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
Whittet R
(2016)
Seed sourcing for woodland creation in an era of uncertainty: an analysis of the options for Great Britain
in Forestry
Bakhoum N
(2015)
Senegalia Senegal response to inoculation with rhizobial strains vary in relation to seed provenance and soil type
in Plant and Soil
McDermott Long O
(2017)
Sensitivity of UK butterflies to local climatic extremes: which life stages are most at risk?
in The Journal of animal ecology
Groom Q
(2017)
Seven Recommendations to Make Your Invasive Alien Species Data More Useful
in Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics
Roy DB
(2015)
Similarities in butterfly emergence dates among populations suggest local adaptation to climate.
in Global change biology
Reed T
(2015)
Skipped breeding in common guillemots in a changing climate: restraint or constraint?
in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
Rhymes J
(2016)
Small changes in water levels and groundwater nutrients alter nitrogen and carbon processing in dune slack soils
in Soil Biology and Biochemistry
McCracken M
(2015)
Social and ecological drivers of success in agri-environment schemes: the roles of farmers and environmental context
in Journal of Applied Ecology
Nottingham A
(2015)
Soil microbial nutrient constraints along a tropical forest elevation gradient: a belowground test of a biogeochemical paradigm
in Biogeosciences
Ford H
(2016)
Soil stabilization linked to plant diversity and environmental context in coastal wetlands.
in Journal of vegetation science : official organ of the International Association for Vegetation Science
Mills JA
(2016)
Solutions for Archiving Data in Long-Term Studies: A Reply to Whitlock et al.
in Trends in ecology & evolution
Grimaldo J
(2016)
Spatial and environmental drivers of macrophyte diversity and community composition in temperate and tropical calcareous rivers
in Aquatic Botany
Gilbert M
(2017)
Speeding up the simulation of population spread models
in Methods in Ecology and Evolution
Chiwa M
(2016)
Sphagnum can 'filter' N deposition, but effects on the plant and pore water depend on the N form.
in The Science of the total environment
Bell B
(2017)
Stable carbon isotope analysis of Cedrus atlantica pollen as an indicator of moisture availability
in Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology
Jarvis SG
(2015)
Strong altitudinal partitioning in the distributions of ectomycorrhizal fungi along a short (300 m) elevation gradient.
in The New phytologist
Gibbs M
(2017)
Sub-lethal viral exposure and growth on drought stressed host plants changes resource allocation patterns and life history costs in the Speckled Wood butterfly, Pararge aegeria.
in Journal of invertebrate pathology
Whittet R
(2016)
Supplying trees in an era of environmental uncertainty: Identifying challenges faced by the forest nursery sector in Great Britain.
in Land use policy
Balian E
(2016)
Supporting evidence-based policy on biodiversity and ecosystem services: recommendations for effective policy briefs
in Evidence & Policy
OLIVER T
(2017)
Synchrony in population counts predicts butterfly movement frequencies
in Ecological Entomology
Howard B
(2016)
Taking stock of the spectrum of arguments for biodiversity
in Biodiversity and Conservation
Reichert S
(2017)
Telomere length measurement by qPCR in birds is affected by storage method of blood samples
in Oecologia
Roy HE
(2015)
Ten years of invasion: Harmonia axyridis (Pallas) (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) in Britain.
in Ecological entomology
Cavers S
(2014)
The basis of resilience in forest tree species and its use in adaptive forest management in Britain
in Forestry
Fenn K
(2014)
The Carbon Cycle of a Maritime Ancient Temperate Broadleaved Woodland at Seasonal and Annual Scales
in Ecosystems
Roy H
(2015)
The contribution of volunteer recorders to our understanding of biological invasions Biological Records and Invasions
in Biological Journal of the Linnean Society
Curtis R
(2014)
The effect of temperature and habitat quality on abundance of the Glanville fritillary on the Isle of Wight: implications for conservation management in a warming climate
in Journal of Insect Conservation
Gillingham P
(2015)
The effectiveness of protected areas in the conservation of species with changing geographical ranges Protected Areas Help Retain Contracting Species
in Biological Journal of the Linnean Society
Wang R
(2015)
The fig wasp followers and colonists of a widely introduced fig tree, Ficus microcarpa
in Insect Conservation and Diversity
Welch D
(2016)
The floristic changes of Scottish moorland dominated by heather ( Calluna vulgaris , Ericaceae) but unburnt for 50 years and kept checked by moderate grazing
in New Journal of Botany
Worrall F
(2017)
The flux of organic matter through a peatland ecosystem: The role of cellulose, lignin, and their control of the ecosystem oxidation state Flux of Organic Matter Through a Peat
in Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences
Senapathi D
(2015)
The impact of over 80 years of land cover changes on bee and wasp pollinator communities in England.
in Proceedings. Biological sciences
Norton L
(2016)
The importance of scale in the development of ecosystem service indicators?
in Ecological Indicators
Silva AT
(2018)
The Influence of Sex, Parasitism, and Ontogeny on the Physiological Response of European Eels (Anguilla anguilla) to an Abiotic Stressor.
in Physiological and biochemical zoology : PBZ
Maurice L
(2015)
The invertebrate ecology of the Chalk aquifer in England (UK)
in Hydrogeology Journal
Clement R
(2016)
The nature of the CO2 -concentrating mechanisms in a marine diatom, Thalassiosira pseudonana.
in The New phytologist
Kopf A
(2015)
The ocean sampling day consortium.
in GigaScience
Oliver T
(2015)
The pitfalls of ecological forecasting
in Biological Journal of the Linnean Society
Winkler M
(2016)
The rich sides of mountain summits - a pan-European view on aspect preferences of alpine plants
in Journal of Biogeography
| 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 |