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Diving for science • Living highways • A history of UK coastal flooding • Nitrogen • Soils Follow us on 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 For subscriptions or change of address please 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 readers’ feedback on any aspect of the magazine or website and are happy to hear from NERC-funded scientists who want to write for Planet Earth. Please bear in mind that we rarely accept unsolicited articles, so contact the editors first to 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 Natural Environment Research Council Polaris House, North Star Avenue, Swindon, Wiltshire, SN2 1EU Tel: 01793 411500 www.nerc.ac.uk