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Diving for science • Living highways • A history of UK coastal flooding • Nitrogen • Soils
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About us
NERC – the Natural Environment Research Council –
is the UK’s leading funder of environmental science. We
invest public money in cutting-edge research, science
infrastructure, postgraduate training and innovation.
Our scientists study the physical, chemical and biological
processes on which our planet and life itself depends –
from pole to pole, from the deep Earth and oceans to
the atmosphere and space. We work in partnership with
other UK and international researchers, policymakers and
business to tackle the big environmental challenges we
face – how to use our limited resources sustainably, how
to build resilience to environmental hazards and how to
manage environmental change.
NERC is a non-departmental public body. Much of
our funding comes from the Department for Business,
Innovation and Skills but we work independently of
government. Our projects range from curiosity-driven
research to long-term, multi-million-pound strategic
programmes, coordinated by universities and our own
research centres:
British Antarctic Survey
British Geological Survey
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
National Oceanography Centre
National Centre for Atmospheric Science
National Centre for Earth Observation
Contact us
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email: [email protected]
or write to us at Planet Earth Editors, NERC, Polaris House,
North Star Avenue, Swindon SN2 1EU.
Editor
Tom Marshall [email protected]
Planet Earth is NERC’s quarterly magazine, aimed at anyone
interested in environmental science. It covers all aspects of
NERC-funded work and most of the features are written by
the researchers themselves.
For the latest environmental science news, features, blogs and
the fortnightly Planet Earth Podcast, visit our website Planet
Earth Online at www.planetearth.nerc.ac.uk.
Science writer
George Dibble [email protected]
NERC-funded researchers should contact:
[email protected]
Design
Candy Sorrell [email protected]
Not all of the work described in Planet Earth has been
peer-reviewed. The views expressed are those of individual
authors and not necessarily shared by NERC. We welcome
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discuss your ideas.
ISSN: 1479-2605
Front cover: A honeybee hive in a hollow log in the Cévennes, France, showing circular comb architecture.
Copyright: Eric Tourneret – http://thebeephotographer.photoshelter.com
In this issue
Winter 2015
16
2 News from the science
community including:
lRRS Discovery in London
l the UK's new polar ship
l honeybees and our
ancestors.
16 Diving for science
Training the research
divers of the future.
19Living highways Making roadside verges
more wildlife friendly.
22A century of UK coastal
flooding
How historical data helps
us understand the future
of flooding.
24 Wonderstuff
Exploring the tangled web
of nitrogen and climate
change.
26Inevitable surprises in the
Atlantic Ocean
What we’ve learned from
a decade of watching
ocean circulation.
22
28 Spotlight on soils
Not just a load of dirt.
24
28
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
1
News
Editorial
I
t’s that time of year again; as Planet Earth goes to press,
heavy winter rain has once more left great swathes of
Britain underwater, bringing misery to thousands of families
and causing damage that’s already being valued at several
billion pounds.
The science NERC supports is vital to understanding
and managing flood risk. On page 22, Ivan Haigh and
Elizabeth Bradshaw describe their new database of coastal
floods around the UK, and what it can tell us about these
devastating events. It can be hard to take the long view when
water’s flowing down the high street, but doing so gives us
invaluable insights into where flooding is likeliest in future, and
where we should be spending scarce resources to defend
against it.
Floods are going to happen; we need ways to limit the
damage they do. In the long term, walls and other hard
defences can only achieve so much, and we can’t afford to
build them everywhere. We need to think more widely
and creatively about the problem to make our communities
more resilient; options
range from improving
how we manage upland
landscapes to designing
more sustainable urban
drainage systems. Later
in 2016 we’ll be taking
an in-depth look at the
big picture on flooding,
and exploring some
of the ways we could
address it.
On an administrative note, there will
now be a short break in this magazine’s schedule, so
you won’t be receiving a spring issue. We’re planning a few
changes to the magazine that we hope will make it even more
interesting and relevant; the new and improved Planet Earth
will be back in summer.
New £200m polar research vessel on its way
Cammell Laird / BAS
A shipyard has been selected as the preferred supplier of a
£200m new polar research vessel.
Cammell Laird in Birkenhead will build the state-of-the-art
ship, which will be ready for action in 2019.
The ice-strengthened vessel, which will operate in Antarctic
and Arctic waters for up to 60 days at a time, will be one of
the most sophisticated floating research laboratories working
in the polar regions. Tonne for tonne, the UK will have the
2 PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
most advanced research fleet in the world.
The ship will have a helipad and will be able to deploy the
latest marine research technology, like robotic submarines
and gliders that collect data beneath the waves.
Announcing the news while on board the RRS Discovery
in October, Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson
said, ‘This £200m investment secures the UK’s position as a
world leader in polar research and provides a major boost to
shipbuilding in the North-west.’
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) will operate the vessel
on NERC’s behalf, and it will be available to the whole UK
research community.
‘This new research ship will be a tremendous asset to the
UK polar science community,’ explains Professor Jane Francis,
director of BAS. It will be able to deploy the latest advanced
technologies being developed in the UK, allowing scientists to
capture ocean and ice data from places that would otherwise
be inaccessible.
The observations made by instruments on the new ship
will help scientists more accurately predict future climate and
sea-level rise, as well as the impact of environmental change
on marine ecosystems.
Follow us on @NERCscience
Sand-scaping could
protect UK coastline
investigating whether it could be used in
the UK.
‘Rising sea levels and the expansion
of built-up areas around the coast is
causing beaches to become “squeezed”
into thinner strips,’ says project lead Dr
Jenny Brown from NOC. ‘By assessing
the possibility of protecting coastlines
using wider beaches, our aim is to help
coastal authorities better understand the
changing vulnerability of more natural
approaches to coastal defence.’
The team are using computer models
to simulate how waves and currents move
beach sediment along the Dungeness
coastline in Kent.
This will help determine whether beach
-widening techniques could be applied to
the UK to combat erosion and increase
coastal resilience to floods and storms.
As much as 50 per cent of all natural
history specimens in the world’s museums
could be incorrectly named, a new study
claims.
This can cause headaches for biologists,
so researchers from the University of
Oxford and the Royal Botanic Gardens
Edinburgh set out to assess the accuracy
of current naming practices.
‘Many areas of biological sciences,
including academic studies of evolution
and applied conservation, as well as
achieving the 2020 targets under the
Convention on Biological Diversity are
underpinned by accurate naming,’ explains
Dr Robert Scotland from the University
of Oxford.
‘Without accurate names on specimens,
the records held in collections around the
world would make no sense, as they don’t
respond to the reality outside,’ he adds.
In one example, the team scoured
the records of the genus which includes
the sweet potato. Examining 49,500
specimens from the Americas, they found
that 40 per cent of names were outdated
synonyms. A further 16 per cent were
unrecognisable or invalid. The situation is
probably similar for other groups.
Yet there could be an even more
worrying problem around the corner. Of
1.8 million different species described on
Earth, 0.35 million are flowering plants and
0.95 million are insects. So while names
of flowering plants are often wrong, the
situation in the insect kingdom could be
even worse.
The research is published in Current
Biology.
DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2015.10.002
Oxford University
Could wider beaches help reduce
coastal flooding and erosion? That’s the
thinking behind new research led by the
National Oceanography Centre (NOC)
in partnership with the University of
Liverpool. It's the UK’s first investigation
into the use of beach widening to protect
the coastline.
Beach widening, or ‘sand-scaping’,
involves replacing sand lost through
erosion by drawing on outside sources,
creating wider beaches. This could reduce
the impact of waves on coastal defences
by causing them to break further offshore.
It could also protect coastal features like
beaches and cliffs from erosion, as well
as creating new habitats for wildlife and
perhaps generating economic growth.
The Dutch have been using this
method since 2011, but now scientists are
Half of plant specimens
wrongly named
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015 3
News
Discovery
in London
To celebrate NERC’s 50th anniversary, the Royal
Research Ship Discovery made a unique visit to
London for a series of events in early October.
4
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
Follow us on @NERCscience
Leaving its usual berth at the National Oceanography Centre in
Southampton, the Discovery travelled up the Thames and under
Tower Bridge, mooring alongside HMS Belfast for six days.
Visitors from science, government, business, local primary
schools and members of the public came on board to look
around and discover some of the exciting research that NERC
scientists do.
They could see everything from marine robots and a
‘beesocosm’ displaying live insects to a simulator of NERC’s
atmospheric research aircraft and a model of how groundwater
moves beneath our feet. On the bank, scientists performed
live experiments and talked about Discovery to those not lucky
enough to get on board.
After leaving London, she only had a few days to recover
before departing for the Bahamas to contribute to the RAPID
project – find out more on page 26.
Discovery is NERC’s state-of-the-art oceanographic research
vessel, providing access to the world’s seas, from the tropics
to the poles. As well as carrying out more traditional marine
research, she can deploy innovative underwater technology, such
as autonomous submersibles and remotely-operated vehicles to
explore the deep oceans, of which we still know very little.
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015 5
News
Managed bees give
wild ones diseases
Early warning for
aquaculture
6 PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
after completing a NERC-funded PhD
at the University of Leeds. ‘Loss of wild
pollinators will ultimately either reduce
crop yields or increase the reliance on and
cost of shipping in more managed bees.
This increased cost will cascade down to
consumers, raising the price of food we
put on our tables.’
The researchers came up with a list of
recommendations to help protect wild
bees. These include better and more
frequent screening for disease in managed
bees, creating better barriers on farm
glasshouses and poly tunnels to minimise
mixing between managed and wild
populations, and promoting hedgerows
and wildflower margins around fields
to boost wild pollinators and reduce
dependence on managed bees.
In early 2015 Graystock was runner-up
in the Early Career category of NERC’s
inaugural Impact Awards for his research
on bee parasites and diseases.
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijppaw.2015.10.001
Bumblebee foraging on cardoon (Cyanara cardunculus).
Sarah Jenkins
NERC-supported scientists are helping
protect salmon and shellfish farmers
around Shetland from harmful algal
blooms (HABs).
The islands produce 77 per cent of
Scotland’s rope-grown mussels and their
seafood sector is worth some £350m a
year. But these stocks are threatened by
masses of algae that form off the coast;
these blooms can kill farmed fish and their
toxins can be absorbed by shellfish, posing
a health risk to anyone who eats them.
Scientists at Exeter University, Marine
Scotland, the North Atlantic Fisheries
College Marine Centre, Plymouth Marine
Laboratory (PML) and the Scottish
Association for Marine Science (SAMS)
have worked together to set up an earlywarning system. It comprises 16 floating
‘drifter’ buoys that track shifts in ocean
currents. Alongside satellite images, this
will help predict when harmful blooms
may strike. The data will be used to
check and improve an existing model
of HAB risk, funded by NERC and the
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences
Research Council (BBSRC).
Fish and shellfish farmers will benefit
from a more reliable early warning system,
letting them act more effectively to
protect their operations.
PML scientists are now leading a project
alongside researchers and technicians
at Exeter, the Centre for Environment,
Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas)
and SAMS that will seek to improve HAB
forecasting even further. The ShellEye
project (www.shelleye.org) will work
with Cornish and Scottish aquaculture
companies to make sure its results are as
useful as possible to the sector.
Large-scale beekeeping is an important
part of modern farming; many crops
couldn’t be grown if managed bee
populations weren’t brought onto the land
to pollinate them.
But a review of the evidence in the
International Journal for Parasitology
suggests importing large populations of
honeybees and bumblebees and moving
them around the country to pollinate
crops may be having unwelcome sideeffects – they seem to be giving wild bees
parasites and diseases. Even when the
managed bees aren’t themselves infected,
they still cause stress to wild populations,
making them more vulnerable.
‘The use of managed honeybees and
bumblebees is linked with several cases
of increased disease and population
declines in wild bees. This is shown in
various countries around the world
and is not always because the managed
bees are carrying a disease,’ says lead
author Dr Peter Graystock, who’s now
at University of California, Riverside,
Fighting elephant
poachers on eBay
Scientists have created a computer system that can help detect illegal
ivory sales on the web.
The ivory black market is what drives poaching, a grave threat to wild
elephants. Governments have committed to eliminate it, but that’s very
hard to do.
Many sales now take place online, and picking them out from all the
legal transactions is a big challenge. ‘Ivory’ doesn’t just refer to elephant
tusks; it’s also an off-white colour and a generic term for anything made
from an animal’s teeth, so a simple keyword search doesn’t narrow the
field down very much.
At the moment officials have to go through online listings one by
one, looking for distinctive marks that appear in elephant ivory but
not in similar materials such as walrus tusk. Now NERC-supported
researchers at the University of Kent have managed to teach a
computer to scan the auction website eBay and automatically highlight
potentially illegal listings. The idea is to reduce the number of items that
humans need to look at, streamlining the process of screening for illicit
ivory.
‘The current way of doing this is tedious and inefficient,’ says Dr
David Roberts, co-author of the paper, published in PeerJ Computer
Science. ‘We hope that using machine learning will let law enforcement
identify illegal ivory and build a case more quickly.’
Two former law-enforcement experts spent time looked at the items
in eBay’s Antiques section that mentioned ivory over eight weeks,
classifying them according to whether they were elephant ivory and
whether they seemed potentially illegal.
The scientists then used data-mining software to analyse the sale
items alongside the expert judgements, seeking to deduce rules that
would allow a computer to draw the same conclusions. The system
looked at 37 pieces of ‘metadata’ about each item, including its price,
postage cost and number of bids received.
The results were impressive; the computer matched the experts’
opinion 93 per cent of the time. It did this without looking at various
other information sources that people would use, including the images
and text accompanying the sale listings, suggesting the approach could
be improved further by extending it to take these into account. The
scientists say a similar approach could be used to monitor other illegal
markets – in guns or stolen goods, for instance.
DOI: 10.7717/peerj-cs.10
’’
Follow us on @NERCscience
in brief . . .
New strategic research announced
NERC is funding the first set of projects under the
new highlight topics route, which is designed to give
the science community a greater role in identifying
important areas that need strategic funding to help
solve environmental challenges.
The eight projects that have received funding cover
subjects ranging from why the climate is warming at
an uneven rate with pronounced pauses and surges,
what happens to nanoparticles as they move through
the environment and break down, and how we can use
new genetic techniques to measure biodiversity.
Blue whale spotted in English waters
In late August scientists on the RRS James Cook made
the incredibly rare sighting of a blue whale around
400km south-west of the Cornish coast, on the
northern margin of the Bay of Biscay.
Professor Russell Wynn of the National
Oceanography Centre spotted the rare visitor while
watching a group of fin whales, the runners-up to the
blue in the biggest-animal-on-Earth stakes. Scientists
rushed to the deck to catch the spectacle – for many,
it was the first time they’d ever seen this gigantic
creature.
Another blue was photographed off the Irish coast
in 2008; the species was hunted to near-extinction in
the north-east Atlantic in the early 20th century, but
these sightings may suggest it’s starting to make a slow
recovery.
Securing supplies of elements for low-carbon
tech
NERC is investing more than £8m in research that will
ensure we have access to so-called e-tech elements
that are essential for technologies that will provide
cleaner energy and let us use it more efficiently.
Elements like cobalt, tellurium and neodymium are
used in applications like lithium batteries, solar panels
and wind turbines. But currently they are just byproducts of producing more common minerals, and
aren’t mined on a commercial scale. Now population
growth, greater resource consumption and efforts
to cut carbon emissions are pushing demand to new
heights.
The Security of Supply of Minerals programme will
help us cope, supporting innovative geoscience that
illuminates how these rare minerals form and circulate
within the Earth’s crust, and where we should look
for them.
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015 7
News
Tracking ocean currents from space
The National Oceanography Centre
(NOC) and NASA have developed
a new way of monitoring ocean
circulation with satellites.
The project uses the gravitational
sensors on the twin satellites of
NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate
Experiment (GRACE) mission to
measure how quickly deep ocean
currents are flowing by detecting the
tiny changes they cause in the Earth’s
gravity field.
This let the scientists calculate the flow
rate of one of the major current systems
in the region, known as the Atlantic
Meridional Overturning Circulation
(AMOC). This moves heat from the
tropics to north-west Europe, giving us
our mild climate.
The measurements were checked using
data from the NERC-funded RAPID array
of oceanographic instruments across the
Atlantic, which monitors AMOC and is
maintained by NOC. (See p26 for an
Scientists to
probe El Niño
fires in Indonesia
8 PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
article about what we’ve learned from a
decade of RAPID measurements.)
‘It’s awesome that GRACE can see
variations of deep-water transport,
but this signal might never have been
detected or verified without the RAPID
array,’ says Eric Lindstrom of NASA’s
Physical Oceanography Program. ‘We
will continue to need both in situ and
space-based systems to monitor the
subtle but significant variations of the
ocean circulation.’
NERC has awarded scientists at King’s College London £55,000
to use drones to measure how wildfires currently raging in
Indonesia affect the atmosphere.
The grant will let the researchers assess greenhouse gas
emissions from fires around the Berbak National Park, Sumatra.
‘We know these extreme fires have a major impact on the
Earth’s atmosphere, and that this is one of the most important
ways in which El Niño affects the climate,’ says project leader
Professor Martin Wooster of King’s and NERC’s National Centre
for Earth Observation. ‘But we need to find out more about how
much material is being burned and what is being released into the
air, and studying fires in this Indonesian region gives us a unique
opportunity to do this.’
Farmers in Indonesia traditionally burn vegetation to manage
the land, but corporations and government-supported initiatives
have taken this further, clearing huge areas of forest and draining
peatlands for agriculture. This makes the affected areas dry out
much more quickly. Fires can then get out of control and, when
they are burning on carbon-rich peat, the soil itself can ignite and
burn down into the ground.
The current strong El Niño has caused droughts across the
region. Areas of forest normally too wet to burn have turned into
tinderboxes, leading to extremely widespread and severe fires.
These threaten endangered species like orang-utans and tigers,
and the smoke they produce harms local people’s health.
Fires during the last strong El Niño in 1997-1998 raged
across tens of thousands of square kilometres, releasing carbon
equivalent to an estimated 13-40 per cent of that year’s total
global carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
Wooster and colleagues will use drones equipped with LIDAR
sensors, which use lasers to scan the land surface below. This
will provide unprecedented insights into how far down into
the peat the fires reach. They expect to illuminate how much
organic matter is being burned, what is being emitted and what
the effects will be. This should improve atmospheric and climate
models and contribute to efforts to preserve the region’s forests.
Follow us on @NERCscience
New app to track UK dragonflies
The Dragonfly Recording Network,
run by the British Dragonfly Society, has
helped track the presence of different
species all over the UK since 1999 using
reports from volunteers. The new app,
produced by a team at the Biological
Records Centre at NERC’s Centre for
Ecology & Hydrology, makes it easier to
find dragonflies, to tell what species you’re
looking at when you do and to let the
experts know about it. The information
collected will help protect dragonflies
from the pressures they face.
The app works on almost any phone,
tablet or computer; you can find it at
http://irecord.org.uk/dragonflies.
Steve Cham
A free new mobile app lets members
of the public identify dragonflies and
damselflies they spot around the UK.
They can then add these sightings to a
national database that will help scientists
understand how these stunning insects
are coping with changes in the climate and
their habitats.
Dragonflies and damselflies don’t just
add colour to our ponds and streams
in summer; they also play an important
ecological role, eating other insects and
helping control pests like mosquitoes.
They’re a sign of a healthy ecosystem and
of unpolluted water; many species have
expanded their ranges in recent years
and others are arriving from continental
Europe.
From top: common darter, scarce chaser,
hairy dragonfly.
Finding the Sahara’s lost rivers
Scientists have found a 500km-long
ancient river network buried under the
parched sands of Mauritania.
This river supplied sediment
to a deep-sea canyon, which was
discovered and mapped in 3D in
2003 by a team including researchers
from NERC’s National Oceanography
Centre.
They analysed the sediment found
in the canyon and found signs that it
originally came from a major river system.
No rivers emerge into the Atlantic on
the coast of Western Sahara nowadays,
though, so the exact course of these
watercourses wasn’t clear and we had no
direct evidence of their existence.
Now a group of French researchers,
writing in Nature Communications, found
the traces of the river system by analysing
data from satellites equipped with
synthetic aperture radar sensors that
can look through the sands that have
built up since its demise. They think the
river flowed during the wet periods
that have periodically visited the region;
the last of these periods was between
around 11,700 and 5,000 years ago.
DOI:10.1038/ncomms9751
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015 9
News
Science minister opens new
Marine Robotics Innovation Centre
Jo Johnson, the Universities and Science
Minister, in November opened the UK’s
new £3m centre aimed at developing
new technology for the emerging marine
robotics sector.
‘The UK is leading the way in marine
science and this new facility will help to put
wind in the sales of our marine industry,’ he
commented at the official opening event.
Based at NERC’s National
Oceanography Centre (NOC), the
Marine Robotics Innovation Centre will
be a hub for businesses developing new
autonomous platforms and sensors that
can be used to gather data cost-effectively
from the world’s oceans. It will connect the
private sector with scientific expertise to
promote innovation and support economic
growth.
Autonomous robotic submarines are
one of the most exciting areas of marine
science. They can stay at sea for months
at a time, covering vast areas, and can
go to places traditionally considered too
difficult or dangerous for humans to work,
potentially opening up whole new fields of
inquiry. They’re also a very cheap way of
gathering data compared to research ships.
There are potential applications in sectors
ranging from renewable energy and oil and
gas to deep-sea mining and aquaculture.
NERC also recently announced a new
£2.5m Centre for Doctoral Training that
will teach the next generation of scientists
to design, build and operate autonomous
sensor platforms – both waterborne and
aerial ones. Known as NEXUSS – ‘NEXt
generation Unmanned System Science’
– it will provide specialised training in
this increasingly vital area, creating a
community of highly skilled people whose
expertise will contribute both to scientific
breakthroughs and to economic growth.
Collected here are just a few recent
highlights of the science NERC-supported
marine robots are enabling.
Working with the WWF
NOC is partnering with the World
Wildlife Fund (WWF) to use marine
robots to find out why the deep parts of
the Celtic Sea are so attractive to marine
predators like dolphins and seabirds.
Scientists deployed a submarine glider
and an Autonomous Surface Vehicle
to the Celtic Deep area; the two will
work together to explore the region's
ecosystems.
‘The Celtic Sea contains known
hotspots for iconic and highly mobile
marine animals such as the mighty fin
10 PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
whale and the globally threatened Balearic
shearwater,’ says NOC’s Professor Russell
Wynn, who’s coordinating the research.
‘However, we need a greater density of
observations to really understand why
these hotspots are so attractive to these
animals, and how stable they are in space
and time. Marine robotic technologies
give us the opportunity to have a
persistent presence in these areas, and
are changing the way we conduct science
in the marine environment.’
‘WWF is excited to support this
innovative technology in order to get
a clearer picture of what’s out there
in our seas,’ adds Dr Lyndsey Dodds,
head of marine policy at WWF-UK.
‘Only through increased understanding
can we identify what needs to be done
to ensure good management and
protection. By ensuring our seas are
healthy and productive we can ensure a
strong marine economy and prosperous
coastal communities that depend on the
resources and business opportunities
the seas provide.’
Follow us on @NERCscience
Scientists work with BP to use robots
for oil-spill monitoring
Underwater robotic technology could play a key role in oil-spill
response planning, according to new research by the Scottish
Association for Marine Science (SAMS).
Scientists at SAMS have been working with oil and gas
company BP to use robots known as Seagliders to remotely
monitor oceanographic conditions up to a kilometre beneath
the surface. They aim to enable better situational awareness
during oil spills in order to improve response time and minimise
environmental damage.
Earlier this year they tested a Seaglider as part of a major
emergency response exercise coordinated by BP from its
North Sea headquarters in Aberdeen. It involved more than
150 participants from BP and partner agencies responding to a
simulated incident in the Clair oilfield west of Shetland.
During the exercise, SAMS launched a Seaglider from the
research vessel MRV Scotia in the Faroe-Shetland Channel. It
was then directed towards the Clair field, providing real-time
oceanographic data to aid decision-making by role-playing
responders onshore.
The gliders are energy-efficient autonomous vehicles that
can continuously measure water properties for months on end,
sending the data back to base over a satellite link.
Fraser Macdonald, a knowledge exchange fellow in marine
physics and autonomous systems at SAMS, has been working
with members of BP’s global response team to look at how to
apply scientific knowledge to oil and gas operations. ‘The use
of autonomous systems has brought about a paradigm shift in
how we measure the marine environment,’ he says. ‘Working
with BP, SAMS is starting to push the boundaries in developing
how we integrate this cutting-edge science into the oil and gas
sector.’
‘Recent developments in autonomous technologies have
provided an opportunity to establish rapid 3D situational
awareness which is critical to aid science-based response
decision-making for any potential major incident,’ adds Peter
Collinson, an expert in global environmental response at BP.
SAMS has been developing the use of gliders in
oceanography research since the North Atlantic Glider Base
(NAGB) was established in 2012. This is part of the wider
NERC Marine Autonomous Robotic Systems group, based at
the National Oceanography Centre (NOC).
Macdonald now aims to explore how autonomous
technology could help minimise the harm done to marine
environments during the removal of offshore oil and gas
installations.
SAMS
Mapping deep-water canyons
NOC marine robots have also helped survey fascinating
and unusual habitats in the Whittard Canyon, deep beneath
the waters of the Bay of Biscay. Ocean canyons host a huge
variety of living things because of the complex landscape
they provide, creating a wide range of conditions that suit
different plants and animals.
The Autosub 6000 autonomous submersible worked
alongside sensors aboard the RRS James Cook to create
a nested set of maps of the area, ranging in scale from
one covering the whole 200km-long canyon down to one
that includes individual cold-water polyps. This will inform
the management of England’s only deep-water Marine
Conservation Zone.
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015 11
News
Fishing discards could
increase prevalence of
turtle disease
Fishermen in the Turks and Caicos
Islands could be making a global
turtle disease more common by
selectively catching healthy animals
and throwing back infected ones.
Researchers at the University of Exeter,
the Marine Conservation Society and the
Turks and Caicos Department of Environment
and Maritime Affairs surveyed green turtles in the
Caribbean waters around the islands, a UK overseas
territory. The animals are globally endangered after
centuries of excessive hunting, yet their numbers are
recovering well around the islands, so the country permits
a small, regulated fishery.
The disease, called ‘fibropapillomatosis’, creates unsightly
pink tumours. Although benign, these can impede turtles’
vision and movement, as well as interfering with feeding,
swimming and organ function.
Over two years, around 13 per cent of green turtles
found in waters had the disease. In contrast,
fishermen did not land any diseased animals
during this time. ‘Most of the fishermen we spoke to
said they had caught diseased turtles, but they didn’t want
to eat turtles with tumours, so they threw them back,’ says
lead author Dr Tom Stringell from the University of Exeter.
‘We know a lot about the consequences of culling
diseased creatures to take them out of the general
population, and this practice has the opposite effect,
effectively increasing the proportion of diseased animals in
the population,’ he adds.
The study was published in Frontiers in Marine Science.
DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2015.00057
Atmospheric testing understates diesel pollution
Emissions from diesel vehicles have
been in the headlines lately after the
revelation that Volkswagen set up
some of its cars to cheat emissions
tests. Now new research suggests
that emissions from diesel engines
in general may be higher than we’d
thought, and that the monitoring
regimes governments have put in place
are missing pollutants that could be
doing serious harm to our health.
Atmospheric chemists at the
University of York and NERC’s
National Centre for Atmospheric
Science examined measurements of air
quality in London, focusing on longchain hydrocarbon molecules.
Hydrocarbon emissions lead to the
12 PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
production of two priority pollutants,
ozone and particulate matter; both
of these cause serious lung problems
and are the targets of government
emissions-control regimes. But neither
air-quality strategies nor the measurement
programmes they depend on have focused
on long-chain hydrocarbons from diesel
vehicles. The study suggests this may
need to change; long-chain molecules
turn out to be a major component of the
hydrocarbons in London’s atmosphere
and may account for up to half of ozone
production in London. Levels of some
types of hydrocarbon in emissions
inventories may have been understated by
as much as 70 times.
If diesels are producing more long-chain
hydrocarbons than previously thought,
this could be a serious problem. These
engines’ popularity has rocketed in
recent years because of their greater
fuel efficiency; in the UK, diesel rose
from 52 to 62 per cent of total fuel
used between 2005 and 2012. ‘The
shift towards diesel vehicles means we
probably need tighter regulations on the
pollution they produce,’ says Dr Jacqui
Hamilton of the University of York,
the paper’s senior author. ‘A first step
towards doing this would be to improve
monitoring of long-chain hydrocarbon
levels.’
The study appears in Atmospheric
Chemistry and Physics.
DOI: 10.5194/acp-15-9983-2015
Follow us on @NERCscience
Are pesticides Ocean acidification threatens
harming
cold-water coral reefs
butterflies?
DOI: 10.7717/
peerj.1402
Sebastian Hennige
The controversy over the impact
neonicotinoid pesticides are having on
bees continues to rumble on, with a
growing number of studies suggesting
there are harmful effects.
Now a group of scientists have taken a
look at the consequences of widespread
neonicotinoid use for another group
of pollinators – butterflies. Like bees,
these insects are vital to many wild and
cultivated plants; they’re also widely loved
by the public and of serious concern
to conservationists. Total abundance
of widespread butterfly species on
English farmland declined by 58 per cent
between 2000 and 2009, even though
UK conservation spending more than
doubled over the same period.
The role of pesticides in this has
until now received comparatively little
attention. Researchers at Butterfly
Conservation, the Universities of Stirling
and Sussex and the Biological Records
Centre at NERC’s Centre for Ecology &
Hydrology examined data on populations
of 17 butterfly species that are
widespread on farmland. This information
was gathered by volunteers at more than
1,000 sites across the UK.
They found evidence that having more
land nearby on which neonicotinoids are
used is strongly associated with declining
populations in 15 of the species examined.
These results are suggestive but the
scientists say more work is needed to
prove that neonicotinoids are responsible;
it’s possible that some common factor,
such as more general
intensification of
farming, is causing
both increased
pesticide use and
butterfly decline.
Close up of the common
cold-water coral Lophelia.
The skeletons of corals growing in the
deep, cold ocean will change shape and
get 20 to 30 per cent weaker, according
to the longest-ever simulation of future
ocean conditions on corals.
This will put cold-water reefs, which
form oases of biodiversity on the North
Atlantic seabed, at severe risk. By the
end of the century many of these unique
habitats could be collapsing.
The ocean absorbs much of the carbon
dioxide we emit. In a way this is good,
as it removes a lot of carbon dioxide
from our atmosphere, but it also makes
seawater more acidic. In the long term
this is a huge threat to many marine
species.
Scientists simulated the process
in lab conditions over a year,
reducing seawater’s pH (that
is, making it more acidic) and
observing the effect on the
common corals that form the
cold-water reefs off Scotland.
Superficially the subjects seemed
to cope, but beneath the surface the way
their skeletons form underwent major
changes. While the live coral grew in a
different way, the dead skeleton, which
forms most of the reef and supports the
live coral, became much more brittle.
In the long term this would put a reef’s
whole structure at risk.
‘Live corals are standing on the
shoulders of their dead parents and
grandparents, and we see that ocean
acidification can start to dissolve dead
coral skeleton,’ explains Dr Sebastian
Hennige of Heriot-Watt University,
lead author of the study in Proceedings
of the Royal Society B. ‘This makes them
weaker and more brittle, like bones with
osteoporosis, and means they may not
be able to support the large reefs above
them in the future.’ So many species
depend on reefs that their disappearance
would have enormous knock-on effects
throughout marine ecosystems.
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.0990
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015 13
News
Europe’s first farmers
exploited honeybees
Neolithic people were harvesting from
honeybee nests at least 8,500 years
ago, research in Nature shows.
The scientists, partly NERC-funded,
analysed the residues on more than
6,000 samples of prehistoric pottery
from more than 150 archaeological
sites spread across Europe and the
Near East. The distinctive chemical
signature of beeswax appears in
around 83 of them; only 33 of these
were known before this paper. This
is the first unequivocal evidence of
a close and long-lived relationship
between early farmers and honeybees.
We don’t know if the wax came
from wild or domesticated bees.
But the findings provide remarkable
insights into how people lived in
early farming communities thousands
of years ago – during the seventh
millennium BC at the oldest site
examined, in modern-day Turkey,
through to the fourth millennium
BC at sites in France and southern
England.
‘The most obvious reason for
exploiting the honeybee would be for
honey, which would have been a rare
sweetener for prehistoric people,’ says
lead author Dr Mélanie Roffet-Salque
of the University of Bristol. ‘However,
beeswax could have been used in its
own right, for various technological,
ritual, cosmetic and medicinal purposes
– for example, to waterproof ceramic
vessels.’
This isn’t the first use of chemical
analysis to find traces of early
honeybee exploitation by farmers, but
these results push back the earliest
date at which we know this was
happening by at least a millennium.
The study also provides the first
insights into where honeybees were
found in the period; insects don’t
fossilise well so this kind of indirect
approach is needed to detect them.
DOI:10.1038/nature15757
A honeybee hive in a hollow log in the Cévennes,
France, showing circular comb architecture.
Eric Tourneret (http://thebeephotographer.photoshelter.com)
14
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
Follow us on @NERCscience
Protecting forests
saves lives…
Brazil’s successful efforts to slow deforestation have saved
thousands of lives by improving air quality, new research shows.
About 15 per cent of the Brazilian Amazon forest was cleared
between 1976 and 2010, and much of this was done with
fire. This sent soot and other particles into the atmosphere,
degrading air quality and endangering the health of local people.
Since 2004, Brazil has managed to cut deforestation rates by
about 40 per cent – around 70 per cent in the Amazon. This has
had many environmental and social benefits; among them, fewer
fires.
Researchers from the Universities of Leeds, Manchester and
Sao Paulo, and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
used measurements of air quality from satellites and sensors on
the ground to assess the impact of lower deforestation rates on
air quality and human health in non-drought years between 2001
and 2012. Drought years were excluded because they tend to
have many more fires irrespective of deforestation rates.
They estimate that Brazil’s success in reducing deforestation
has cut concentrations of particulate matter in the air by about
30 per cent in the dry season. This is saving an estimated 4001,700 premature adult deaths every year across South America.
The authors note that cleaner air benefits people all over the
continent, but that changes in Brazil’s forest policy risk increasing
deforestation rates again, which would jeopardise improvements
in the region’s air quality. Their paper appears in Nature
Geoscience. DOI: 10.1038/NGEO2535
…and not protecting
them could trigger
drought
Another recent study shows increased deforestation could
cause droughts across the Amazon. After falling over the first
decade of the century, Brazilian deforestation rates have shown
worrying increases lately, rising in 2013 and 2014 from 2012’s
level.
If this continues, researchers say it could reduce rainfall in the
Amazon Basin, affecting the region’s climate, ecosystems and
economies. They predict that if deforestation returns to a pre2004 rate, nearly half the Amazon’s original forest cover will be
gone by mid-century, and that annual rainfall could fall below
drought levels.
‘Essentially, drought years could become the norm for
the Amazon by 2050 if deforestation rates rebound,’ says
project lead Dr Dominick Spracklen from the University of
Leeds, who was also a co-author on the air-pollution paper in
Nature Geoscience. ‘This significant drop in rainfall could affect
ecosystems and wildlife throughout the entire Amazon basin,
which covers roughly 40 per cent of South America.’
Forests are an important route for water, energy and gases
to move between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere.
This means clearing them affects temperature, humidity and
rainfall. The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
DOI: 10.1002/2015GL066063
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015 15
for science
Jo Porter and Richard Shucksmith
describe what it’s like to take part
in an intensive course training the
scientific divers of the future.
All photos: Richard Shucksmith
16
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
T
he icy wind chills your
face – the only part
exposed to the air.
Fully kitted up, the divers go
through their final checks.
A shot line is thrown from
the side of the boat, the
MV Halton, marking the area
to be dived. As the skipper
brings the vessel back round
towards the line, a shout goes up:
‘Divers ready!’ Seconds later, ‘Go,
go, go!’ Each diver takes a giant stride
from the boat and is immersed in the
clear, cool water of Scapa Flow.
They are on a specialised course that will teach
them all the skills a working scientific diver needs. These
include carrying out surveys, taxonomic identification of marine life, monitoring,
sampling, collection and preservation of organisms for genomics processing, as well as
knowing the relevant recording protocols.
Among the course’s aims is to teach the skills needed to undertake an in situ
‘MNCR Phase 2’ survey – the industry standard. By the end, participants know how
to survey habitats, collecting and recording data in a systematic, standardised way that
ensures the right information is recorded to assess what lives there. They are also
better divers with stronger basic skills.
North of mainland Scotland, across the Pentland Firth, are the Orkney Islands.
Within them lies Scapa Flow, a sheltered body of sea that’s famous for the scuttling
of the German fleet during the First World War. At 324km2 , it is the second-largest
natural harbour in the world, after Sydney Harbour in Australia. It encompasses many
habitats and species, and can be dived even in the worst weather. This makes it the
perfect place for the course, letting participants carry out real-life survey scenarios.
❝
It was very intensive but very
enjoyable, with wonderful diving,
seeing species and habitats I have never
seen before. Fiona Tibbitt, Natural England
On top of this Heriot-Watt University has an Orkney campus based at Stromness,
Scapa Flow’s main harbour, which provides laboratory facilities and lecture rooms.
At the beginning of the course, participants meet the Halton, the dive boat and
survey platform and their home for the next week. Heriot-Watt scientific divers use
this vessel for survey work, so students are getting a realistic taste of what it is like
to be out on survey. Some are studying for PhDs; others work in diving units for
conservation agencies or public bodies like the Joint Nature Conservation Committee,
Marine Science Scotland, Natural England, Natural Resources Wales and Scottish
Natural Heritage.
It’s an intense course with a lot to take on board in a short time. The first evening
on the day the participants arrive, marks the start of the course with an introductory
lecture from Dr Bill Sanderson of the Heriot-Watt Scientific Dive Team, co-creator
of the course. It is a time for both the participants and the instructors to get to know
one another, and understand how much experience each person has.
Next day, lectures start at 8am in the Halton’s saloon. Chief dive instructor Kieran
Hatton distributes official paperwork, and then it’s into the first session. Throughout
the week a range of techniques and methodologies are taught, in both theory and
practice. Dry runs before each dive make sure everyone understands the task ahead
and the kit they will use.
Each participant is buddied with another, and there are two trainees per instructor,
both for safety and to maximise learning opportunities. Each day the instructors
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
17
i
NERC funded the In-Situ Marine
Field Identification and Survey
Skills for Scientific Diving course
in collaboration with HeriotWatt University and the Scottish
Association for Marine Science
(SAMS) under the Marine Alliance
for Science and Technology
Scotland (MASTS).
Dr Jo Porter is a senior lecturer
in the School of Life Sciences
at Heriot-Watt University;
she co-created the scientific
diving course alongside Dr Bill
Sanderson. Dr Richard Shucksmith
is a marine biologist and awardwinning professional underwater
photographer, and works as the
course’s embedded photographer.
Richard Shucksmith
Email: [email protected] and
[email protected]
are rotated so that trainees can benefit from the instructors’
different expertise. Kieran leads on the teaching in-water dive
skills, including kit configuration for scientific diving, buoyancy
control, positioning in the water and line laying.
Shakedowns, shrimps and flame shells
The first dive is a shakedown to go through the fundamental
skills that all divers need – mask clearing, regulator retrieval,
using an alternative air source, finning technique, surface marker
buoy deployment – before we move on to more specialised
scientific diving skills like macro photography for species
identification, wide-angle photography for habitat imaging, onsite species and habitat recording, video transects, quadrats and
core sampling.
Participants practise these skills over a series of dives,
culminating in the last day where they are given a site to survey.
They have to work together to organise the whole survey day,
allocate tasks between each buddy pair and collect data, with
only limited input from the instructors. The next day the data
is analysed at the Heriot-Watt Orkney Campus laboratory, and
then the team give a presentation to report their findings. All
the instructors attend, as well as several of the Orkney campus
lecturers, to simulate what might be required for a scientific
research study or for commissioned surveys.
For many people on the course it is their first time using
professional underwater imaging kit. On land this can often feel
heavy and bulky. Once under the water, though, these camera
rigs become almost neutrally buoyant, making them very easy
to handle. They produce high-resolution imagery that records
incredibly fine detail and helps document habitats and identify
animals and plants.
The quality of some of the images being produced by people
who have never held a professional underwater camera before
is stunning. Each day everyone eagerly gathers around the big
screen onboard Halton to review the imagery and get feedback.
With advice from the instructors on photographic skills and
technique, the trainees quickly gain confidence and their images
improve markedly from one day to the next.
Sometimes the students make real scientific discoveries.
18
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
For example, it was during an image review session that a
rare shrimp was identified. The feather star shrimp (Hippolyte
prideauxiana) lives on the feather star (Antedon bifida) and was
only observed due to the review of the high-resolution images,
giving a great example of how digital imaging helps record small
hard-to-find species in biological surveys. This particular shrimp
has only been recorded eight times within the UK, and this is
only the second sighting in Orkney. A great find by the course
participants.
Another discovery was a flame shell (Limaria hians). These
are beautiful bivalve molluscs that are considered a priority
marine feature (PMF) in Scotland. About 4cm long, they have
bright orange fleshy tentacles coming out of their shell, hence
the name. Despite their striking appearance, finding them can
be difficult unless you know what you are looking for – they live
hidden on the seabed, building nests from shells, stones and
other material around them. These nests can form dense beds,
raising and stabilising the seabed, and providing a habitat for
many other species.
As students undertook video transects on one of the training
dives, Bill Sanderson thought he saw such a nest-like structure.
A little digging revealed a small flame-shell bed, increasing
the range of places around Scapa Flow in which we know this
species lives.
Throughout the week Kieran uses a GoPro camera to record
buddy pairs diving. This footage is shown at the end of each day,
attracting keen interest – it is incredibly helpful in honing diving
skills, letting trainees see for themselves exactly what they are
doing under water.
By the end of the week, a group of strangers is transformed
into an efficient working team, capable of planning, executing
and collating an underwater scientific survey to a very high
standard. The marine environment faces a host of potential
problems, from nutrient pollution to ocean acidification, and
we are moving into a new era of ocean conservation with
the designation of new marine protected areas. It is essential
that we train the scientific divers of the future, so that we
can generate the evidence we need to inform sustainable
management practices and comply with new laws.
The goal – a wildflower-rich
roadside verge in Rotherham.
Living
highways
Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust
A new project aims to make Sheffield a better place to
live by attracting more plants and animals to its roadside
verges. Tom Marshall spoke to those involved.
C
ities contain a lot more greenery
than you might think, but a lot
of it isn’t terribly interesting
from an ecologist’s viewpoint, or very
easy on the eye – think of the dull
grassy embankments running along the
sides of many a ring road, or the patchy
vegetation struggling to survive on the
average urban central reservation.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Simple
changes can make these fragments of
land much more beautiful, and perhaps
more attractive to a wider range of
wildlife. This could in turn make local
people’s lives better – there’s research
that suggests regularly experiencing
healthy, varied natural environments
improves wellbeing.
Better management of urban green
space may help in other ways too,
perhaps improving air quality, absorbing
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
19
more carbon and cutting flood risk. It
could even help reduce the impact of
climate change. And crucially for local
authorities struggling to cope with budget
cuts, it can be cheaper than doing things
the traditional way.
Dr Alison Holt, an ecologist at the
University of Sheffield and NERC
Knowledge Exchange Fellow, coordinates the Living Highways project.
She’s working with infrastructure services
company Amey, which is carrying out
the Streets Ahead project on behalf
of Sheffield City Council, and with the
Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust to
investigate how to make the city’s verges
more pleasant, more wildlife-friendly, and
more able to provide a range of benefits
to urban dwellers. It’s still early days, but
if the project succeeds it could form a
model for cities across the UK.
‘Part of my role is starting
conversations to find out what each
of the partners need, and what they
can contribute,’ she says. ‘As scientists
we want to find out more about the
role road verges can play in urban
sustainability. Working together benefits
everyone; we get to write papers about
our findings, while Amey and the Wildlife
Trust can put them to practical use.’
In 2012, Amey began a 25-year
highways maintenance contract with
Sheffield City Council which includes
taking care of Sheffield’s roadside green
space. There’s a lot of it – around
2.2 million square metres, from long
stretches beside dual carriageways to tiny
patches of grass along residential streets.
Wildlife Trust staff already worked
with Amey, and had heard about NERC’s
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
(BESS) programme, which investigates
how the variety of living things in
an environment affects its ability to
provide ‘ecosystem services’ – benefits
like pollination or clean water. They
wondered if similar principles could
be applied to roadside verges. They
approached Holt and her colleague
Professor Phil Warren, who is closely
involved with BESS, and helped establish
contact with Amey.
The partners have distinct but
compatible aims; both Amey and the
Wildlife Trust would like to increase
biodiversity and improve the ecosystem
services local people receive. ‘We want
to look at the current maintenance
regime and find out if there are things
we could do better,’ says Darren Butt,
operations manager for Amey, working
with Sheffield City Council. ‘We’re here
for a long time so we can try out different
approaches and see what works. The
goal is to increase biodiversity while also
being sustainable both environmentally
and financially.’
‘For us, the benefit of the contract
is the scale and duration – 25 years
of maintaining the whole of Sheffield’s
highway system, not just one aspect of it,’
he adds. ‘In other cities we don’t have the
same scope to look at the big picture.’
From lawns to meadows
One promising idea is mowing roadside
verges less often, so more wildflowers
reach maturity and attract pollinating
insects and other creatures. Other
possibilities are ‘mosaic mowing’ – cutting
grass in sections over time to provide
more varied habitats – and re-seeding
with native plants in places where the
soil doesn’t have a healthy seedbank of
its own. At the moment most verges
contain a limited range of species and are
regularly mown short. Tactics like these
could transform them into sustainable
flower meadows hosting a rich variety of
wildlife.
There will be challenges, though.
Some residents might see unmown grass
as scruffy so the partners are working
to keep them onside, with regular
meetings to explain what’s going on and
why. ‘People can be resistant to change,
particularly when it’s in the area around
their house,’ Holt explains. ‘But we hope
that by consulting as widely as possible
and being open about what we are
trying to do, we can build support. That’s
Ecologically boring
roadside verge in
Sheffield.
Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust
20
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
Yellow rattle.
Gail Hampshire/Wikimedia Commons
important because in the long term the project won’t work if
people don’t like it.’
‘We’re not going to do anything without talking to residents,’
adds Dr Nicky Rivers, Living Landscape Development Manager
at the Wildlife Trust. ‘Once we explain what’s happening,
people tend to be very enthusiastic.’ The partners also aim
to involve the local community with projects like creating
small meadows in the
unused space around road
junctions, or getting more
benefit from its urban trees.
‘Sheffield has many tiny
pockets of woodland that
aren’t really managed at the
moment,’ says Rivers. ‘So
we are thinking together
about how to make these
sites more interesting for people and wildlife. I would also like
the project to enhance ecological networks and strengthen
the city’s “network for nature”.’ The last idea involves helping
wildlife move around the city as a whole rather than being
scattered across many small fragments of habitat.
Living Highways is still at an early stage. Holt and her
colleagues have already reviewed research on verge
management to get a sense of the options available, and have
provided suggestions on topics like what new tree species
could be planted to improve the city’s air quality. Experimental
work starts in earnest in 2016. A lot of it will be done by Olivia
Richardson, who recently started a PhD at Sheffield with
support from NERC, Amey and the Trust. She’ll spend the next
❝
couple of years finding out the ecological state roadside verges
are in, how they’re benefiting residents and how they could be
cost-effectively improved. The details are still being worked
out, but the benefits she looks at could include pollination,
carbon storage, flood control or enjoyment of nature.
One thing that’s already clear is that there’s a lot of variety
in Sheffield’s roadsides; they range from recently-planted grass
monocultures to fragments of much older and more diverse
landscapes. The Sheffield City Area includes a surprising
number of diverse rural roadside verges, which need very
different management to an urban road.
‘We’re still learning what we have to work with,’ says Butt at
Amey. ‘In some places there may be diverse habitats already,
remnants of older meadows and woodlands that we can
identify and enhance. For us, having the PhD student will build
on our understanding of the existing estate; this will help Amey
and Sheffield City Council to put the maintenance contract on
a more scientific footing.’ Knowledge flows in both directions,
though. As well as helping Amey understand its options, the
scientists will also get a much clearer idea of what is and isn’t
feasible for the private sector.
Things are already starting to happen. The Wildlife Trust
recently experimented with planting a roundabout with yellow
rattle, a native wildflower that parasitises grass, weakening it so
other species can get a foothold. It’s not a hi-tech procedure;
volunteers cut hay from a nearby Wildlife Trust meadow with
a rich mix of native species and spread it on the roundabout so
that the seeds it contains will settle to the earth and germinate.
This is just one of a variety of management changes that’ll be
tested over the next few years; how well it works remains to
be seen. ‘It’s great for us to have the university involved,’ says
Rivers of the Wildlife Trust. ‘They can give us a much clearer
idea of what will and won’t work, so that we end up with
a menu of practical options that can be applied in different
places depending on the local conditions. It’s a really exciting
project to be involved in – there’s huge interest in verges
and biodiversity across Britain.’ That’s coming from everyone
from city councils to Network Rail and Highways England.
Butt agrees that the other local
authorities that Amey works
with are interested in the
findings, especially if they provide
environmental and cost benefits.
We’re only just starting to
think seriously about everything
we need to do to help our cities
cope with the many problems
environmental change will bring.
Verges aren’t going to solve them all, but we’ll need to manage
all our urban resources wisely if we’re to provide the urbanites
of the future with safe, pleasant living spaces. Turning roadside
spaces from dull grassy monocultures into thriving, diverse
meadows and woodlands could be a good place to start.
The goal is to increase
biodiversity while
also being sustainable both
environmentally and financially.
i
Living Highways is a partnership between the University of
Sheffield, Amey and the Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife
Trust. Working alongside Holt on the project at the university
are Professor Phil Warren and Dr Karl Evans.
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
21
A family evacuated in Whitstable,
Kent, during the ‘Great Storm’ of
1953. These floods killed 307 people
in eastern England and were the
catalyst for the construction of the
Thames Barrier.
A century of
Canterbury City Council 2015
UK coastal flooding
Ivan Haigh and Elizabeth
Bradshaw describe
SurgeWatch, a new
database of coastal floods
that’s set to revolutionise
our understanding of how
and why these destructive
events happen – and of
how to limit the damage.
22
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
C
oastal floods, caused by high sea levels, are a serious global hazard. In the
last decade we have witnessed major events including two of the most costly
natural disasters in US history: Hurricanes Katrina (in 2005) and Sandy (in
2012). Coastal flooding from these two events killed thousands of people and caused
damage worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
In 2008 Cyclone Nargis generated a 5m storm surge along the coast of southern
Myanmar, sweeping seawater 50km inland and killing a staggering 130,000 people. In
2013, Typhoon Haiyan swept across the central Philippines, killing 8,000 people and
destroying a million homes; much of the damage was due to high sea levels.
During the winter of 2013/14, an unusually severe sequence of coastal flooding
occurred in the UK. Over this period storms repeatedly subjected large areas of the
coast to enormous stress and caused extensive damage.
These events are a reminder of the ever-present risks facing coastal communities;
risks that will increase over the coming century as sea levels rise and coastal
populations continue to grow. To plan effectively for the future, we need better
information on the occurrence, causes and consequences of coastal flooding.
What causes coastal flooding?
Coastal flooding happens because of a
combination of high tides, storm surges
and waves. A storm surge is a temporary
large-scale rise in sea level caused by
strong winds pushing water towards
the coast where it ‘piles up’, and by low
pressure at the centre of storms – this
‘pulls’ the sea surface up by about 1cm
for every millibar that air pressure drops.
Often, the worst coastal flooding occurs
when the peak storm surge coincides
with high spring tide. Storms can also
produce large waves, which can overtop
coastal defences and cause erosion.
A long history of flooding in the
UK
The UK coastline has been subject
to terrible floods throughout history.
Records suggest that coastal floods killed
100,000 people in the UK in 1099, with
similar death tolls in 1421 and 1446. Up
to 2,000 people drowned around the
Bristol Channel in 1607, the greatest loss
of life from a natural catastrophe in the
UK in the last 500 years.
In 1703 a severe storm washed away
the lowest street of houses in the village
of Brighthelmstone (today’s Brighton).
Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson
Crusoe, wrote an interesting account of
the events in The Storm. He described
the aftermath of the flood as ‘the very
picture of desolation’ and wrote that ‘it
looked as if an enemy had sacked’ the
towns affected.
The worst natural disaster to affect
the UK in modern times was the ‘Big
Flood’ of early 1953. 307 people were
killed in South-east England and 24,000
fled their homes, while almost 2,000
lives were lost in the Netherlands and
Belgium. This was the driving force
for the creation of the Thames Storm
Surge Barrier and other flood defence
schemes around the country. It also
led to the establishment of the UK
Coastal Monitoring and Forecasting
Service. Today, this provides warnings of
impending high sea levels, helping people
prepare for flooding emergencies.
2013/14 storm surge season
Over the winter of 2013/14, these flood
defence and forecasting services were
tested on a national scale when storms
and floods relentlessly hit the UK coast,
triggering intense media coverage and
public attention. On several occasions
the government assembled the Cobra
crisis committee.
Particular events stand out. First, the
storm on 5-6 December 2013 that
generated what was widely referred to
as ‘the biggest storm surge for 60 years’
and flooded 2,800 homes and 1,000
businesses. Second, the storm in early
February that destroyed the Dawlish
railway in Devon. Third, the dramatic
‘Valentine’s Day Storm’, which placed the
south coast under severe flood alert.
The fact that the damage was so
limited during these storms, compared
to the tragedy of 1953, is thanks to
significant government investment in
coastal defences, flood forecasting,
sea-level monitoring and improved
communications. However, 2.5 million
people and £150 billion of assets are still
at risk from coastal flooding in the UK
today.
On top of this there is currently no
nationwide system in place to record
which high sea levels caused coastal
flooding, and to record information on
how often this happens and what the
consequences are. This limits our ability
to understand coastal flood risks and
makes it difficult to assess how unusual
2013/14 really was.
SurgeWatch: A new coastal
flooding database
This led a team of scientists from the
University of Southampton, National
Oceanography Centre, and the British
Oceanographic Data Centre to create a
100-year database of coastal flooding in
the UK, called SurgeWatch. We compiled
data on the 96 largest events over this
period, with information on the storm
that generated each event, the high
water levels recorded during the events
and the severity of coastal flooding.
We also developed a website
(www.surgewatch.org) to make the
information freely and easily accessible
to a wide range of users including
scientists, coastal engineers, managers
and planners.
We are aiming to expand the
database and are appealing for the
help of the general public. Do you have
any photographs of coastal flooding
from recent or past events which you
are willing to share? Photos can be
easily uploaded to www.surgewatch.
org/contribute-photos. We want to
investigate these in order to improve
understanding of exactly which areas
were flooded and to what water depth.
Please don’t put yourself at risk to take
photos, though.
Preventing future flooding
Coastal flooding remains a threat to life
and economic assets in the UK and we
hope SurgeWatch will provide crucial
information to help prevent it in future.
The database has let us identify which
historic storms resulted in the worst
coastal flooding over the last century, and
we have mapped the specific paths of the
storms responsible.
What is particularly clear is that coastal
flooding ‘clusters’. You get seasons and
even decades of calm, with relatively few
floods, and other periods when they
occur in rapid succession. 2013/14 was a
particularly unusual season, in that seven
out of the 96 events in the 100-year
database occurred during this period;
no other season has had so many large
floods in the last century. Two of the
events in 2013/14 (5–6 December 2013
and 3 January 2014) rank in the top ten
for sea-level height. Both also rank highly
in terms of spatial footprints – that is,
they struck very long stretches of the UK
coast.
Now that we know more accurately
which seasons and decades had the
most coastal flooding, we are examining
properties of the North Atlantic the year
before, such as the temperature of the
sea surface, to see if this gives any clues
to how stormy the following season may
be. If there are links that show the ocean
contributes to storm clustering, we may
be able to develop seasonal predictions
that could supplement the short-term
forecasting provided by the UK Coastal
Monitoring and Forecasting Service. If
we can give coastal communities more
warning, perhaps the losses of life and
property they suffer from flooding can
continue to fall even as sea levels rise.
i
Dr Ivan D. Haigh is a coastal
oceanographer at the University
of Southampton, and Elizabeth
Bradshaw is a data scientist at the
British Oceanographic Data Centre.
Email: [email protected] and
[email protected].
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
23
W nde
Dave Reay explores the tangled web
of nitrogen and global climate change.
O
ur secondary school chemistry class was not sent wild with excitement
the first time we heard about nitrogen. It was spring, and through the dark
months of winter the stained and malodorous Mr Davies had dragged us on
through the hinterlands of the periodic table. For hour after hour we scribbled down
the key facts about hydrogen, helium and the rest and, if we were lucky, got to try out
each element’s peculiarities in the lab.
We had made hydrogen go ‘pop’ in a test tube, had been roundly disciplined for
breathing in helium from balloons to make our voices squeak, and had burnt some
coal to heat water. For nitrogen, though, there was to be no practical. What was
there to do with this odourless, colourless and unreactive gas but write down that it
was as common as muck and didn’t do a whole lot? We had oxygen coming up the
following week and the promise of setting things on fire, so for now it was just a case
of fidgeting in the clammy plastic chairs and hoping someone would fart to break the
monotony.
The key facts on nitrogen were dutifully regurgitated onto exam papers at the end
of the year and that, as far as we were concerned, was that. Never again would we
have to recall where nitrogen came in the periodic table and all the things it didn’t
do. I thought nitrogen didn’t matter. It seemed irrelevant to the intensifying global
challenges of water, food, energy and climate security and that the important things in
my life – family, friends and a sustainable future – had nothing to do with nitrogen. On
every count, I was wrong.
The 1990s found me as a NERC PhD
student aboard a research ship in the
Southern Ocean. Our quest was to
discover how climate change might
affect these vast and violent waters, and
almost immediately a glittering strand of
nitrogen’s key role in life and death began
to shine.
Not all nitrogen, I soon became aware,
was inert. The cold waters that swirled
around the ship were teeming with life
that depended on getting enough of the
stuff. As I simulated a hundred years’
worth of planetary warming in racks of
heated water jars, the rampant thirst of
all plants and animals for nitrogen, the
bursts of growth when it was plentiful
and the life-or-death struggles when
it wasn’t, were played out in miniature
before my eyes. It was a revelation – this
stuff was actually important. Mr Davies
would have been proud.
The stuff of life and death
The more I learned about nitrogen, the
more I saw just how powerful it was.
From toxic algal blooms in the Gulf of
Mexico to eye-watering smogs in Beijing,
the harm it did was increasingly obvious.
But then so too were its many benefits.
When my wife went into labour with
our firstborn it was nitrous oxide that
eased her pain; when my father was
flattened by an attack of angina it was
a spray of nitroglycerine into his mouth
that had him up and back digging the
garden within minutes. In fields around
the world nitrogen fertilisers were
helping put food in the mouths of billions.
High-nitrogen wetland, with
lots of algal growth.
Fabrice Gouriveau
24
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
derstuff
This was a substance with myriad forms
that had shaped human civilization for
millennia and whose fingerprints were all
over almost every facet of life on Earth.
Over the last 20 years my own quest
to understand more about nitrogen
has become ever more entwined with
climate change, and with NERC. From
post-doctoral research fellowships
examining how nitrogen affects
exchanges of the powerful greenhouse
gases methane and nitrous oxide,
through a NERC fellowship investigating
the effects of changing nitrogen use on
the climate, right up to today’s work on
better quantifying emissions of nitrous
oxide and other greenhouse gases across
the UK landscape, the journey has been
both fascinating and alarming.
Our understanding of nitrogen’s
myriad interactions with climate change
is still incomplete, yet the power it
can exert for good or ill in a warming
world has become all too clear. Each
year, agriculture alone introduces
around 120 million tonnes of reactive
nitrogen directly to the land in the
form of fertilisers and nitrogen fixation
by legumes. On top of this comes an
intensifying shower of reactive nitrogen
from the air.
This terrestrial enrichment has many
effects on the climate. These range from
reinforcing the warming trend through
increased nitrous oxide emissions to
boosting plant growth and causing natural
systems like forests and the oceans
to take in more carbon. Its impacts
on natural ecosystems are manifold,
forming a triumvirate with climate and
land-use change as the leading causes of
biodiversity loss in the 21st century.
In the world’s rivers, lakes and
oceans, excess nitrogen can work in
Automated chambers at work
measuring nitrous oxide emissions from
a farm drainage ditch.
i
tandem with changing temperatures
and rainfall patterns to promote harmful
algal blooms, exacerbate flood risks
and damage water quality. Even in the
atmosphere, too much reactive nitrogen
can combine with higher temperatures
to degrade air quality, pushing up lowaltitude ozone concentrations and so
threatening the health of plants, animals
and humans.
Scratch the surface of the global
challenge that is climate change in the
21st century, peer further into the
perfect storm of population growth,
food shortages and water pollution,
and it is the layered and interconnected
threads of nitrogen that shine through.
They run through life, death and
decomposition, integral to our genes,
the food we eat, the air we breathe and
the climate changes we face. Its story
is of the peculiar and the mundane, of
water turning red and people turning
blue, one of climate friend and pollution
foe, of meaty feasts and looming famine.
Truly, it is a wonderstuff.
Dave Reay is professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh. This article
is adapted from his new book Nitrogen and Climate Change: An Explosive Story published
by Palgrave Macmillan.
He gained his PhD as a NERC CASE student with the British Antarctic Survey and the
University of Essex. He was a NERC research fellow between 2005 and 2008 and has
worked on numerous NERC programmes including the EDGE and GANE thematic
programmes and, most recently, the NERC GREENHOUSE programme.
Vanishing act, Planet Earth 2003: https://web.archive.org/web/20030628205734/http://
www.nerc.ac.uk/publications/documents/Vanishingact.pdf
Reap what we sow, Planet Earth 2009: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.
uk/20090707013910/http://nerc.ac.uk/publications/planetearth/2009/summer/sum09sow.pdf
GREENHOUSE: Generating Regional Emissions Estimates with a Novel Hierarchy of
Observations and Upscaled Simulation Experiments. NERC Greenhouse Gas Emissions
and Feedbacks Programme, www.greenhouse-gases.org.uk
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
25
Launching a mooring from the rear
deck of the RRS Discovery.
Inevitable surprises in the
Atlantic Ocean
What have we learned from a decade of monitoring how water and
heat circulate through the North Atlantic? As Meric Srokosz explains,
a great deal – much of it unexpected.
I
n 2002, a report – entitled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable
Surprises? – highlighted the possibility of sudden shifts in the
North Atlantic circulation in a warming climate. Likewise the
2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
report suggested that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning
Circulation (AMOC) could weaken over the 21st century.
The AMOC transports heat northwards across the equator;
this makes the Atlantic different from the Indian and Pacific
Oceans, where the ocean transports heat away from the
equator towards the poles. The warm northward flow is
balanced by a cold deep return flow, as the waters cool and
sink having given up their heat to the atmosphere above. We
already knew this is important for the climate, and models
predict it will slow down under global warming, with significant
effects. AMOC is what gives the UK and North-west Europe
their temperate climate, so ironically in a warming world these
areas could get cooler due to weakening ocean circulation.
Changes in the AMOC could also affect sea levels around the
periphery of the North Atlantic.
All this meant scientists renewed their efforts to make
observations of the AMOC. In particular, it led to the
deployment of the NERC-led joint UK-US RAPID observing
26
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
system across the Atlantic at 26.5˚N in spring 2004. Last year
this system achieved ten years of measurements; during that
decade it has indeed provided some inevitable surprises.
Traditionally, the AMOC has been measured by sending a
research ship across the Atlantic, stopping every 50km and
lowering instruments right to the seabed to measure the
temperature and salinity of the water. The water is typically
5km deep, so this is a slow process and a single crossing of the
Atlantic at the 26.5˚N latitude can take 35 days.
Only six such transects have been made since the 1950s.
Clearly this is not a viable way to continuously measure the
AMOC – hence the need to create a long-term observing
system. It consists of instrumented moorings at the eastern
and western boundaries, and on either side of the mid-Atlantic
ridge, together with an undersea cable that measures the flow
through the Florida Straits.
As well as the baseline decade of RAPID observations of
the full AMOC at 26.5˚N, there have been other ongoing
measurements during this period that capture components of
the AMOC (for example, just the deep return flow). Some of
these are not continuous, or of much shorter duration.
Yet the RAPID measurements are unique – they are the only
A simplified version of the Atlantic Meridional
Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Warm water
flows north in the upper ocean (red), gives up heat
to the atmosphere, sinks and returns as a deep cold
flow (blue). The yellow line represents the 26.5˚N
AMOC observations.
ocean-wide continuous measurements
of the AMOC’s strength and vertical
structure. They have produced several
surprises – some of them taking place
on timescales shorter than a year, others
lasting the full length of the observations.
Fluctuations in the flow
The first surprise was that in the first
year of measurement, the AMOC seemed
to vary far more than we’d expected. Its
flow fluctuated between 4 and 35 Sverdrup
(Sv – this is the standard unit for measuring
ocean circulation; one Sverdrup is a million cubic
metres per second). Five ship-based observations
over the previous 50 years found a flow between
15 and 23Sv. A similarly large range of variation was
subsequently observed in the South Atlantic, where the
observations are more recent and of much shorter duration
– just 20 months.
The second surprise was that the amplitude of the
seasonal cycle, with a minimum in the spring and a maximum
in the autumn, was much larger (around 6.7Sv) than
anticipated.
The third big surprise was that the AMOC temporarily
declined by 30 per cent during 2009-10. This was completely
unexpected, and exceeded the range of year-to-year
variations found in climate models used for the IPCC
assessments. It was also captured by Argo – these are freefloating buoys that measure temperature and salinity down
to 2km – and by satellite altimeter observations of the upper
limb of the AMOC at 41˚N. This dip was accompanied by
significant changes in the heat content of the ocean. These
would have affected the weather, perhaps contributing to
the severe winter of 2009-10. The decline has also been
linked to an unprecedented sea-level rise on the eastern
seaboard of the USA during the same period, so scientists
are now working to understand why it happened.
The final surprise was that over the first decade of the
RAPID observations, the AMOC has declined by about
0.5Sv per year – ten times faster than climate models
predict. Whether this is a trend caused by global warming,
or just part of the so-called Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation
– a long-term cycle taking place over 60-80 years observed
in sea-surface temperatures – is another question scientists
are still trying to answer. There is no doubt that continuously
observing the AMOC over a decade has significantly
changed how we view the ocean circulation in the North
Atlantic, how it varies and its impact on our climate.
The RAPID observations are now stimulating the
development of further AMOC observing systems both
in the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre, south of Greenland
and Iceland – a project called OSNAP (Overturning in the
AMOC strength in Sverdrups over ten years to March 2014. Note
the low AMOC event in 2009/10 and the overall decline in AMOC
strength over the period.
Subpolar North Atlantic Programme) in which the UK is playing
a major part – and in the South Atlantic.
The aim is to combine the new observations with the RAPID
ones and so obtain a holistic picture of the AMOC from south
to north in the Atlantic. Given the surprises and insights into the
Atlantic circulation that RAPID observations have produced so
far, it is not too much to expect that the new observations will
lead to future ‘inevitable surprises’.
i
Professor Meric Srokosz works on marine physics and
the relationship between the ocean and the climate at the
National Oceanography Centre in Southampton.
Email: [email protected].
For more on the RAPID programme see www.rapid.ac.uk
DOI: 10.1126/science.1255575
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
27
Spotlight on
SOILS
Oribatiid mite from a soil sample.
T
2015 is the International Year of Soils. It’s not the most
glamorous area of science, but it’s vital to just about
every aspect of our lives – as Janet Moxley and Nicole
Archer explain.
o many people soil might not seem to offer much to
celebrate. After all isn’t it just a load of dirt? Or perhaps
something that’s important to farmers and gardeners,
but not much use to anyone else. However, when you ask
‘What have soils ever done for us?’ the list gets quite long!
Perhaps the most obvious thing that soils do is allow plants
to grow, but they also soak up rainwater, store carbon, filter
out pollutants, hold up buildings, help regulate greenhouse gas
emissions, protect archaeological remains and are home to a
diverse community of animals. NERC scientists are helping us
understand many of these functions.
Five factors control how soil forms: climate, topography,
vegetation, time and the kind of rock that lies beneath. UK soils
are relatively young – in geological terms, at least – because
glaciers 10,000 years ago scraped away older soils, and new
ones formed more recently from the underlying geological
parent material.
The UK’s rich geological diversity generates over 1,800
types of soil, each with its own different chemistry and layer
pattern or ‘profile’. Since the late 1960s scientists at the British
Geological Survey (BGS) have measured the soil environment
to understand the distribution and movement of chemical
elements at the Earth’s surface.
28
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
This has led to the development of G-Base, a database
providing geochemical baseline data for the whole UK. It is
used for applications such as mineral exploration, mapping
environmental change, supporting policy and environmental
regulators, and studies into possible environmental causes of
human health and agricultural problems.
The UK’s cool, damp climate means our soils are very good at
storing carbon. Plant material takes a long time to decompose,
so carbon from plants builds up in the soil. If soils lose this
carbon again, it may be released into the atmosphere as carbon
dioxide or methane – greenhouse gases that cause climate
change. Peatlands, traditionally regarded as unproductive bogs,
are particularly important carbon stores. Although they cover
less than 3 per cent of the global land surface, they are thought
to contain twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests.
BGS staff have been improving our understanding of where
these sensitive peat soils are, and how deep they go. They use
both traditional field survey methods of mapping and measuring
peat depths and new remote-sensing technologies to study the
variations in soil across the landscape, which tell us whether
peat is building up or being lost. Meanwhile colleagues at the
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) have been studying
how peatlands respond to pressures such as climate change,
drainage and pollution. This knowledge will let us manage these
areas better to make sure the carbon stays in the soil, and
where possible increase soil carbon stocks.
Carbon dioxide and methane are not the only
greenhouse gases that can be released from soils.
Nitrogen compounds that are naturally present
in soils but are also added in fertilisers and
manures can break down to give nitrous oxide,
a very powerful greenhouse gas. Research at
CEH has looked at how agricultural practices
influence nitrous oxide emissions from soils in
the UK and abroad.
Soil and water
As well as storing carbon and helping regulate climate, soil
properties can also affect how rainwater flows into rivers. All
soils consist of three components – solid, water and air. How
water behaves within the soil influences run-off and flood risk.
Clay soil, for example, can store more water than sandy soil.
Wetting these clay soils can make them swell, while drying
can lead to cracking. These changes can contribute to building
subsidence and landslides.
Scientists at BGS and CEH are working to find out more
about how soil and water interact so we can develop better
models to assess the risk of flooding, landslides and subsidence;
this information helps BGS to maintain the National Landslide
Database. This is mainly used by local authorities, companies
and private landowners to assess landslide risks for road
construction, town planning, building regulation and land-use
management.
Plant roots are also part of the soil system, and can create
pathways that transport water to deeper soil layers. Vegetation
(particularly trees) helps water to soak into the ground and
decreases water run off along the surface. This stops rainwater
reaching rivers too quickly, making flooding less likely.
BGS scientists have measured how water moves through
soils in forests more than a century old, and have found that
they have the highest infiltration rates regardless of soil type
and absorb heavy rainfall, whereas heavily grazed clay soils have
low infiltration rates so heavy rainfall flows over the land surface
rather than seeping into the soil. This can cause hotspots for
flooding.
At CEH, meanwhile, scientists have found that when peaty
soils dry out in summer droughts they become difficult to rewet
as the soil particles become water repellent. This could increase
flood risk if climate change means there are longer dry spells
followed by heavy downpours. Preventing peaty soils from
drying out during droughts by blocking drains and encouraging
the growth of water-retaining plants such as sphagnum moss
could help reduce this risk.
Soils are home to a huge range of animals, fungi and bacteria
Autochambers to measure gas exchanges
from peatland at Auchencorth, Midlothian.
Bev Dodd sampling soil water at the Environmental
Change Network site at Moor House in Teesdale.
– everything from moles and earthworms to microbes. Just
a teaspoon of healthy soil contains more living organisms
than there are people on the planet. Identifying all of them
with a microscope would take far too long, but fortunately
sophisticated DNA fingerprinting techniques being used at
CEH are giving us a better understanding of soil organisms than
ever before.
CEH carries out the UK Countryside Survey roughly once
a decade. Scientists visit over 600 sites across Great Britain
to assess vegetation cover and take soil samples. Countryside
Survey data show how soil properties, including carbon and
nitrogen stocks, concentrations of metals, and soil animals, are
changing over time.
Information on NERC-supported work on soils has recently
been gathered together on the UK Soils Observatory
website at www.ukso.org. This includes maps showing soil
characteristics, information on the network of soil monitoring
sites and mobile phone apps to find out more about the soils
around you. The My Soil app developed by CEH and BGS gives
you access to a comprehensive soil properties map, as well as
allowing you to upload information to improve future mapping.
i
Dr Janet Moxley is a soil carbon scientist at the Centre for
Ecology & Hydrology, and
Dr Nicole Archer is a soil hydrologist at the British Geological
Survey, both based in Edinburgh.
Email: [email protected] and [email protected].
UK Soils Observatory: www.ukso.org
PLANET EARTH Winter 2015
29
Previous issues available online at www.nerc.ac.uk
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