Carbon and plant biodiversity recovery

A very short post to draw attention to new research by one of our PhD students Phil Martin (with Bournemouth University) who this week was lead author of a paper published in the Royal Society's flagship biological sciences journal, Proceedings B.

The Centre for Ecology & Hydrology published a news story about the research: Carbon storage recovers more quickly than plant biodiversity in re-growing tropical forests

You can read the paper itself on the Proceedings B website (free to access until 30 November as part of the Royal Society's commitment to Open Access Week): Carbon pools recover more quickly than plant biodiversity in tropical secondary forests

On Phil's blog Ecology for a Crowded Planet, he has written an engaging and informative post giving more details about the research and why it is important: How long does tropical forest take to recover from agricultural clearance?

The photograph below by Ricardo Solar depicts an intermediate secondary forest in Paragominas, Para, Brazil and is indicative of the type of forest used in the analyses.

Photo by Ricardo Solar

Paulette Burns, Media Coordinator 

Additional information

Staff page of Philip Martin at CEH 

21 November 2013 update

Philip also published an article about his research in The Conversation on 13 November 2013

Hedgerows and hydrology - CEH paperblog 5

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

• A new study in Global Change Biology describes results from a nine-year N perturbation, manipulation experiment carried out by CEH scientists on an ombrotrophic bog, Whim (a site in the Scottish Borders). Ammonium and nitrate were provided in rainwater spray in differing amounts, plus a rainwater only control, via an automated system coupled to site meteorology. The work was led by Dr Lucy Sheppard.

• A study recently published in Biological Conservation examined changes over 70 years in hedgerow floral diversity, including the impacts of management. The paper, led by CEH's Jo Staley with colleagues James  Bullock, John Redhead, Danny Hooftman and Richard Pywell, used a unique botanical dataset for 357 hedge sites across a study area of 2600 km² in Dorset, collected in the 1930s and again in 2001. 

• Professor Helen Jarvie of CEH, working with other CEH scientists and scientists based in the US, has written a new paper examining water quality remediation and the challenges it faces from "legacy phosphorus". The paper is published in Environmental Science & Technology.

• Three CEH hydrologists led by Dr Alison Kay have undertaken a study of uncertainty and sensitivity issues around estimating changes in 20-year return period flood peaks in Britain. The research is published in the journal Hydrological Processes.

• Professor Mike Acreman of CEH and Profesor Joe Holden from the University of Leeds have published a new article on "How Wetlands Affect Floods". It was published in Wetlands, the official scholarly journal of the Society of Wetland Scientists, in mid-August. They focused on two example wetland types (upland rain-fed wetlands and floodplain wetlands) to demonstrate why there are differences in flood functions both within and between wetland types.

Open access publishing is increasingly becoming the 'norm' in scientific publishing in the UK. To end this month's paperblog, we highlight three papers, all open access, which involve CEH scientists.

• First, Dr Bethan Purse of CEH co-authored a review of "Culicoides biting midges, arboviruses and public health in Europe" published in Antiviral Research, led by Simon Carpenter from the Pirbright Institute.

• Second, three CEH scientists have collaborated on a paper examining upland streamwater nitrate dynamics in CEH's long-term field sites at Plynlimon in Wales. The manuscript, describing work led by the University of Reading, is currently under discussion in Biogeosciences Discussions (until 3 October 2013). All data reported in the paper are freely accessible via the CEH Information Gateway.

• Finally, and also under discussion until 3 October 2013, Mike Bowes of CEH, working with colleagues at Newcastle University, is co-author of a new paper in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences looking at nutrient pollution modelling and monitoring. The example used is the river Frome catchment in Dorset, an area which CEH scientists know well, having carried out many years of research there.

Barnaby Smith - Media Relations Manager

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.

Guest blog: TELLUS move to open access welcomed

In a guest blog,  CEH Climate Modeller, Dr Chris Huntingford, welcomes the ‘open access’ move by TELLUS

CEH research is published in many science journals, some of which are now available via Open Access. News, this month, that the TELLUS journal series has moved over to Open Access is a development to be welcomed – even more so, that the entire TELLUS archive of existing publications is now freely available. Why? Because this means that our research is now more accessible, by freely downloading the papers from the internet.

In welcoming this move, here are three recent pieces of work from the TELLUS archive involving CEH, Exeter University and the Met Office. This work all relates to climate change and its impacts, which might be of interest to others. Please feel free to click on the links below, which should return the research papers.

Lina Mercado (Exeter University/CEH) and co-authors published in 2007: “Improving the representation of radiation interception and photosynthesis for climate model applications”, (Tellus Series B-Chemical And Physical Meteorology, 59). This paper moved the well-used JULES land surface model on from the existing “big-leaf” averaging methodology, and describes in full how light-interception throughout a vegetation canopy should be modelled. Representing light radiation at different levels, this paper is the precursor to the subsequent publication by Lina in Nature, demonstrating the initially counter-intuitive result that darkening aerosols in the atmosphere can actually increase photosynthesis. This is because raised levels of diffuse light can penetrate the vegetation canopies more deeply. 

Peter Stott (Met Office) and co-authors published in 2008: “Observed climate change constrains the likelihood of extreme future global warming”, (Tellus B, 60). They used techniques similar to the standard IPCC detection and attribution algorithms to determine better, from present day spatial and temporal temperature records, the extent to which aerosols are masking the full extent of global warming. Although the greenhouse gas warming offset partially by aerosols is well known, this work aided in quantifying that balance. They conclude the present-day aerosol cooling is suppressing a major portion of current greenhouse warming. This work, including the methodology, has the potential to refine better future predictions for different simultaneous greenhouse gas and aerosol concentrations.

Chris Huntingford (CEH) and co-authors published in 2009: “Contributions of carbon cycle uncertainty to future climate projection spread”, (Tellus B, 61). In this paper, the complete set of combined climate-carbon cycle simulations from the C4MIP intercomparison study were mapped on to a common simple climate model. This involved deriving effective parameters for both the thermal properties (climate sensitivity and oceanic thermal capacity) and for the carbon cycle, capturing features of the C4MIP ensemble. This yielded a direct way to compare the effect of current uncertainty in physical features of the climate system against that of the carbon cycle. For year 2100 and a standard emissions scenario, the headline result is that unknowns in the global carbon cycle can get as high as 40% of current uncertainty in how the more physical parts of climate will change for raised greenhouse gas concentrations.

Chris Huntingford.