November 2015 – Ambroise Baker's Research

Update on Festuca altissima in the Porter Valley, Sheffield, UK

Very good news from the population of Festuca altissima, Wood Fescue, at Forge Dam, Porter Valley, Sheffield, UK. For the first time since 2013, many plants flowered this year.

The flowering status of this population prior to 2013 is not known, in 2013 and 2014 the counts were zero and in October 2015, I observed 13 flower heads. This is a fantastic increase, likely to be the result of the conservation efforts by the Friends of Porter Valley.

I reported in a previous post how they cleared the site from encroachment by cherry laurel, Prunus laurocerasus. I really hope to report similarly good news in a years time and if the management proves successful in the longer term, we ought to consider reducing even further the cherry laurel on this bank in order to promote Wood Fescue at the site.

Pictures of Festuca altissima, wood fescue, at Forge Dam, Porter Valley, Sheffield, UK, with inflorescences – apologise for the quality of the photography, it was a windy day! Wood fescue is the scruffy looking grass, by the way.

Lake Connectivity, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Workshop in the Broads

We are inviting any interested Broads stakeholder to take part to our workshop on Lake Connectivity, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in the Broads, England.

Thursday January 7th 2016 at the Broads Authority head quarters, from 11:30.

At this occasion, we would like to share the findings of our Lake BESS research project and we will have a special focus on the Broads. We are keen to share our work with local stakeholders working on and around lakes in the area so our research can be useful to anyone concerned.

Please get in touch for further details and to register – go to the bottom of this page and send us a message or ambroise.baker [at] ucl.ac.uk

oulton Broad_aerial — Aerial phtograph of Oulton broad by Mike Page http://mike-page.co.uk/

Workshop and Seminar about Upper Lough Erne’s satellite lakes

Following the previous post, this is just to let you know that our trip to Northern Ireland was very successful. It gave us a chance to discuss our research results with many partners, stakeholders and members of the public. The interest we met makes us hope that our research will find direct applications on the ground.

We would like to thank the many people who made this trip possible at the Fermanagh and Omagh District Council, Waterways Ireland, the Northern Ireland Environmental Agency and Queen’s University Belfast.

About Me

My work focuses on how plants, biodiversity and complex ecosystems respond to environmental change. Answering this question is critical to developing: 1) guidance to accelerate ecological recovery and 2) evidence-based policies to protect the environment and human well-being in the context of global change. New evidences in my research chiefly come directly from studying plants, the natural environment and large-scale, long-term ecological systems.

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Teesside University Profile

I am a Senior Lecturer in Ecology at Teesside University, UK. I was previously a post-doctoral researcher based in UCL (University College London), UK, working on landscape connectivity, biodiversity and ecosystem function in freshwater networks (projects: Lake BESS, Hydroscape). My PhD, completed in the Oxford Long-term Ecology Lab at the University of Oxford, UK, was a contribution to the hotly debated conservation practice of rewilding, using a long-term perspective.