uses ultraviolet light to calculate the mass of mercury in the sample. We can then work out the original concentration in air.

Typically background concentrations of gaseous mercury in the northern hemisphere are about 1.4 - 1.7 nanograms per cubic metre of air. That is 0.0000000014 grams, which seems really small, but these small amounts can accumulate to cause potentially harmful effects. We monitor mercury in air every five minutes at two sites, one at Auchencorth Moss in Midlothian, Scotland and the other at Harwell in Oxfordshire, England. At the other sites, we have low volume samplers which sample Total Gaseous Mercury (TGM), comprising gaseous elemental mercury and mercury-containing compounds, for two-week periods.

A low-volume Total Gaseous Mercury sampler

Our data show that average concentrations of mercury in the south-east of the UK are higher than in the north-west. This would be consistent with the urbanisation of the UK, but also with air containing mercury coming from the European mainland. Using the five-minute data and local wind speed and direction, we can even start to pinpoint possible local emission sources, such as coal-fired power stations or crematoria.

By understanding the sources and their influence on atmospheric mercury, we provide evidence to policy makers to help them make informed decisions on the problems we face. When control measures designed to reduce emissions are introduced, we can then monitor the impact and their effectiveness.

CEH also measures mercury content in soils as part of the UK Countryside Survey, which allows us to better understand how mercury enters and leaves soils, and its impact on the soil environment. Additionally, CEH scientists at Bangor also coordinate the ICP Vegetation programme (the International Cooperative Programme on Effects of Air Pollution on Natural Vegetation and Crops) which surveys the concentration of heavy metals, including mercury, in mosses across Europe.

We also operate the Predatory Bird Monitoring Scheme, which examines the concentrations of pollutants in certain dead birds as a way of identifying risks to wildlife and potentially humans. Mercury is one of the chemicals monitored as part of this programme as it is thought to be a contributing factor to the decline of some bird species.

• Find out more about CEH's various monitoring activities with the links below. And if you are in the Edinburgh area, the International Conference on Mercury also has a public open day. Come along to the Lomond Suite, Edinburgh International Conference Centre, 150 Morrison Street, on Sunday 28 July between 2pm-4.30pm.

John Kentisbeer

Additional information

UK Pollutant Deposition: Heavy Metal Monitoring

UK Countryside Survey

Predatory Bird Monitoring Scheme

ICP Vegetation

2013 International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant website 

Staff page of John Kentisbeer at CEH

Peat, puffins and pollinators - Paperblog No 2

Our second paperblog covers wildlife and radionuclides, peatland chemistry, puffin survival, drugs and the environment, and pesticides and rats. For those who want to know more about the paperblog concept, take a look at paperblog #1 published on 21 June.

• Dr Nick Beresford and colleagues from Canada, Austria, Sweden and Finland have produced "A new approach to predicting environmental transfer of radionuclides to wildlife". Their new paper in Science of the Total Environment applies the method to freshwater fish and caesium.
• Dr Lucy Sheppard and colleagues from the Netherlands and Spain report on a nine-year experiment examining vegetation changes and chemistry in a Scottish peatland. The paper is published in Biogeochemistry.
• Prof Mike Harris and scientists from CEH's seabird ecology team working on the Isle of May NNR off the east coast of Scotland have used geolocators attached to Atlantic puffins to gain further insights into their survival rates over winter. The paper is published in Marine Biology.
• Prof Richard Shore, who studies the exposure and effects of pollutants, biocides and pesticides in wild birds and mammals, is a co-author on a new paper in Biology Letters. It reports the conclusions of a Royal Society-supported seminar involving experts from diverse scientific fields discussing the risks posed by pharmaceuticals to wildlife.
• Prof Shore, along with three CEH colleagues, also co-authors a new paper in Food and Chemical Toxicology which examines metabolic and physiological changes in rats following short-term oral dosing with pesticides commonly found in food.
• And finally a special mention for the new publication from the British Ecological Society, "100 Influential Papers", which were chosen from BES journals published in the society's first 100 years. Research by several current and former CEH scientists is included, as well as several papers published by staff at our predecessor institutes. One of the more recent papers included in the list is a study led by Dr Claire Carvell comparing the efficacy of agri-environment schemes to enhance bumblebee abundance and diversity on arable field margins. The study, published in 2006, "represents a quantum shift in our approach", in the words of Prof Jane Memmott, who recommended it for inclusion on the 100 influential papers list.

That's it for our second 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 who 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 record atlases and project reports. More details can be found in the publications section of the CEH website.

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