The CBESS team is once again returning to Warton Sands in Morecambe Bay to deliver the second Advanced Training Short Course funded by NERC; biodiversity and ecosystem assessment in the coastal margin (BESA)
Andrew Blight
CBESS Annual Science Meeting 2015
The CBESS team met in York at the start of January for two days to discuss the best way to incorporate scale and context into our data analysis and how to best approach up-scaling biodiversity and ecosystem services and finally the creation of novel tools for Ecosystem Service Provisioning.
Bangor University: 3D scan of a saltmarsh
The terrestrial laser scanner, or TLS, represents the latest tool in remote sensing. With dimensions similar to that of a large suitcase, the TLS uses precise laser light to return a panoramic 3D point model of the surrounding landscape. The end scan is detailed (50,000 points per second), far ranging (with a range of 300 meters) and rapid (scans take less than 5 minutes).
Bangor University : beetles and spiders
A year has gone so quickly, it seems no time at all since we were busy sampling spiders and beetles with our inverted leaf blower and taking huge cores of intact saltmarsh sediment, complete with plant roots and shoots, to use in our shoreline erosion-resistance studies!
Winter 2014/15: grappling with data
Over the winter months, the CBESS team has been busy finishing processing the vast amounts of data collected in the filed during the winter and summer field campaigns in 2013. I am very happy to report that we are nearly there! As reported in the Autumn up-date this is producing an increasingly complex data-set that will be explored in Theme 2 and 3: scale effects and context dependency on biodiversity and ecosystem service relationships.
Autumn 2014: our data keeps growing
As autumn cools the air and our coasts become increasingly wild, wet and windy, CBESS members give a recap of events over the last three months. The collection of CBESS data continues to grow, with more and more samples being processed each day. This is providing the Data Analysis Working Group (DAWG) with an increasingly complex dataset to explore. With Theme 1 (socio-economic and ecological data collection) nearing completion, researchers are beginning to look at Themes 2 and 3: scale effects and context dependency on biodiversity and ecosystem service relationships.
CBESS: World Conference on Marine Biodiversity 2014, China
Several members of the CBESS consortium descended on Qingdao, China this month for the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity (WCMB 2014). The conference was the third of its kind, bringing together a multinational audience of marine biologists. It was an excellent a platform for CBESS members to present their research and join the debate on the current issues and challenges facing the development of marine biodiversity.
University of York: will creating new salt marshes help or hinder climate change?
The Redeker Lab at the University of York is leading a study that compares seasonal, climate-impacting behaviour between natural and human created (aka: realigned) salt marshes for four natural/realigned pairings in Essex. These sites include marshes that have recently been developed and those accidentally created over 100 years ago.
CCRU: largest ever saltmarsh flume experiment
Large-scale flume experiment shows that salt marshes reduce the height of waves during storm surge conditions by nearly 20%
University of St Andrews: fieldwork update from the Eddy Covariance Team
Over the summer, the Eddy Covariance Team at the University of St Andrews has been busy collecting additional chamber CO2 flux data, aiming to quantify the response of the different mosaics of vegetation over the landward-seaward gradient to a manipulated range of light conditions.