15 June 2022

EXEC’S CORNER

Welcome to the June issue of ECT’s quarterly newsletter. Below you will find a veritable mine of information on ‘new’ experiment registrations, new publications, policy matters, webinars, podcasts and small grant awards, together with a welcome to our newly-appointed part-time fundraising manager Tim Rowland. I would like to highlight in particular ECT’s ‘main event’ this year at the World Congress of Soil Science in Glasgow - a one-day in-person Fringe Event on long-term experiments being held on Thursday 4 August in partnership with the British Society of Soil Science, followed by a guided tour of the spectacular Whim Bog experiment (pictured) on Friday 5 August. ECT hopes to see some of you there, especially if you are attending the full Congress.

At the end of Volunteers Week 2022, it seems appropriate to remind you all that ECT is continuing to build its Volunteer Pool that can be called upon from time-to time to help with various projects. Volunteer opportunities may include remote communications activities or, depending upon your locality, joining a maintenance team for a day at one of the active long-term experiments on ECT’s register. Depending upon the size of the volunteer pool and availability, we expect to call upon volunteers up to twice a year. If you - or friends and family - are interested in joining this volunteer pool, please do contact me to express your interest, and include a short paragraph describing any relevant skills/knowledge that you may bring to the role.

On behalf of staff and Trustees here at ECT, I wish you all an enjoyable summer.

Ben Sykes

ECT FRINGE EVENT AT THE WORLD CONGRESS OF SOIL SCIENCE 2022

This August soil scientists and stakeholders will be attending the World Congress of Soil Science in Glasgow hosted by the British Society of Soil Science. Alongside the main scientific programme and activities, the ECT will be hosting a one-day fringe event on LTEs. Our final programme is nearing completion, but will include talks and a discussion panel on the first day (4th August) and a tour to Whim Bog LTE (limited to 30 people) on 5th August. You can register for the conference (full access or a one-day pass on 4 August) for online or physical attendance in order to attend our fringe event.

SMALL GRANTS

It has been an eventful quarter for our small grants scheme, with three awards announced.

In May, we awarded Andrea Rabbai (University of Birmingham) a small grant for work at BIFoR-FACE. This award will go towards the costs of phenocam installation to look into the response of young mixed and monoculture tree plantations to an innovative ‘fertigation’ management system. Also in May, we awarded Julia Cooper (Newcastle University) a small grant for data curation at the Palace Leas grassland experiment in Northumberland. More recently, Ellen Fry (Edge Hill University) received a small grant towards the installation of equipment to photograph and monitor root growth at Ainsdale Dune Slacks in west Lancashire.

Photos from left to right: Ainsdale Dune Slacks, Palace Leas, BIFoR-FACE.

WEBINARS

ECT hosts free webinars every two months. In May, Rob MacKenzie (University of Birmingham) updated us on the latest research from the BIFoR-FACE LTE. This is now available to watch on our YouTube channel. Our next lunchtime webinar is on Friday 15th July and will feature Mick Crawley (Imperial College London) talking about the Silwood Park experiments (Pound Hill and Nash’s Field). You can register for Mick’s talk via our webinars page or the button below.

NEW STAFF

We welcomed Tim Rowland as our third staff member back in April. Tim is our new fundraising manager and works part-time on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Read his bio on our ‘About’ page.

As an apprentice engineer, my role is to help oversee the correct operation of the Free-Air Carbon Enrichment  (FACE) facility, meaning that the elevated levels of CO₂ within the woodland are at the right concentration. This means monitoring and maintaining the liquid and gas CO₂ pressure system on-site, calibrating infrared gas analysers, and trying to keep the myriad of computers and networking systems operational (amongst other things). If for any reason the system is not operating as intended, any data collected by researchers will be thrown into doubt so it really is important that everything runs as smoothly as possible. Of course, this is all made more complicated by the simultaneous pandemic, CO₂ shortage (and truck driver shortage), semiconductor shortage and the ensuing energy crisis! As part of my role, I have to work at height (we have 107 towers on site). Whilst it took some getting used to, it is now one of the best parts about my job and I love being able to look out at 40m over the woodland on a sometimes sunny day – even if it probably means that an instrument at the top needs repairing. The forest itself is a stunning place to work every day. As I’m writing this, the woods are covered in a carpet of bluebells and spring birdsong is ringing out over the chorus of tonnes of CO₂ being forced through a 2cm valve. I’ve also had a very brief moment in-frame on BBC2’s Gardener’s World - another highlight!

PEATLAND-ES-UK IMPACT: POST NOTE ON REDUCING PEATLAND EMISSIONS

Andreas Heinemeyer summarises the POSTNote on peatland emissions that was published online in April 2022:

The long-term Peatland-ES-UK site assessing management and climate impacts on blanket bog functioning continues to influence policy via various channels including in Parliament. The latest Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) note on “Reducing Peatland Emissions” features several of the study’s publications. More importantly, the POST note outlines the lack of evidence and conflicting views on various aspects around heather-dominated peatland management, especially around burning. We welcome that the POST note highlights that “long-term studies are needed for data on restoration outcomes”. The Peatland-ES-UK study assesses trade-offs for such restoration measures. It is the first study to compare various management options (prescribed vegetation burning versus alternative cutting or no management) and actually measure carbon, water and biodiversity outcomes over an entire management cycle. The study’s findings have been mentioned in several debates including on changes to the burning regulation and on aspects around grouse shooting. For more information see the project’s website Peatland-ES-UK.

Photo: Carbon flux measurements at the Peatland-ES-UK Mossdale site, photo credit: Andreas Heinemeyer.

TWO NEW PUBLICATIONS FROM THE MOOR HOUSE LTEs

Rob Marrs summarises his new paper in Ecological Indicators on the long-term effects of sheep-grazing and its removal on British upland grasslands/ moorlands at the Moor House LTE:

The British uplands have been exposed to continuous changing environmental pressures over the last century or so. Conservation managers we need to know how upland plant communities will change in response to environmental factors, such as grazing pressure, and landscape-level factors (e.g. atmospheric SO₂ and NOx deposition changes). Long-term experiments, where species change is monitored through time, are crucial in providing such evidence. This is especially the case when we hope to see improvements as a result of management changes or the recent improvement in air quality.

In this paper, we described long-term trends in four UK upland communities. For convenience, these have been named high-level grassland, intermediate grassland, blanket bog and high-level bog at the two LTEs - Moor House Hard Hill and Moor House Grazing Plots. Each upland community was considered a replicated experiment which examined the effects of sheep grazing versus no-sheep grazing over time (where the vegetation is inside a fenced exclosure). Within each experiment, the vegetation was monitored over the same time range.

We used Generalised Additive Mixed models to analyse and visualise changes in species diversity, and the abundance of vascular plants, mosses, liverworts and lichens. After 2000, species richness and abundance recovered in grazed plots. There were noticeable improvements in species richness and abundance of vascular plants, mosses, and to a lesser degree, liverworts. No improvement was found for lichens. Species richness, vascular plants, and mosses recovered the fastest, and much faster than liverworts. There was no evidence of slower recovery of species richness and abundance in plots where sheep grazing was removed. Although trends in diversity and abundance in the grazed and ungrazed plots were not identical, they were not markedly different either. Land managers might consider the development of intervention techniques to speed up the recovery of liverworts and especially lichens.

Photos: Moor House Hard Hill

Althea Davies summarises her publication in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, and Palaeoecology on herbivore grazing dynamics which was also conducted at the Moor House LTE:

Large animals play a significant role in regulating many terrestrial plant ecosystems. But in the palaeoecological and archaeological sciences our tools for tracking herbivory through time remain somewhat imperfect. Long-term grazing experiments can help test and improve these methods as a stepping stone to understanding grazing ecology in the deeper past.

Our newly published study assesses the sensitivity of pollen, spores from dung fungi and faecal biomarkers to changes in grazing intensity over the last 100-150 years at three UK upland sites, including the Hard Hill grazing plots at Moor House. Advances in faecal biomarkers mean they can identify which grazers were present, which is not possible from pollen or dung fungi signals. We use agricultural census and on-site stocking estimates as independent records of regional and local changes in sheep density, respectively.

The results highlight the differential sensitivity of each proxy. This demonstrates that peaks in the abundance of dung fungi coincide with ecologically influential (high) levels of herbivory, which can suppress flowering and hence reduce the pollen signal. Sheep (and red grouse) densities at Moor House were too low to generate a reliable biomarker signal, indicating the current limits to grazing detection. We provide recommendations for future methodological improvements that allow us to close the gap between palaeoecological and long-term ecological records of grazing ecology.

We are grateful for funding support from ECT, Quaternary Research Association and the Leverhulme Trust.

THE NBN TRUST’S NEW STRATEGY: “MAKING DATA WORK FOR NATURE”

The National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Trust is one of several organisations with whom ECT has recently formed a strategic partnership. The NBN Trust is excited to have published its new five-year strategy – “Making data work for nature”

This is a pivotal time for the NBN Trust, for the entire conservation community and – most importantly – for nature. Urgent and concerted action is essential in order to meet the global and UK targets of reversing biodiversity loss by 2030. “Making data work for nature” sets out the NBN Trust’s ambitions to provide vital evidence for nature’s recovery. Their vision is of nature thriving everywhere in all its diversity and the NBN Trust believes passionately that, together, the biodiversity crisis can be reversed - that is why partnership is central to the Trust’s mission.

The NBN is the UK’s largest partnership for nature. With their partners, they create a vast flow of data carrying the evidence needed to protect and restore biodiversity, and the stories to inspire wonder and commitment. The new strategy takes the NBN Trust into its third decade and celebrates the fifth anniversary of the launch of the NBN Atlas, one of the world’s largest repositories of publicly available biodiversity data. With more than 200 million records of over 46,000 UK species, the NBN Atlas is at the heart of the data flow for nature’s recovery.

Just like ECT, the NBN Trust is a small charity. They have a committed membership of over 250 organisations (including the ECT) and individuals but, if they are to see their vision come to fruition, they need their supporter base to grow. With their new strategy, the NBN Trust is looking for others to join them in their mission, so that we can all work together to make data work for nature.

NBN AWARDS FOR WILDLIFE RECORDING 2022

Each year, the NBN Trust seeks to recognise significant achievement and celebrate success in wildlife recording and information sharing in the UK.

To do this, they set up a national award scheme in 2015, in partnership with the Biological Records Centre and the National Forum for Biological Recording. The NBN Awards for Wildlife Recording are made annually to individuals, groups of people or to whole organisations that are making outstanding contributions to improving our understanding of the natural world in the UK.

Nominations have now opened for the 2022 Awards and, on behalf of the NBN, ECT asks whether there is an incredible individual or group that you could nominate this year?

There are five categories of Awards:

·      NBN Award for Wildlife Recording – Terrestrial (open to individuals 21 years +)

·       NBN Award for Wildlife Recording – Marine (open to individuals 21 years +)

·       NBN Group Award (no age restrictions)

·       NBN Young Person’s Award (open to individuals aged 11-20)

·       NBN Newcomer Award (open to individuals 21 years +)