CEH science at EGU2014

The breadth of CEH science has been well represented in several sessions at this week’s European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2014 in Vienna. The event brought together more than 11,000 scientists from all over the world into one meeting covering all disciplines of the Earth, planetary and space sciences. Check out our Storify for a flavour of what’s been going on for CEH or scroll down for abstracts of our lead talks and posters.

Abstracts

Stephen Thackeray presented an update on the Shifting Seasons and climate change phenology project which he leads. For more details of the project, visit the webpage.

Andrew Chiverton: Which catchment characteristics control the temporal dependence structure of daily river flows?

Kelly Mason: Regulation of Boreal soil respiration - evidence from a Swedish forest fire chronosequence

Ed Rowe: Towards an understanding of feedbacks between plant productivity, acidity and dissolved organic matter

James Miller: Assessing the relative and cumulative impacts of future urbanisation and climate change on storm runoff in a peri-urban catchment

Steven Cole: Probabilistic flood forecasting for Rapid Response Catchments using a countrywide distributed hydrological mode

Kerry Dinsmore: Aquatic carbon and GHG losses via the aquatic pathway in an Arctic catchment

Cecilia Svensson: Improving winter river flow forecasts for the UK

Andy Robertson: Land use change to Miscanthus - measured and modelled changes in soil carbon fractions

Carole Helfter: Effects of winter temperature and summer drought on net ecosystem exchange of CO2 in a temperate peatland

Andy Robertson: Using an input manipulation experiment to partition greenhouse gas fluxes from a commercial Miscanthus plantation in the UK

Cecilia Svensson: Seasonal UK river flow forecasts based on persistence and historical analogy

Jessica Adams: Estimating sources and fluxes of dissolved and particulate organic matter in UK rivers

Kerry Dinsmore: Multisite comparison of drivers of methane emissions from wetlands in the European Arctic - influence of vegetation community and water table

Garry Hayman: Wetland methane modelling over the Scandinavian Arctic - performance of current land-surface models

Additionally, our scientists have been busy collaborating with many international colleagues who also gave talks at the event: topics included the Globolakes project, atmospheric ammonia, emissions modelling at the field scale, monitoring changes in peatland, greenhouse gas production from shallow lakes and ponds, soil organic carbon dynamics, vulnerability of ecosystems to extreme climatic events, water quality sampling, streamwater nitrate dynamics, soil status in drought, crowd-sourcing data with the mySoil app, historical flood information, using isotopes in Arctic catchments, the sensitivity of river reaches to water abstraction, soil hydraulics, peatland modelling, microbial carbon turnover and hazard assessment for volcanic eruptions.

Kelly Mason, Research Associate in Plant-Soil Interactions at CEH, presented
work on regulation of boreal soil respiration, which was carried out with
colleagues from CEH, Lancaster University, University of Washington and Bangor
University. Photo: Andy Robertson

Posted by Paulette Burns

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