Seeds, snow and scientific papers

The car park at CEH's HQ in Wallingford, Oxfordshire is slowly beginning to fill with snow this morning as the predictions of snow across the country come true. As the snow falls outside, I'm catching up on new scientific papers involving CEH staff. One in particular has caught my attention. It's a new paper in PLOS One by Dr Moritz von der Lippe from the Technische Universitat Berlin and colleagues including Prof James Bullock of CEH and Dr Matthias Wichmann of the University of Potsdam, a CEH Fellow. It reports on a recent study of seed dispersal by vehicles and the experiments were carried out in our car park, albeit in rather warmer times!

You can read the seed dispersal study here - it's an open access paper. Planet Earth Online has written a nice news story about the work, referring to the "glamorous location" of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology car park!

The CEH car park at Wallingford, a glamorous
location for scientific research?

James and Matthias collaborated on another seed dispersal study a few years back, with an experiment focusing on how far two wild plant seeds might be dispersed by attachment to hikers’ boots. You can read the CEH news story about that here.

Barnaby Smith

Additional information

Staff page of Professor James Bullock at CEH

CEH seed dispersal research