Bangor Science festival (‘Hidden Worlds’) 2015 was a great success with over 750 visitors overall!
Bangor University
CBESS/MASTS: postgraduate and early career training in Feb 2015
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)
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.
Bangor University: sorting, sorting, sorting…
Since the summer campaign in 2013, Bangor-CEH people have been spending their time predominantly sorting the samples collected during the summer campaign.
CBESS/MASTS: post-graduate training, feedback from last year’s participants
Applications for the 2015 ‘Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Assessment’ training course are open until 14th November 2014. In February we hope to build on the success of the 2014 course and we have made some additions and improvements to the program based on the feedback we received from students. We are also lucky to have an international component in the form of Professor Stefano Lanzoni from the University of Padova.