Examples of current research across the EBI
Understanding biogeochemical processes in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea
Terminal Cretaceous Climate Change and Biotic Response in Antarctica
Increasing water colour: Climate change or recovery from acidification?
The Amazon Forest Inventory Network (RAINFOR)
Assessing the impacts of the Amazonian drought
Sustainable upland management for multiple benefits
Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU)
Prediction of nitrate and pesticide trends in chalk groundwaters
Assessing LArge-scale environmental Risks with tested Methods (ALARM)
Avalanche Studies and Model Validation in Europe (SATSIE)
Interactions between the Marine environment, PREdators, and prey: implications for Sustainable Sandeel fisheries (IMPRESS)
Leeds Centre for Polar Science
White Rose Palaeobiology Group
South Saskatchewan River Project
Understanding biogeochemical processes in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea
The Eastern Mediterranean is unusual in two particular ways; it is ultra-oligotrophic with very low primary productivity despite the input of significant amounts of nutrients from the adjacent land-masses particularly Europe. This is caused by its anti-estuarine circulation. 20 years ago we published a paper which showed that the Eastern Mediterranean was the largest body of water in the world which is unequivocally phosphorus limited with a nitrate:phosphate ratio of 28:1 far in excess of the Redfield ratio of 16:1 (Krom et al., 1991). It is P starved with high N:P ratios for DOM and POM. We have recently been able to explain unequivocally Why the basin is P limited (Krom et al., 2010, Progress in Oceanography). There is an excess of N over P in the nutrient supply, particularly the atmospheric supply. However, unlike other bodies of water where the N:P input is greater than 16:1, in the Eastern Mediterranean there is very limited denitrification and thus no biological process available to reduce the N:P ratio to Redfieldian numbers. This is because of the low primary productivity in the system. Thus we have been able to show that the two unusual features of the Eastern Mediterranean are connect. N fixation is an unimportant process in this system. This new paradigm is being used to develop new ideas on the response of the Eastern Mediterranean to environmental and climate change.
See: Krom, M.D., Emeis K-C, van-Cappellan, P. (2010) Why is the Eastern Mediterranean P limited? Progress in Oceanography. Vol 85; p236-244.
Terminal Cretaceous Climate Change and Biotic Response in Antarctica
Prof Jane Francis and Dr Vanessa Bowman from EBI are investigating the nature of latest Cretaceous to early Tertiary (Maastrichtian to earliest Danian) climates in Antarctica, along with project partners from the British Antarctic Survey, British Geological Survey, University of Liverpool and University of Exeter (Camborne School of Mines). Geological evidence suggests that after the peak mid Cretaceous greenhouse warmth climates cooled considerably during the Maastrichtian (~71-65Ma) and may have been so severe that high latitude regions suffered short-term (Milankovitch scale) glaciations, causing eustatic sea level changes worldwide. This challenges the current view that the Cretaceous greenhouse world was ice-free. The Late Cretaceous sequence in the James Ross Basin, Antarctica is the best sequence in the world in which to investigate Maastrichtian environments and climate change. It is well exposed, allows very high resolution analysis, includes the K/T boundary, is extremely fossiliferous and provides a linked record of both terrestrial (palaeobotanical) and marine (stable isotope) climate change. From this exceptional sequence, we are investigating the nature of latest Cretaceous-early Tertiary climate change at high latitudes, testing the hypothesis that ice was present at times, determining the biological response to this environmental change in both the terrestrial and marine realms and aiming to understand the environmental context in which the K/T extinctions occurred. The project has been funded by the NERC Antarctic Funding Initiative.
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Increasing water colour: Climate change or recovery from acidification?
Pippa Chapman and Simon Bottrell have recently won a £330K NERC grant to investigate whether recovery from acid rain is the major cause of the observed increase in dissolved organic carbon, and hence water colour, in freshwaters across the UK. The work builds on research carried out by Joanna Clark and Rebecca Bartlett as part of their PhD and MSc, respectively. Both are now involved in this project as research fellows along with Rob Newton (research fellow) and colleagues from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and University College London. For more details of research activities, follow the link. Back to top
The Amazon Forest Inventory Network (RAINFOR)
The Amazon Forest Inventory Network (RAINFOR) is an international
network that has been established to monitor the biomass, dynamics, and
biodiversity of Amazonian forests. The Amazon holds the world's most
productive vegetation, and is the largest tropical forest block in the
world. One hectare of Amazonian rainforest supports ten times as many
tree species as are found in the entire British Isles. How Amazonia
responds to ongoing global environmental changes therefore has
world-wide consequences. The RAINFOR project is co-ordinated at Leeds
(Oliver Phillips, Jon Lloyd, Tim Baker) and Oxford (Yadvinder Malhi),
with more than 50 institutional partners world-wide. Since 2000 we have
been supported by the UK NERC, Royal Society, the US National Geographic
Society, NSF, NASA, Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, and EU
Framework V and VI. The Royal Society (through Simon Lewis) and NERC
are also supporting integration of the RAINFOR plot network with similar
research activities in Africa, Asia, and Australia. For more details of research activities, follow the link. Back to top
Assessing the impacts of the Amazonian drought
Oliver Phillips and Jon Lloyd have won a NERC Urgency grant to study the impact of the 2005 Amazon drought on the forest. Sandra Patino (visiting research fellow) and Tim Baker (NERC research fellow) are also involved, together with Simon Bottrell and Rob Newton in Earth Sciences, colleagues from Oxford, and numerous collaborators across South America and Europe.
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Sustainable upland management for multiple benefits
Economic and climate change are combining to threaten the way people use Britain's uplands according to researchers at the Universities of Leeds, Durham and Sheffield. With the help of local people and 'Moors for the Future', they are developing inventive solutions that could give Britain a helping hand towards its climate targets under the Kyoto Protocol. Back to top
Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU)
Scientists from the universities of Leeds, Sheffield, East Anglia, Durham and Sussex are embarking on research projects worth over £1 million in the Peak District to understand what rural policy changes mean for the future of rural livelihoods and the countryside. The research is funded by the government's Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme, a research initiative that brings together diverse teams of natural and social scientists with local stakeholders and policy makers. The goal is to identify a choice of options for the future of the countryside that could never have been developed by any of these groups in isolation.
UplandsMuch of Britain's drinking water comes from uplands. They are important for tourism, farming and hunting, and are home to threatened plant and animal species. But the face of our uplands is changing. Farm subsidies have been overhauled; new EU rules regulate land management impacts on water quality; additional public rights of way have been opened; and traditional management practices like heather burning are receiving increasing scrutiny. The potential impacts on rural communities are huge, and nowhere more so than in the Peak District, which lies within an hour's drive for about a third of the UK population. The projects in the Peak District aim to understand how upland communities can respond to these changes.
Organic and conventional agriculture
A number of past studies have compared the environmental and economic impacts of different agricultural methods, but most have been restricted to plot or field scale, or at most farm scale analyses. This project will test for landscape scale effects, focussing in particular on organic versus conventional grazing and arable rotations. The costs and benefits these different methods may well depend on the fraction of the surrounding landscape adopting similar techniques, as biodiversity benefits may require critical minimum areas of land, while economic outputs may be affected by competition or collaboration with neighbouring farms. The project will focus on a set of 32 farms in paired landscapes across South and Central England, involving ecologists, hydrologists, soil scientists and economists.
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Prediction of nitrate and pesticide trends in chalk groundwaters.
Groundwater
represents a high proportion of the public, industrial and agricultural
water supply in many parts of England and is a vital resource in many other
countries, but its quality is increasingly under threat from rising levels
of pollution. This project is centred around characterisation of groundwater
flow, storage and pollutant transport behaviour of the unsaturated zone
of fractured rock aquifers. Back to top
Assessing LArge-scale environmental Risks with tested Methods (ALARM)
ALARM is a European Union Framework 6 Integrated Project combining the expertise of 54 partners from 26 countries and has a centrally funded work programme for an initial period of 5 years. Research will focus on assessment and forecast of changes in biodiversity and in structure, function, and dynamics of ecosystems. In particular, risks arising from pollinator loss, climate change, environmental chemicals and biological invasions in the context of current and future European land use patterns will be assessed. Back to top
Avalanche Studies and Model Validation in Europe (SATSIE)
An adequate level of avalanche safety is prerequisite to further development of the mountain regions as habitable areas, prime destinations of tourism, and the critical segments of some of the most important European traffic routes. It is vital to perform this work at a European scale in order to share know-how and make maximum use of the large cost of operating full-scale experimental sites. Back to top
Interactions between the Marine environment, PREdators, and prey: implications for Sustainable Sandeel fisheries (IMPRESS)
The industrial sandeel fishery is currently the largest single fishery in the North Sea, and sandeels are also important prey for higher predators such as seabirds, producing the potential for conflict. Earlier studies of ecosystem-level effects of fisheries have focused on the geographical overlap between sandeel fisheries and feeding areas of seabirds, but the relationship between prey density and availability to predators is still poorly understood. In this project, partnered by Keith Hamer in the School of Biology, predator-prey interactions in the North Sea are being studied in unprecedented detail using a suite of advanced technologies. The data obtained should allow us to give fishery managers and conservationists high-quality advice concerning strategies
to mitigate the impacts of fisheries on higher predators.
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Leeds Centre for Polar Science
The Leeds Centre for Polar Science brings together and fosters the research community in polar science in the University via a series of research seminars, conferences, workshops etc. For more details of research activities, follow the link. Back to top
White Rose Palaeobiology Group
The White Rose Palaeobiology Group is a collaborative initiative between the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds in the United Kingdom. For more details of research activities, follow the link. Back to top
South Saskatchewan River Project
The South Saskatchewan River Project is a NERC funded project, which aims to quantify the relationship between the 'process' (i.e. sediment erosion and transport ) and 'product' (i.e. deposition and preservation) in sandy braided rivers. Our work is focussed on the South Saskatchewan River, Canada where a spectacular, 2 km-wide sandy braided river flows south of Saskatoon near the small town of Outlook. For more details of research activities, follow the link. Back to top