2014 CEH photo competition winners

A recent tradition at CEH is an annual photo competition open to all our staff and students. The quality of entries this year has been fantastic. Here we share the 2014 winning images:

Landscape category

Light on a Lakeland Fell by Andrew Sier (Winner in Landscape category and overall winner):

Judges: "Lovely composition with excellent use of exposure, showing light at its best, and
conveying the power and majesty of the fells."

Sunset over the Alps by Eric Sauquet (Runner-up):

View from the Lac Fourchu (Grenoble, France)

Stepping Stones by Alan Lawlor (Third place)

On the River Duddon, English Lake District

Allium Flowers by Alan Lawlor (Fourth place)

Allium flowers, ancient woodland, Arnside and Silverdale AONB

Wildlife category

Grey Heron by Denise Pallett (Winner):

Judges: "Beautifully exposed, with great backlighting and
use of depth of field"

Nearest and Deerest by Richard Howells (Runner-up):

"Hog deer (Ciervo porcino), introduced from India into Victoria, Australia,
in 1858, are considered a pest by some, but they are a beautiful, shy
and illusive species. I took this photograph while hiking in a remote area of
Wilsons Promontory National Park, just after sunrise."

Seasonal Monarch of the Glen by Will Brownlie (Third place):

Photographed at 6am near The Devil's Point

Fox on My Allotment by Will Brownlie (Fourth place):

"This Fox comes and sits with me on my allotment from time to time"

Other categories

Searching for Rare Arable Weeds by Nadine Mitschunas (Commended in the CEH at work category)

CEH colleague Markus Wagner during fieldwork

Surveying the Swamps by Laurence Carvalho (Commended in the CEH at work category)

CEH collaborated with SNH and SEPA staff in a 24-hour BioBlitz
to mark Loch Leven's 50th anniversary as a National Nature Reserve

Frosty Footprints by Emma Brown (Commended in the Creative category)

Along the path in Padley Gorge, Peak District

Ox-eye Daisy by Nadine Mitschunas (Commended in the Creative category)

Ox-eye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) seen from below (insect view).

Well done to all our winning entrants and thanks to the staff and students from all four CEH sites who took part!

CEH-led paper charts at number 42 in top 100 list of academic research catching the public's imagination in 2013

The company Altmetric has just published its list of the 100 research papers that received the most attention online in 2013. Altmetric track who's saying what about academic papers within social media and online news articles. The analysis is embedded in several journal websites, including those from the Nature Publications Group. 

Dr Chris Huntingford from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology was the lead author of the paper at number 42 on the Altmetric list, "No increase in global temperature variability despite changing regional patterns". It was published in July in the journal Nature.

Chris tells us that, "The study which led to the Nature publication was a team effort, and the analysis took over a year to complete with CEH kindly allocating me time to complete the final paper. The paper provides insights into how variability in temperature is changing both in time and geographically. Ongoing research into weather fluctuations and extremes is needed, as changes in weather patterns might prove to be as important as any general climate change in a greenhouse gas enriched environment. CEH and the other NERC centre/surveys are working with the Met Office and key university departments to aid public safety through such transitions. This will be by informing of adaptation measures that may be needed."

Chris adds, "The titles of the top 100 papers make fascinating reading as a snapshot of issues of concern or interest, and I would recommend anyone with a spare moment to take a look at the list."

You can find out more about how Altmetric collect data and put this list together on their blog. In true 'BBC style' we would like to point out there are many other ways of determining the 'impact' of a single research paper!

Barnaby Smith, Media Relations Manager, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

Huntingford et al. (2013) No increase in global temperature variability despite changing regional patterns. 500, 327–330 (15 August 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12310Nature.

Biodiversity indicators and the Biological Records Centre

The 2013 update to the UK Biodiversity Indicators has just been published on the JNCC website.
 
CEH scientists working within the Biological Records Centre contribute to several of the indicators, building on our wealth of knowledge and links to most of the UK's wildlife recording schemes. In particular, for 2013, our scientists have contributed to development of the new index on the status of priority species (C4a).

Dr Nick Isaac of CEH explains more:

"The new indicator C4a uses data from national surveys, such as the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme. The index provides an annual summary of the abundance of 210 mammal, bird, butterfly and moth species, all of which have been identified as priorities for the four national conservation agencies. This property makes this index much more sensitive than the old C4, in which species were categorised as declining, stable or increasing based on expert opinion."

"In addition, we also produced a supplementary index based on distribution data. These 'biological records' are not collected in a standardised way, which makes the data extremely noisy and liable to produce biased estimates of species trends. Within the Biological Records Centre, we've invested heavily in trying to understand this bias, and to extract a meaningful signal of change from the noise in the data. This investment has now paid off, because we're now able to report on the status of  taxonomic groups, such as bees, that lack standardised monitoring schemes."

"Both the abundance and distribution-based indicators show a decline of 50-60% since 1970, reinforcing the message that conservation agencies have their work cut out to prevent more species from going extinct."

More details of the C4a indicator can be found in the technical report, "Status of threatened species - status of priority species".

Other UK biodiversity indicators with CEH involvement include:

• C6. Insects of the wider countryside (butterflies) population (data from CEH's joint stewardship of the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme with Butterfly Conservation)

• C2. Habitat Connectivity (Countryside Survey data)

• B6. Pressure from Invasive species (reflecting our work with the National Biodiversity Network)

• B5. Pressure from Pollution

• C7. Plants of the wider countryside (data from CEH's Countryside Survey)

CEH science also played a key role in the 2011 National Ecosystem Assessment, which is the basis of Indicator D2. Biodiversity and ecosystem services (terrestrial).

Additional information

Biological Records Centre

Staff page of Dr Nick Isaac, CEH

Habitat quality, borehole insights & lake studies - CEH paperblog 4

Our latest paperblog highlights some of the recently published scientific papers led by or involving researchers from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.

• A study in Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment examined relationships between habitat and breeding success for two of our common bird species, the great tit Parus major and the blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus. The aim was to determine the potential of these species to act as indicators of food resource availability for birds in managed semi-natural habitats on farmland, thus acting as a measure of the effectiveness of specific management practices under agri-environment schemes. The paper, led by CEH's John Redhead with colleagues Richard Pywell, Richard Broughton and Shelley Hinsley, followed a four-year study of breeding success using 90 nestboxes on arable farmland in central England. Researchers from the RSPB and Bournemouth University also collaborated on the study, which found that habitat within 100m of the nestbox was the most influential on breeding success.
• Dr Chris Huntingford of CEH led a recent study published in the journal Nature, with colleagues from the University of East Anglia and the University of Exeter, which examined shifting patterns of temperature volatility in the climate system. The findings contradicted the sometimes stated view that a warming world will automatically be one of more overall climatic variation. Read CEH's press release and the Nature paper itself.
• CEH scientists often collaborate with our NERC colleagues on particular projects and areas of research. A new paper in PLOS One led by British Geological Survey colleagues is a recent example, in which hydrogeology is used to tackle questions in groundwater ecology. In the study, the team used borehole imaging and invertebrate sampling to shed more light on groundwater ecosystems and their potential ecosystem services. (The paper is open access).
• The Isle of May in the Firth of Forth is the location for one of CEH's most important monitoring projects, a long-term seabird ecology study. Puffins perhaps get the most column inches in coverage of this internationally recognised work, but several species of seabirds are actually monitored on the island. One such species is the European shag (Phalacrocorax aristotelis), and a new paper in Ibis reveals more about the dispersal rates and distances of shags colour-ringed as chicks on the Isle of May. The paper led by PhD student Emily Barlow represents a collaboration between CEH and the University of Aberdeen.
• The discharge of pharmaceuticals into the aquatic environment from wastewater is a topical area of discussion for researchers, regulators and the water industry. Professor Andrew Johnson has led a new study evaluating the potential environmental concentrations of four drugs from a group often featured on lists of pharmaceuticals of concern that are discharged into our river systems - the results showed considerable variation in the popularity of the drugs across Europe, with such variations potentially having an effect on the detection of these compounds in sewage effluent or river water. Radboud University and Brunel University scientists collaborated on the paper in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.
• Finally for this edition, Dr Bryan Spears from CEH has led an international team of researchers, including from Wageningen in the Netherlands, the Institute Dr Nowak in Germany and New Zealand's National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research in a eutrophication management study. The team looked at the potential for negative ecological impacts following the use of a lanthanum-modified bentonite clay to control phosphorus release from lake bed sediments. The study, published in Water Research, examined 16 case study lakes and the findings have implications for water managers worldwide.

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.