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What came after the Woolly Mammoth

Published on by Gillian

On the 26th April, Dr Ambroise Baker gave a fascinating talk about ‘What came after the Woolly mammoth’

The talk introduced some of the questions surrounding the late-Quaternary extinctions and their relevance when considering ecosystem management today. There was a focus on the consequence of this wave of megafauna extinction. Importantly, studying these consequences furthers our understanding of the ecosystem function that megafauna preformed before extinction. Understanding the loss of this function is increasingly relevant when managing ecosystems, especially when considering megafauna introduction as is the case with rewilding strategies. However, there remains many unknowns regarding the lost megafauna functions, how to re-introduce them and the benefits that can be achieved with re-introduction, pointing to the need for a thorough monitoring of current rewilding projects.

Call for Expressions of Interest in Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowships

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Teesside University, the School of Health and Life Science, and the Earth, Ecology and Environment research collective are welcoming expressions of interest in Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowships.

The research areas of existing strength are as follows:

  • Climate change Impacts and palaeoclimate reconstruction
  • Archaeological advances in preservation and outreach
  • Sustainable agriculture and aquaculture
  • Rewilding for ecological recovery and sustainability
  • Sustainable food supply chain and environmental impact
  • Microbial biotechnology and bioremediation

Contact point for inquiries: Dr Ambroise Baker (A.Baker@tees.ac.uk)

Two PhD Opportunities

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Our environmental group is delighted to announce 1 fully funded and 1 fees-only funded PhD opportunities. See below and follow the links provided for further information.

Investigation of moorland management practices and carbon dynamics for climate change mitigation (fully-funded)

Peatlands are increasingly being seen as part of nature’s solutions to deal with the environmental challenges of today, from tackling climate change through to flood protection and enhancing biodiversity. However, while all peatlands provide these services, research and conservation efforts have focused largely on deep peats (>40cm depth). Therefore this project will investigate the impact of different management practices on shallow peatland carbon balances. A field campaign will enable multiple sites across the North York Moors to be surveyed and monitored for peat and pore water chemistry, microbial communities and carbon dynamics.

Above and below ground carbon stocks and biotic changes during rewilding

This project will quantify changes in biodiversity, ecosystem function, carbon stocks and their interactions during the initial phases of rewilding. At the primary field site, some 66 experimental fixed plots are set up within formerly agricultural land comprising a variety of arable, improved, and natural grasslands. Rewilding was initiated in 2022, with the cessation of agricultural activities which will be followed by large herbivore re-introduction (eg hardy free-ranging cattle and pigs). The analysis will quantify ecosystem changes in time, against baseline data collected in 2021-2022, and enable an assessment of rewilding contribution notably to net-zero and nature recovery policies.

We anticipate the project to be a unique opportunity to work with a range of collaborators inside and outside academia. We are looking for candidates with a strong interest in combining biodiversity, microbiological and environmental science, to develop novel evidence contributing to the UN decade of ecosystem restoration.

1 kilometre under the surface: Researching organisms from extreme environment

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MSc Microbiology students Orakan Jones and Nathalia Thompson with Drs Paul Dean and Jens Holtvoeth collected brines for extremophile research 1,000m below the surface in the Boulby salt mine.

In October, a team from Teesside University took part in the 10th annual field event on astrobiology, robotics, and planetary exploration (MINAR X), organised by the UKRI Underground Laboratory at the ICL salt mine at Boulby. Dr Jens Holtvoeth was joined by Dr Paul Dean and two microbiology MSc students, Orakan Jones and Nathalia Thompson to travel 1.000 meters down the shaft and underneath the North Sea, together with scientists from the Universities of Edinburgh, York, Manchester, and Newcastle, the California Institute of Technology, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena).

The aim of our team was to collect samples of salt and brine for biomarker and DNA analyses to produce a geochemical fingerprint of fossil and living microbial communities and to gain information on cellular adaptation mechanisms of halophile microorganisms to the extreme conditions. This will help to interpret fossil biomarker distributions found in the salt with regard to environmental conditions at the fringes of the evaporating Zechstein Sea about 250 million years ago.

While the team were able to collect brines from a disused part of the mine, aptly named Billingham Bath, the collection of salt samples by coring the salt with sterilised drill bits had to be postponed due to a technical fault of the corer. Thus, the team is looking forward to going down the shaft later this semester, again.

Partnering with Durham Wildlife Trust to address microplastics pollution in the River Wear

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An update on a previous blog post about our microplastic project in Co Durham, UK.

Environment Group researchers Drs Baldini, Baker, He, Rollason and Scott, along with recent Environmental Science graduate, Zhuhaa Siddiq, recently partnered with Durham Wildlife Trust to investigate microplastics in the River Wear. Fieldwork happened over several weeks in late summer 2021 and involved standing in the river with a microplankton net and flow meter for 20 minutes to collect a known volume of river water for microplastics detection. We sampled water and sediments at five locations along the river Wear from the source (near Wearhead) to the tidal limit (Chester-le-Street). Laboratory analysis revealed a pattern of increasing microplastics in river water downstream from the source until river flow was altered by Durham city weirs. A sharp decrease in microplastics was observed at the furthest downstream site, Chester-le-Street. In sediments, there was a clear pattern of microplastics accumulation downstream of wastewater treatment plants. In summer 2022, Environmental Management research project student, Patrick van Loo Jenner, investigated our hypothesis of microplastics accumulation upstream of weirs in Durham as a precursor to scheduled dredging by the Environment Agency. In March 2022, Dr Baldini presented preliminary findings to a Source to Sea workshop addressing plastics pollution at Durham County Council and in July 2022, submitted a final report to Durham Wildlife Trust. A manuscript of our findings is currently in prep. For more on this successful Teesside University collaboration with local partners see https://www.durhamwt.com/source-sea.

LIMES 2022 – Nijmegen

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What an amazing week attending the LIMES Congress in Nijmegen. This was my first LIMES congress, so not sure what to expect.. so here is a run down of the events and my thoughts.

Day 1 – so many talks, in so many different rooms, what an outstanding start.. so many free books, I had to rethink my packing and this was day one! One of my highlights was seeing ‘The missing dead’ session about reconstructing the past through digital games play at Roman Vindolanda. I will be bias as a Vindolanda Trustee member but the future thinking was a great talking point with the audience.

Day 2 – first day trip… and I mean all day 7.30 start and back at 8pm… but what a day, when walking round the archaeological sites, Roman Castellum, Meinerswijk, Military practice camps, Uedem and Xanten-Furstenberg, before heading to LVR Archaologischen park Xanten, at the end of the day, the exquisite and beautiful museum was just awe inspiring.

 

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Day 3 – The day I had been waiting for, which included the organic riches session… and it didn’t disappoint, chaired by Carol Van Driel-Murray and speakers including Beth Green showed the importance of understanding our artefacts, the discussion came to end with a query about impacts of climate change upon these artefacts, exactly at the right time for us to say a comment about our climate change work at the Roman site of Magna.

There was an evening visit to Valkhof museum, with of course some special LIMES beer

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Day 4 – second day trip and this was an absolute highlight for me, the Roman Ship at Castellum Hoge Woerd ‘De Meern 1’  and the wonderful world of Archeon Museum park,  walking through from Mesolithic to the Romans and everything in-between. The hospitality was spectacular, and a delicious BBQ to finish the day. Have to mention the heat, at 34o°C… finding shade and heading inside as often as possible was the order of the day.

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Day 5 – Its not the end of the week for us, Fridays talk started with churches in military outposts and a very full session with a talk from CEO Vindolanda Trust – Dr Andrew Birley.

Day 6 – yip still going and it is Saturday, lots of bright early starters to attend the Feeding the Frontier talks, followed by Roman Britian led by Tanja Romankiewicz, as David Breeze said during questions, ‘exceptional’ talk from Tanja – military construction strategies on the Limes: new insights from geoarcheology.

If I didn’t mention your talk, sorry, so much to see, so many pancakes to eat..

Roll on Georgia, what an inclusive, friendly and engaging series of talks and events

Cold Ice in a Warm Windy Bath – Report from a Field Season in the Arctic

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The GLRETA project captures changes in one of the most dynamic parts of an Arctic mountain environment, by measuring lake temperatures in front of a glacier (proglacial) and the regularity of iceberg calving events (monitored by time lapse cameras) driven by thermal undercutting of the glacier terminus. This has proved to be a challenging environment to undertake field work in, as we have to regularly adapt plans to collect data when the weather windows arrive and hope that icebergs don’t wipe out our temperature sensors in the meantime.

Boaty conducting sonar scan and temperature survey along Kaskasapakte proglacial lake. Aug 2022. Photo; A. Dye

The Arctic summer weather can be very variable in Scandinavia and this year has been no exception. The boulder ‘reinforcements’ of our weather station proved to be successful as it survived the 135 km/h wind gusts largely intact. Sadly our base camp tent didn’t fare so well over the summer and also incurred some substantial damage to the door from some passing fauna. On discovering this at the start of trip 2 we realised that scientific objectives had to be postponed as fixing the tent up before the bad weather arrived was ‘rather critical’. Thankfully after 3 days of floods and high winds we were able to forget about base camp maintenance and get back on with the science.

Flooding wiped out our food storage point and nearly flooded our tent on 2 occasions. 60mm of rain in 12 hours is rather a lot! Photo; A. Dye

Mercifully we were presented with one of the best weather days I can remember in the Arctic and promptly set about compressing 3 days into one rather long one. First on the agenda was a dSLR camera survey to create a digital surface model of the glacier, to calculate how much the ice has lowered from melting during the summer and how much ice has been calved off in icebergs. The glacier front had changed a lot between our visits over the summer, as about 5m wide strip of ice had been calved off across the terminus and the crevasses behind it had widened substantially. Thankfully our time lapse cameras caught these iceberg calving events, along with the changing lake conditions during the summer. Our inflatable kayak mission was successful in retrieving the key lake temperature data sets, which had risen to a maximum of 4oC in late July before steadily cooling from late August. This will provide an important record for understanding how lake conditions and temperature correspond to iceberg calving events, combined with sonar scans of the terminus to understand how the underwater ice front geometry promotes calving.

GoPro image along Norra Kaskasapakte calving front. Note the large thermally eroded notch at the weaterline. Photo; A Dye.

The recent warm events in Arctic Scandinavia will have enhanced melting of glaciers in the area during the heatwave events, which are predicted to become more frequent with climate change. So we have also been creating digital surface models of other glaciers in the area, to assess how much surface lowering has occurred on these land terminating glaciers. We can then compare the surface lowering of land terminating glaciers to the lake terminating glacier, to assess how they are all responding to recent warm events. We also want to greater understand how contact with a proglacial lake can enhance glacier retreat too and how they are likely to respond to future changes in climate.

Norra Kaskasapakte glaciar, August 2022. Photo; A.Dye

Lecturer in Environmental Sciences (1 post)

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Our Department is advertising for one permanent position of lecturer in environmental science. The newly appointed lecturer has an opportunity to take a leading role in our Earth, Ecology and Environment research collective and bring their own research and/or consultancy expertise.

The job ad can be found following the two links below:

Teesside HR

If you would like to discuss how your research could fit within the Earth, Ecology and Environment research collective – please get in touch with Ambroise a.baker@tees.ac.uk.