Friday 27 September 2013

British birds, pollinators and penguin poo - paperblog 7

In the latest edition of the CEH paperblog, we first highlight a recent PLoS ONE paper that involved researchers from Anglia Ruskin University and Dr Shelley Hinsley of CEH in a ten-year study of British birds, and how weather interacts with habitat to determine breeding success. The Cambridgeshire-focused study discovered that birds breeding in urban areas are better able to cope during unusually cold and wet weather, because they are less reliant on a single food source for feeding their chicks. The study compared 2012 - with its notable weather, including a cold and wet spring and lower than average temperatures - to the previous nine years.

Over the whole ten years of the study, birds living in the traditional woodland habitat had fared significantly better and produced larger and healthier broods than their city cousins. However, if extreme weather events become more commonplace due to the effects of climate change, then those birds living in urban environments may ultimately have the advantage. The PLoS ONE paper is open access.

Staying with PLoS ONE, and open access, a study led by Professor Hui Wang of CEH has used new technology to investigate viruses such as varroa destructor virus in honeybees and bumblebees. The results, from a small field trial, show how the use of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology can help understand virus infections in key pollinating insects, with novel observations even from a small sample size. Such technology has potentially interesting applications in ecological and environmental science.

A new paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology also looks at pollinators and other invertebrates that provide important ecosystem services crucial to crop production. A team of researchers led by CEH mapped the distribution of species richness and functional diversity for ground beetles which are important in the delivery of natural pest control and for bees, important for pollination. Understanding national patterns can help to promote more effective crop management and contribute to longer-term food security.

Next, penguins are under the spotlight in a new paper in Atmospheric Environment. The emissions from remote seabird colonies often represent the main source of atmospheric nitrogen into surrounding ecosystems, and can provide useful case studies for scientists investigating nitrogen cycling and emission processes. However before this study no field-based estimates of ammonia emissions from penguin colonies had been published. Data was collected from seven locations around an Adelie penguin colony in the Antarctic and three different atmospheric dispersion models were used to derive the first field-based emission estimates of a penguin colony.  The researchers, including Sim Tang and Mark Sutton of CEH, estimate that 2% of the nitrogen excreted by the penguins is emitted as ammonia.

Finally, a featured article in the Journal of Environmental Quality led by Prof Andrew Sharpley (University of Arkansas) and involving Helen Jarvie, Bryan Spears and Linda May of CEH, used long-term monitoring data from a range of case studies (including CEH's Loch Leven and River Lambourn sites) to demonstrate the timelines and processes associated with recovery of water quality following phosphorus reduction measures. The team reported recovery times ranging from years to centuries across terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Read more in the open access paper and more background in a CEH news story.

Paulette Burns, Media Coordinator

Additional information


If you'd like a fuller picture of new papers from CEH, just follow the CEH Paper Alerts 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 have indicated above where this is the case.

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

Wednesday 25 September 2013

Cormorant-fishery conflicts: photos from the INTERCAFE project

Findings from a major Europe-wide study into cormorant-fishery conflicts have been published, providing one of the most detailed ecological and socio-economic investigations of these fish-eating birds, their impacts and implications for their management. Read more in CEH news and view photos from the project below.

The INTERCAFE study, chaired by David Carss of CEH, included the first
pan-European census of the number and distribution of cormorants in summer
and wintertime. Cormorant numbers across Europe have been increasing,
particularly within the last three decades.
Photo: INTERCAFE
Researchers carry out an INTERCAFE field survey (c) INTERCAFE. The
INTERCAFE reports include an overview of field techniques and standard
research methods for cormorants, fishes and the interactions between them.
Photo: INTERCAFE

A carp damaged by a cormorant. The INTERCAFE reports contain analysis
of cormorant-fisheries conflicts at carp-rearing ponds - an important freshwater
fishery sector across continental Europe - where problems at individual sites
can be caused by birds which breed as far as 2000km away.
Photo by Robert Gwiazda
The project drew together researchers from a number of disciplines, including
bird-related and broader ecology disciplines, fisheries science and management,
sociology, social anthropology and international law, together with experts on
fisheries production, harvest and management, local interest groups and
international policy-makers.
Photo: INTERCAFE
The project involved 70 researchers from 30 countries, as well as hundreds
of volunteers of the Wetlands International-IUCN Cormorant Research Group.
Photo by Stef van Rijn.
Photo of a cormorant by Josef Trauttmansdorff

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More information


CEH News: Europe-wide studies into cormorant-fishery conflicts published

INTERCAFE reports

Flickr set of photos from INTERCAFE project

Wednesday 18 September 2013

Freshwater Ecology Group's loch health research highlighted

Scientific research carried out by CEH's Freshwater Ecology Group has been highlighted in an article published recently in the popular magazine Scotland Outdoors. The article, in the Autumn 2013 edition, describes how research by the group has shaped the methods by which the health of Scotland's lochs are measured and how this work has shown that Scotland has some of the cleanest and healthiest freshwaters in Europe.

Swan on Loch Leven (photo by Laurence Carvalho)

The article showcases a variety of work by members of the Edinburgh-based Group, including long-term work at CEH's flagship monitoring site at Loch Leven, ecosystem restoration work carried out at Loch Flemington, and a large-scale survey of more than 200 lochs carried out to assess the health of our most important sites of conservation interest.

Sustaining the quality of freshwaters is vital to Scotland's economy and this article highlights how the Group's research is vital to maintaining and raising the standards of this precious resource, providing responses to threats and enhancing the benefits that freshwaters bring to society.

Laurence Carvalho

Related links


Scotland Outdoors magazine (subscription required)

Loch Leven monitoring

CEH's UK lake restoration research

Staff page of Dr Laurence Carvalho

Friday 13 September 2013

Ragweed models and Bird Island measurements - CEH paperblog 6

In our latest paperblog, we first highlight two new papers resulting from a European Commission-funded project to assess and control the spread and effects of Common ragweed in Europe. Accurate models are needed to forecast the progress and impact of alien invasive species. For Common ragweed Ambrosia artemisiifolia such forecasts are extremely important as the species is a serious crop weed and its airborne pollen is a major cause of allergy and asthma in humans.

Newly published in Global Change Biology, Dan Chapman leads the paper, "Phenology predicts the native and invasive range limits of common ragweed", collaborating with CEH colleague Prof James Bullock and researchers from the UK, Austria and South Africa. Their study shows that phenology can be a key determinant of species' range margins, and thus integrating phenology into species distribution models can offer great potential for the mechanistic modelling of range dynamics.

Dan and James are co-authors of a second paper entitled "An operational model for forecasting ragweed pollen release and dispersion in Europe", published in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology and led by the Finnish Meteorological Institute. This study produces the first European-scale simulation of ragweed pollen concentrations. The modelling illustrates the potential for a relatively localized invasive species to produce impacts on human health at a continental scale.

The remote Bird Island in the south Atlantic is home to large seabird and seal colonies, including Macaroni and Gentoo penguins, and Antarctic fur seals. Our NERC colleagues British Antarctic Survey have a research station there. A new open access paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics involving the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, CEH, BAS and Kings College looks at how Bird Island's fauna are influencing the composition and characteristics of remote marine aerosol measured on the island. Many aspects of marine aerosol systems are not yet fully understood, but a detailed understanding is essential to quantify more fully the role of marine aerosol in the functioning of the Earth system.

The study, which saw the first stationary deployment of an aerosol mass spectrometer to a field site in the sub-Antarctic, generally found the aerosol to be less acidic than in other marine environments due to the high availability of ammonia from local fauna emissions.

Finally, we highlight a paper by Professor Colin Neal who recently retired from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology but who remains a research fellow of the organisation. Colin's invited commentary in Hydrological Processes discusses "Catchment water quality: the inconvenient but necessary truth of fractal functioning", drawing on his long-term research, particularly at the Plynlimon catchments in Wales (data freely available from the CEH Information Gateway).

Paulette Burns, Media Coordinator

Additional information


If you'd like a fuller picture of new papers from CEH, just follow the CEH Paper Alerts 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 have indicated above where this is the case.

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