Conference Monday 25th March

Ecological Monitoring for Habitat Management

A reminder of the Masters conference on next Monday 25^th March. A really good programme in Ecology and Environmental Science.

All welcome but lunch provided only for Countryside Management MSc students.
Please register with Dr Francis Brearley  ( F.Q.Brearley@mmu.ac.uk )Venue: Sandra Burslem Building, Rooms 2.05 and 2.10. All Saints Campus 

Monday 25^th March 2013

09.45 Arrive and tea/coffee

10.10  Welcome and Chair

            Simon Caporn

 10.15 The Thinking Behind the Environmental Change Network (ECN): Measuring the

            Causes and Consequences of Environmental Change

            Don Monteith (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology)

 10.45 Nitrogen Deposition Impacts on UK Plant Communities

            Richard Payne (University of Stirling)

11.15 The Acid Waters Monitoring Network

            Clair Gray (Queen Mary, University of London)

 11.45 What Can We Do With Long-Term Plant Data?

            Sarah Whild (Manchester Metropolitan University, Shrewsbury Office)

 12.15 General Discussion

 12.30  Lunch and MSc course poster viewing

 1.30    From Grey to Green - The Importance of Recording Wildlife

            Matt Holker (Greater Manchester Ecology Unit)

 2.00    Size Matters! Monitoring Change at the Landscape Scale - The SCaMP Experience

            Peter Worrall (Penny Anderson Associates)

 2.30    Monitoring and Evaluation of landscape Scale working – the challenge of the Nature Improvement Areas

            Amanda Wright (Natural England)

3.00    General Discussion

 3.15    End

EGS Seminar – Tuesday 19th March 2013

Tuesday 19th March 2013, Room E419, 4th floor, John Dalton East Building, from 1.00-2.00pm.


Sphagnum in the Southern Pennines

Angus Rosenburgh, MMU

The blanket bogs of the Southern Pennines are the most degraded peatlands in the UK. A history of industrial pollution, poor land management and wildfire has devastated these upland ecosystems. Sensitive species were all but eradicated from these areas, and in the most severe cases, all vegetation was lost leaving large areas of bare and actively eroding peat. Over the last 50 years or so, conditions have steadily improved: reduced industrial activity, tighter emission regulations and environmental stewardship subsidies are all significant factors.
Sphagnum is a keystone species, providing the very fabric and functioning of these blanket bogs. Its susceptibility to pollution led to widespread decline over a landscape it once dominated. Amid the improving environmental conditions of recent decades, there has been a notable increase in both Sphagnum cover and diversity.
This work aims to characterise the differences between conditions of the degraded blanket peats of the Southern Pennines and those of more pristine mires from across the UK, identifying those biogeochemical factors that influence the vegetation, and integrating this into current and on-going restoration works.

EGS Seminar – Tuesday 12th March 2013

Tuesday 12^th March 2013, Room E419, 4^th floor, John Dalton East Building, from 1.00-2.00pm.

 

Can Rock Slope Failure Clusters Detect Concentrated Erosion of Bedrock in Mountain Areas?
David Jarman, Mountain Landform Research

A near-complete inventory of all significant bedrock mass movements (RSFs) in the British mountain ranges confirms the tendency to clustering and sparsity across similar terrains and lithologies already mapped for Larger RSFs in the Highlands. A finer grain view identifies additional smaller clusters of comparable character. After rejecting previous explanations for RSF incidence, the best association is with glacial breaches of main and secondary watersheds, implying recent concentrated erosion of bedrock (CEB); some other CEB contexts are discussed.

The key research issue is to construct a model of all the stresses acting on a mountain slope, in order to factor in the effects of bulk erosion possibly hundreds of metres deep. However this is proving intractable. A case study in Glen Roy provides the first geodetic evidence of rebound in a glacial breach, which may provoke development of a retrospective model.

Project Placement with Kosta This Week

Hi all,

For those of you involved in a placement opportunity as part of your MSc project.....Kosta can speak to you in E402 at 3:30pm this Wednesday. Unfortunately, we cannot use the E402 coffee room at 3pm as it is in use for undergraduate Visit Day activities...but it should be free at 3:30pm. There may even be some leftover sandwiches and cakes for you !!

Thanks
Mark