biodiveristy – Ambroise Baker's Research

Workshop on Biodiveristy and Ecosystem Services Resilience

The BESS resilience workshop on June 18th and 19th was a great success with over twenty attendees, mostly BESS researchers but also JNCC and Welsh government representatives.

We also had two special guests, Volker Grimm and Hanna Weise from the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany, who presented fascinating background information about ecosystem resilience. Volker was a pioneer in trying to understand how the notion of resilience can be applied in ecology and his 1997 seminal paper is worthwhile a read.

The first day’s discussions were focussed on defining resilience, while in the second day we explored the multiple ways that can be used to measure ecosystem resilience.

It was very enlightening to hear different researchers from different BESS projects explain how ecosystem resilience was relevant to their work. The diversity of opinion was absolutely overwhelming! To such an extent that after two days of lively discussion it became very difficult to produce a short summary or a take-home message.

There was however two important points most attendees agreed upon:

Resilience is a useful notion for their work
It will be worth pursuing our quest to understand ecosystem resilience after the meeting – and we are already getting organise to do so.

Lake BESS to present results: 100th Ecological Society of America annual meeting, Baltimore, USA

Lake BESS is looking forward to going to the 100^th Ecological Society of America (ESA) annual meeting in Baltimore! We have a talk scheduled Friday August 14th 2015 during the session “COS 142: Habitat Structure, Fragmentation, Connectivity”.

This is a very exciting opportunity to present our work asking the question: Does connectivity increase resilience of biodiversity against eutrophication in networks of shallow lakes? Our talk will be the only one focusing on freshwater in an collection of oral papers otherwise dedicated to ecological connectivity.

We will be using aquatic plant surveys conducted between 1983 and 2014 in our two study areas: The Broads, England, UK, and the Upper Lough Erne area, Northern Ireland, UK, and we will identify the relative importance of:

connectivity between lakes,
local water chemistry
lake morphology
and other factors

to explain the aquatic vegetation patters in the two lake districts during two time periods.

The comprehensive programme of the conference is available here online program and our abstract can be read there.

Norfolk Pond Project

This post highlights another project Carl Sayer, Lake BESS’s principal investigator, is involved with: The Norfolk Pond Project. Ponds sustain a major share of freshwater diversity yet they have been subjected to near-systematic destruction, pollution or abandonment since WWII.

After years of neglect by conservation and research compared to other habitats, ponds are finally being incorporated into UK aquatic conservation approaches and the Norfolk Pond Project is an excellent example:

“Norfolk holds more ponds than any other English county with an estimated 23,000 ponds present. Most of these ponds are located in farmland, and have their origins as marl or clay pits and in some cases livestock-watering ponds dug in the 17th to 19th centuries. “

“In addition the Brecks, west Norfolk and sites north of Norwich are home to some of the most amazingly diverse ancient ponds in the UK, pingos – ponds that occupy ice depressions formed during the last great ice age. A great place to see pingos is at Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s nature reserve, Thompson Common.”

“The Norfolk Ponds Project aims to reverse the decline of Norfolk’s ponds so that agricultural landscapes contain a mosaic of clean water ponds with fewer ponds overgrown by trees and bushes.” Read the leaflet for more information on this exciting new project!

Thanks to Carl for providing all the material for this post.

A short film about the management of biodiversity and water in the Broads.

“In this short film I asked some of the people I work with about the management of biodiversity and water in Broadland. Their thoughts are set alongside some of the most beautiful photos of wildlife and wetland landscapes. We hope you enjoy it” Andrea Kelly Senior Ecologist at the Broads Authority