Ecological Processes and Resilience
Lead Research Organisation:
UK CENTRE FOR ECOLOGY & HYDROLOGY
Department Name: UNLISTED
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Richard Pywell (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Anderson-Teixeira KJ
(2015)
CTFS-ForestGEO: a worldwide network monitoring forests in an era of global change.
in Global change biology
Andresen L
(2016)
Large-Scale Ecology: Model Systems to Global Perspectives
Andrews C
(2016)
Long-term observations of increasing snow cover in the western Cairngorms
in Weather
Andriuzzi W
(2015)
Organic matter composition and the protist and nematode communities around anecic earthworm burrows
in Biology and Fertility of Soils
Armstrong A
(2015)
Biotic and Abiotic Factors Interact to Regulate Northern Peatland Carbon Cycling
in Ecosystems
Arranz I
(2016)
Density-dependent effects as key drivers of intraspecific size structure of six abundant fish species in lakes across Europe
in Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
Atkin OK
(2015)
Global variability in leaf respiration in relation to climate, plant functional types and leaf traits.
in The New phytologist
Auffret A
(2017)
Plant functional connectivity - integrating landscape structure and effective dispersal
in Journal of Ecology
Avitabile V
(2016)
An integrated pan-tropical biomass map using multiple reference datasets.
in Global change biology
Baattrup-Pedersen A
(2015)
Plant trait characteristics vary with size and eutrophication in European lowland streams.
in The Journal of applied ecology
| Description | See RCUK Narrative Impact |
| Exploitation Route | Expect findings to be taken forward in future. To be determined at 'end of grant' in 2019 |
| Sectors | Agriculture Food and Drink Energy Environment |
| Description | Science Area Annual Report: Ecological Processes & Resilience September 2014 1. Introduction 1.1 CEH's Challenges 2014-19 Our strategy, Meeting the Challenges of Environmental Change, covers the period 2014 to 2019 and sets out three interdependent, major societal and environmental challenges aligned with NERC strategy: securing the value of nature, building resilience to environmental hazards, and managing environmental change. 1.2 Meeting the Challenges In order to deliver our ambitions our research is managed via nine Science Areas. The 'Ecological Processes and Resilience' Science Area will deliver to all three strategic areas but primarily to securing the value of nature by improving methods to detect and forecast tipping points and regime shifts and understand the recovery from extreme events. We will identify ecological structures and attributes that confer resilience and which can potentially be subject to management 2. Science Area Status Each Science Area has identified a number of ambitions to achieve by 2019. 3. Research highlights 3.1 Highlight 1 - CEH Lakes Research International e-Conference: "Geo-engineering in lakes: a call for consensus" Water quality targets and deadlines encapsulated in policy documents such as the EU Water Framework Directive and USA Clean Water Act, have created a pressing need for phosphorus management methods to control eutrophication in lakes. In recent years, geo-engineering techniques have increasingly been used to meet such targets, but there remains a lack of scientific consensus on many aspects of these approaches. This has resulted in liberal use of these techniques, with limited scientific forethought, leading to the potential for unintended consequences. To address this, CEH held an innovative two-week e-conference in March 2014 to bring together key members of the international research community and lake managers, promoting discussion of the need for geo-engineering approaches in lake restoration, methods development, the unintended consequences of such approaches and the need to provide decision support tools for lake managers. The e-Conference comprised 25 topics presented as video or written discussions, organised into four sessions using a web forum format with open discussion threads for each topic. The event was promoted on the CEH Lake Restoration webpages and on Twitter (#elakes14). By the end of the conference, there had been 2330 page hits on the webpages, 98 registrations and 258 posts for the forum, 1249 video views from YouTube and Tudou, 9591 topic views on the forum, and #elakes14 tweets had reached 2189 twitter accounts. The forum presentations now form a resource for future interactions between the research and practitioner communities on geo-engineering in lakes. Following the e-conference two commentaries / opinion papers have been invited by journals in the field. The first, 'Mackay et al. Geo-engineering in lakes: welcome attraction or fatal distraction?' will be published in Inland Waters in the autumn. 3.2 Highlight 2 - Assessing the vulnerability of the marine bird community in the western North Sea to climate change and other anthropogenic impacts Ocean warming and anthropogenic activities such as fishing, shipping and marine renewable developments are threatening top predator community resilience, yet research has tended to focus on the effects of single stressors on single species. We studied a marine bird community (45 species; 11 families) utilising the western North Sea for breeding, overwintering or during migration between 1980 and 2011, a period with significant increases in sea surface temperature, fishing pressure and shipping disturbance. We used multiple data sources, including data from CEH's long-term study of seabird populations on the Isle of May (IMLOTS), to quantitatively assess relationships between sea surface temperature and population counts and demography of 25 species for which sufficient data were available for analysis. For the remaining species, we applied a qualitative approach using published trends, published climate relationships and foraging sensitivity. In total, 53% of species showed negative relationships with sea surface temperature. Trends in demography were combined with climate vulnerability to give an index of population concern to future climate warming, and 44% of species were classified as of high or very high concern, notably cormorants, grebes, skuas, shearwaters, terns and auks, as well as species breeding in the region. Qualitative assessments of vulnerability to fisheries, pollutants, disturbance (including introduced predators), marine renewables (since the study area is a priority area for renewable developments) and climate found that 93% of species were vulnerable to =2 threats, and 58% to =4. Our results indicate that the majority of bird species in this region of the North Sea face an uncertain future, potentially threatening the resilience of this important marine bird community. 3.3 Highlight 3 - Saltmarsh Resilience Coastal plant communities are valuable for the biodiversity they support, and have many important functions in terms of coastal protection, agricultural production and regulating greenhouse gas fluxes. Changes in habitat suitability for positive indicator-species are a strong indicator of overall habitat quality, and many functions are specific to particular plant species. The 'Saltmarsh Resilience' project is developing the capacity to predict changes in habitat suitability for plant species in coastal habitats, resulting from interactions among drivers such as sea-level rise, climate change and atmospheric pollution. The main output to date has been a set of multidimensional niche models that predict habitat suitability for 132 coastal plant species given information on climate (annual precipitation and maximum and minimum temperatures), soil conditions (salinity, fertility, alkalinity and moisture) and light availability (Jarvis et al., submitted ). Inputs can be based on long-term average climate data and floristic trait-means, which are publically available. Due to the strong links between trait-means and environmental conditions, floristic data can also be used to calibrate dynamic biogeochemical models to site conditions, at extremely low cost compared to biogeochemical monitoring. This approach is being applied in two studies of ecosystem responses and resilience under scenarios of anthropogenic change and recovery: coastal re-alignment, which addresses the resilience of salt-marsh to agricultural conversion on multi-century timescales (Garbutt et al., in prep.); and nitrogen critical-load setting in the context of the extreme persistence of nitrogen in recalcitrant soil pools (Rowe et al., in prep .). These articles will be submitted by March 2015. The rapidly-developing capacity of this team to apply dynamic niche occupancy models to emerging environmental issues is likely to have considerable impact on ecosystem management at a range of scales. 4. Future research The priority research areas for the Ecological Processes Resilience Science Area over the next five years include the management of genetic resources to improve resilience to Climate Change and increased challenges of pathogens and invasive pests for instance in forestry (e.g. ProTree, THAPBI), understanding the sensitivity to single and multiple stressors in lake ecosystems and their impact (GloboLakes, MARS), and to study the link between biodiversity and resilience in relation to invasives and vector borne disease (ROBIN, VMERGE). Specific priorities for the next year include the development and verification of new statistical methods to detect and forecast regime shifts (ECN, IMLOTS) and of new methods identifying community network structures conferring resilience (NC resilience project). We examine community resilience to extreme events such as drought including soil diversity and impacts on carbon flow (EcoFinders) and population return times after drought events in relation to their landscape context (JNCC/BRC). 2016-17 developments & highlights CEH integrated >370,000 phenological species records and applied a novel statistical approach to assess the climate sensitivity of UK seasonal events, which showed that the seasonal activities of UK plant and animal species are less sensitive to rainfall than to temperature. This was the first time that such a pattern had been observed among so many species and habitats, at the national scale, and could have important implications for UK biodiversity and ecosystem health throughout the UK. CEH scientists collaborated with colleagues from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and Edinburgh to develop a new statistical model that opens up new possibilities for studying phenology change across larger numbers of species than has previously been possible, and for better understanding phenological trends in space as well as time. CEH led a team of researchers to critically assess the challenge of environmental change to complex ecological systems that humanity relies upon at local, regional and global scales. The study identified that, in general, resilience-enhancing measures are available to practitioners across most ecosystem types but that researchers have low confidence in their effectiveness risking 'knee-jerk' management. Anthropogenic pressures, including climate change, are causing non-linear changes in ecosystems across the globe. Reliable early warning indicators (EWIs) are needed to predict such changes in order to manage ecosystems and protect biodiversity, natural capital and ecosystem services. CEH undertook a comprehensive test of the consistency between EWIs and non-linear abundance change across long-term data from multiple species and trophic levels (126 data sets, 55 taxa and 4926 cumulative years of data) in six aquatic study systems, including shallow lake, deep lake and coastal marine ecosystems. We found very little consistency between EWIs and non-linear turning points in abundance. 2017-18 developments & highlights: The state of the major Cumbrian lakes in 2016 report outlines some of the water quality results from seven Cumbrian Lakes taken in 2016 as part of a significant long-term monitoring exercise... These and other measurements, some made automatically every few minutes, help us to document how different types of lakes respond to environmental change. The understanding of the causes of change that this generates is used to help manage lakes sustainably for future generations. Plants and pollution removal - estimating the value There is continued interest from government and the public in recent work done by CEH for the Office of National Statistics (ONS). The ONS has just released an article looking in more detail at our air pollution estimates report and how plants can play a vital role in pollution removal leading to potential health benefits. Our work shows that woodland provides the greatest economic benefit in the UK in terms of estimated avoided health costs, far more than any other habitat. Trees are good filters of pollution. The study found that the value of woodland is far higher than other habitats despite covering less land than farmland and grassland. New Year Honours 2018 - Professor Helen Roy awarded MBE for her outstanding service to biodiversity research, citizen science and science communication. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2013 |
| Sector | Environment |
| Impact Types | Economic |