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

Filming at CEH's met site in Wallingford

Alan Jenkins on Sky News at CEH's met site in Wallingford, a photo by CEH Science News on Flickr.

The recent wet weather means the New Year has got off to a busy start for the CEH Press Office, with several requests from media organisations to interview our hydrologists. On the TV side, Sky, BBC and ITV have all been in touch.

Professor Alan Jenkins of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology was interviewed on January 2 2013 by Sky News (pictured). He spoke about the dramatic transformation from drought to flood seen in the UK in 2012. The interview took place on the meteorological site at CEH's Wallingford, Oxfordshire headquarters. You can watch the interview on the Sky News website.

David Shukman, the BBC's Science editor, also interviewed Prof Jenkins today, Thursday 3 January, for broadcast later today.

Today, also, the Met Office announced (provisional figures) that 2012 was the second wettest year in the UK national record dating back to 1910, and just a few millimetres short of the record set in 2000. It was the wettest year recorded in England however. Just for interest, the aforementioned CEH met site recorded 820mm of precipitation in 2012, the wettest year in a 51-year series (since 1962).

Update Friday 4 January 2013

What is causing Britain's volatile rainfall patterns? Watch the BBC News video featuring Alan Jenkins of CEH and Andrew McKenzie of British Geological Survey.

The video is also part of the BBC News at Ten broadcast available on iPlayer until later today (4 Jan 2013).

BBC Science Editor David Shukman (right) interviews Prof Alan Jenkins



To tweet or not to tweet, is that the question?

In which CEH Media Relations Manager Dr Barnaby Smith examines how CEH is using social media, and makes a prediction for the future.

Some years ago I was a young academic balancing the competing demands of fieldwork commitments, paper and report writing and grant applications, with the occasional carrot thrown my way in the form of a trip to a conference. At said conference I would share the results of my labours to a usually small, possibly uninterested, audience, who, if I was lucky, asked a couple of relevant questions in the few minutes at the end before everyone headed for the bar.

In 2012 things are different...a young postdoc student winds up their social media accounts, slaps their data and preprints in the institutional repository, and networks their outputs across the web with people they've never met from countries all over the world. Their research is discussed openly by a wide range of audiences and can attract media coverage and interest from policy makers prior to the peer-review publication. Once it makes its way to the pages of the journal the expectation, at least from 1 April 2013 in the UK, is that the paper will be open access for all to read for free.

In ten years we've moved from what could be described as a static, linear, 'closed' system to one that embraces dialogue, proactive and reactive engagement, and an openness to communicate all aspects of the work. There have been many ups and downs during the transition but the science community has, in the main, decided to embrace the rapid changes to how the rest of the world operates, and make the best of them.

Over the last few years CEH scientists have been playing catch up with these new ways of operation. Corporately, we launched our first twitter account just over two years ago (@CEHScienceNews) and supplemented it in 2011 with @CEHPaperAlerts, which is a dedicated feed publishing links to our peer-reviewed paper outlets. The CEHScienceNews blog was launched in January of this year, and CEH also has a presence on flickr, facebook and youtube.

Importantly, however, individual scientists from CEH have also jumped into the social media world.  @UKLadybirds, aka Dr Helen Roy, leads the way on twitter but around 20 CEH staff and students are now regularly tweeting about their activities, with many more participating on a more infrequent basis. A recent convert is Professor Alan Jenkins, Science Director of our Water Programme. Various projects involving CEH are using twitter and facebook to communicate their work. Examples include the Scottish Freshwater Group and the Predatory Bird Monitoring Scheme. Our scientists have participated in "live reporting" from scientific conferences (becoming the norm, whether speakers like it or not). This development is having an interesting range of impacts on long-held relationships between scientists, publishers and scientific journals, testing the ‘Ingelfinger’ rule to its limits.

The world is changing rapidly and, at CEH, we are changing with it. One could hope that life will go back to the old days, when one could present your latest work at a conference and be confident that it would go no further than the 50 people in the room, at least until you published the Nature paper two years later. This is almost certainly unrealistic. Instead we need to work out how best to use the new ways to our advantage, making sure that the science, the science community and those that pay for and use the results derive maximum benefit.

Scientists have different views on whether the new ways of doing things are good or bad but, unless the Christmas episode of Dr Who is reality rather than fiction, I'm pretty sure we won't be going back in time. Open discussion of our research, in real time, is here to stay.

This is our final blog of 2012. Thank you for reading and Happy Christmas. We'll be back early in 2013 with more news from behind the scenes at CEH.

Barnaby Smith

Citizen scientists ensure the success of the Open Farm Sunday Pollinator Survey

A guest blog from Dr Helen Roy with initial results from the first ever national farm pollinator survey, which took place in June 2012 as part of Open Farm Sunday

16,380 insects counted in just one day … that is an incredible number, particularly when that day (Sunday 17 June 2012) was slightly overcast and followed weeks of unprecedented torrential rain.  The magic of Open Farm Sunday coupled with the enthusiasm of hundreds of citizen scientists, in all their many guises, ensured that the first ever national pollinator survey on farms was lots of fun and a huge success.

But why do we consider the Open Farm Sunday Pollinator Survey such a success? 

Is it simply the volume of data that was rapidly accumulated across a large geographic region? A dataset of 16,380 observations gathered from 36 farms across 23 counties in about 6 hours is impressive.  

Or the quality of the data that people gathered?  Each participant was provided with detailed information on how to carry out the survey.  We found the data contributed by people new to counting insects was extremely similar to the data gathered by experts.

Surveying for pollinators in a farm crop. Photo by Barnaby Smith/CEH.

  

Or is it just the memories of people coming together with a common purpose and enjoying the opportunity to get involved in “real” science? The atmosphere on the two farms I visited was simply amazing and witnessing the excitement of people of all ages in their quest to count insects visiting flowers was unbeatable.  Expert ecologists worked alongside the visitors on the farms but all did so as volunteers and with huge amounts of enthusiasm.
    

Or perhaps it was the opportunity to engage with people in discussing complex ecological questions?  There is no doubt that standing in a field, with insects playing out so many subtle and intricate interactions literally at your feet, provides the perfect back drop for such discussions.

What about the way in which the data might inform science, conservation or political strategy? Certainly many people were intrigued about the value of their data within a wider context and citizen science can provide datasets that have unprecedented value for research and analysis.  We hope that surveys such as this, coupled with other scientific work, will provide evidence on which effective decisions about land management can be based. 

There are clearly many ways of measuring the success of a citizen science initiative such as the Open Farm Sunday and that in itself highlights the value of citizen science. I never imagined that more than 16,000 insects would be counted on one (not so sunny) day in June by people across the country. 

Today (Tuesday 18 December)  we have the pleasure of presenting the results of the Open Farm Sunday Pollinator Survey at the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting.  But we are also beginning to look forward.  The enthusiastic involvement of so many people in 2012 has inspired me to begin to consider how we can extend the Open Farm Sunday Pollinator Survey in future years ... to gather even more data to improve our understanding of the ecological communities which provide such valuable ecosystem services on farms ... but most importantly to have fun! 

Additional information

Dr Helen Roy is an ecological entomologist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. She was a co-author on two recent publications examining citizen science projects.

More details about CEH science at the 2012 British Ecological Society Annual Meeting

A bird's eye view of wind farms

In a new guest blog, Dr Claire McDonald, a Research Associate in Statistical Ecology, explains more about CEH's work examining the potential impacts of offshore wind farms on seabirds. Claire presented details of the work at the British Ornithologists' Union Autumn Meeting on 26 November 2012.

Last week I was given the chance to discuss my work on modelling the impacts of offshore wind developments on seabirds at a one-day meeting organised by the British Ornithologists' Union. I thought this would be a great event to write about in my first blog for CEH. The meeting had record attendance, with people from across different organisations coming together to keep up to date about studies on marine renewables and birds. There is keen interest in this area as renewable energy developments will likely increase along the shores of the UK as our energy demands continue to increase.

Until recently, the main impacts of offshore wind developments on seabirds has focused on birds colliding with the wind turbines, but a more important consequence may be that the birds avoid the wind farm, forcing them to find food elsewhere. This could make the birds fly for longer, or force them to feed in less favourable areas which in turn would have knock-on effects on the survival and breeding success of the birds.

CEH has a well established long-term monitoring project on the seabird populations on the Isle of May, Scotland. Such data is invaluable and can be used to examine the potential impacts of offshore wind farms.


Guillemot on the Isle of May, photo by Akinori Takahashi



 

Along with other CEH colleagues, we have created a model to look at how guillemots, the second most numerous seabird species on the Isle of May, use the surrounding sea to find food. We were able to use the large amount of information CEH has on the guillemot's behaviour to make the model as realistic as possible, with respect to the direction the birds fly in, how long they spend flying, diving, staying at the colony and looking for food. We then examined how the guillemots changed their behaviour when a wind farm was placed nearby. We found that when a wind farm was present the guillemots on average had to fly for longer, as they had to spend longer looking for food because of increased competition from other birds at that location.

I presented CEH's work at the meeting. Our talk, together with the other talks and posters, provided a good overview of the current issues surrounding marine renewables and seabirds. The results from monitoring work on currently operating offshore wind farms in Denmark and the Netherlands were also shown, in addition to a variety of modelling work. The day provided everyone with the opportunity to discuss the research questions that still need to be answered, as well as how we can use the extensive knowledge we have on seabirds to aid monitoring of both the short and long-term impacts of marine renewables.

Claire McDonald

Claire's work in this area is carried out with Dr Kate Searle, Professor Sarah Wanless and Dr Francis Daunt. All four are based at CEH's site at Penicuik, near Edinburgh.

Read more about CEH's long-term monitoring study on the Isle of May.

Marine Renewables and Birds conference abstracts

Citizen science - sharing the excitement

In a guest blog, ecologist Michael Pocock of CEH shares his enthusiasm for citizen science.

There is a buzz of excitement around citizen science currently. At its best citizen science can allow excellent engagement of people with science and nature, and it can be real science.

Last week, scientists at the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) and Natural History Museum published a review of citizen science [PDF], which looks at the current state of citizen science, looks back on its history, and looks forward to the future potential of citizen science, including the use of technology.

Knowing all about citizen science is one thing, but knowing how to do it is another – so we also wrote a "how to" Guide to Citizen Science [PDF] which includes really practical advice based on our experience and all the evidence we collected during the review. Both publications were commissioned by the United Kingdom Environmental Observation Framework (UKEOF) and can also be downloaded from their website.

Of course, the things that today we call "citizen science" are not brand new. In Britain, the recording of animals and plants by volunteers has been going on for centuries, especially since the time of people like John Ray (the "father of natural history"). This year is the 50^th anniversary of the publication of the Atlas of the British Flora – with the monumental, magnificent effort of botanists that provided the data. Over the past 35 years, the Biological Records Centre at CEH has been publishing atlases of animal and plant groups at the rate of three per year. Many of those atlases now are repeat surveys, so we can chart the changing distributions of animals and plants. Clearly, volunteer data collection is much older than the term "citizen science".

However, the future of citizen science is looking exciting. There are lots of technological innovations (which especially appeals to the geek in us: how about plugging a pollution sensor into your smartphone, do-it-yourself remote sensing with a camera attached to a kite or harvesting twitter messages to track the spread of tree diseases?). There is a huge diversity of projects that allow mass participation; simply download an app and you can use your smartphone as a handheld data recorder to contribute to real science! But there is also lots of fantastic face-to-face engagement, which provides a quality of engagement almost impossible via the internet. Volunteers can provide data, but they can also get involved with analysing data and interpreting results. And citizen science is not limited to professionals asking volunteers to do something – more and more volunteers are working collaboratively with scientists, so that communities get answers to the questions that are important to them. Finally, the data collected by volunteers (with the appropriate checks and balances for quality control) is becoming increasingly trusted and used by scientists and policy-makers.

I’m passionate about citizen science. It provides us, as society, with the data we need to address important questions around environmental change. It also provides a way in which anyone can get involved in science and, in many cases, to get engaged with their natural world. Citizen science, at its best, is real science and potentially life-changing engagement (oh, and it is great fun!) We hope that our enthusiasm for citizen science shines through the Report and the Guide!

Dr Michael Pocock

Additional information

Dr Michael Pocock is an ecologist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. He was one of the team of authors on the two new publications about citizen science commissioned by UKEOF and written by CEH and the Natural History Museum mentioned in the article. The Understanding Citizen Science & Environmental Monitoring project was led by Dr Helen Roy of CEH. 

Read more about the new citizen science publications in CEH's news story

Update - Ash dieback resources from CEH

Ash dieback is continuing to dominate UK environmental headlines with the BBC and Guardian devoting considerable resources to the story today.

CEH has been busy collating information relevant to the problem from our long-term UK data sets and projects, and also from our scientists who work on tree issues.

Dr Michael Pocock, an ecologist from the Biological Records Centre (BRC) at CEH writes, "Based on the current evidence, it seems likely that the spread of ash dieback cannot be stopped in the UK. If this disease takes off and does kill many of our ash trees, in a similar manner to the sequence of events in other places in Europe, there is a potential for very serious impact on our countryside.  Trees and woodlands are hugely important in our ecosystems, both in terms of capturing and storing carbon, within cities for decreasing air pollution, for recreation, for landscape aesthetics, and finally of course for wildlife."

There are many insects and other animals and plants that depend on ash trees and ash woodland. Dr Marc Botham from CEH says, "Over 100 invertebrates have been recorded feeding on Ash in the Database of Insects and their Food Plants (DBIF) , including almost 50 moths, over 25 bugs and more than 20 beetles.  Over a third of these have been recorded solely on Ash trees, with a number of mites and flies in particular, entirely dependent on them. In addition, some species like the Dusky Thorn, a moth found throughout England and Wales and whose caterpillars rely on ash, have already declined significantly across their range in the UK."

Ecological background for ash can be found within the Online Atlas of British and Irish Flora on the Biological Records Centre website  including 4 distribution maps. The BSBI Tetrad Map shows that ash has been recorded from most 2km squares - the gaps in England are recording gaps rather than genuine absence.

 

Yesterday we published a summary of data on ash tree distribution using data analysis from one of our existing long-term, Great Britain (GB) wide data sources, the Countryside Survey (CS). The full analysis can be read here [PDF]. The CS team have done more work overnight and have just sent me an updated map showing ash coverage density within GB.

Dr Lindsay Maskell writes, "We used CS data to work out the areal extent of Ash in each of the 32 (note not 45) CS land classes. Then using the 2007 Land Cover Map and the information it provides on the amount of broadleaved, mixed and yew woodland in each square kilometre across GB, the estimated areal extents were scaled accordingly."

This is the new map:

Links

Biological Records Centre

BBC Online Ash dieback summit brings tree experts together 

Guardian Can ash dieback be stopped in the UK?