Since the summer campaign in 2013, Bangor-CEH people have been spending their time predominantly sorting the samples collected during the summer campaign.
Flume observations of core erosion has proceeded well and all summer and winter flume samples are now done. Most of the covariates collected over the same period have also been processed. There are now just have a few granulometry samples still to go.
Rachel Killingham, who has been working with us extensively as a technician over the past 5 months is about to leave us for a post-doc at another department at Bangor. We have been very lucky to have had Rachel, who’s overseen much of the sample processing while Hilary was away.
Cai Ladd, our new PhD, has completed an extensive literature review and is embarking on planning the summer campaign. Cai will look at marsh resilience in the face of erosion, and what the role of the biology is in resilience processes.
Hilary Ford has just returned from a week of training and processing of saltmarsh invertebrate fauna taxonomy. They hope to have all invertebrate samples completed soon, and then the next step will be to analyse data and start drafting papers. Hilary will be working on two papers first off: role of vegetation diversity in stabilising marsh soils, and, habitat provisioning of marsh vegetation for saltmarsh terrestrial invertebrates. Hilary also did a CBESS presentation very recently at the Estuarine and Coastal Shelf Science meeting, the 8-10th April 2014, which was held in Bangor.
Finally, I have recently started co-supervising a new PhD student, Amrit Dencer-Brown, who will, in all likelihood, become linked to CBESS. Amrit will examine how habitat provisioning for canopy invertebrates by saltmarsh vegetation might change with climate stressors. Amrit’s will focus on responses by the structure, complexity and connectivity strengths of the invertebrate food-web.
Dr Martin Skov, Bangor Unniversity