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147 Projects

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  • 2022

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/P002099/1
    Funder Contribution: 580,838 GBP

    The role of external drivers of climate change in mid-latitude weather events, particularly that of human influence on climate, arouses intense scientific, policy and public interest. In February 2014, the UK Prime Minister stated he "suspected a link" between the flooding at the time and anthropogenic climate change, but the scientific community was, and remains, frustratingly unable to provide a more quantitative assessment. Quantifying the role of climate change in extreme weather events has financial significance as well: at present, impact-relevant climate change will be primarily felt through changes in extreme events. While slow-onset processes can exacerbate (or ameliorate) the impact of individual weather events, any change in the probability of occurrence of these events themselves could overwhelm this effect. While this is known to be a problem, very little is known about the magnitude of such changes in occurrence probabilities, an important knowledge gap this project aims to address. The 2015 Paris Agreement of the UNFCCC has given renewed urgency to understanding relatively subtle changes in extreme weather through its call for research into the impacts of a 1.5oC versus 2oC increase in global temperatures, to contribute to an IPCC Special Report in 2018. Few, if any, mid-latitude weather events can be unambiguously attributed to external climate drivers in the sense that these events would not have happened at all without those drivers. Hence any comprehensive assessment of the cost of anthropogenic climate change and different levels of warming in the future must quantify the impact of changing risks of extreme weather, including subtle changes in the risks of relatively 'ordinary' events. The potential, and significance, of human influence on climate affecting the occupancy of the dynamical regimes that give rise to extreme weather in mid-latitudes has long been noted, but only recently have the first tentative reports of an attributable change in regime occupancy begun to emerge. A recent example is the 2014 floods in the Southern UK, which are thought to have occurred not because of individually heavy downpours, but because of a more persistent jet. Quantifying such changes presents a challenge because high atmospheric resolution is required for realistic simulation of the processes that give rise to weather regimes, while large ensembles are required to quantify subtle but potentially important changes in regime occupancy statistics and event frequency. Under this project we propose, for the first time, to apply a well-established large-ensemble methodology that allows explicit simulation of changing event probabilities to a global seasonal-forecast-resolution model. We aim to answer the following question: over Europe, does the dynamical response to human influence on climate, manifest through changing occupancy of circulation regimes and event frequency, exacerbate or counteract the thermodynamic response, which is primarily manifest through increased available moisture and energy in individual events? Our focus is on comparing present-day conditions with the counterfactual "world that might have been" without human influence on climate, and comparing 1.5 degree and 2 degree future scenarios. While higher forcing provides higher signal-to-noise, interpretation is complicated by changing drivers and the potential for a non-linear response. We compensate for a lower signal with unprecedentedly large ensembles. Event attribution has been recognised by the WCRP as a key component of any comprehensive package of climate services. NERC science has been instrumental in its development so far: this project will provide a long-overdue integration of attribution research into the broader agenda of understanding the dynamics of mid-latitude weather.

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V010093/1
    Funder Contribution: 6,377 GBP

    The proposed research aims to progress the development of a cloud-based application that will help healthcare professionals to identify and predict exposures in early life which may affect the chances of their patients experiencing ill-health in later life. It will do this by incorporating the views, values and requirements of its intended users (and those who will be affected by it) in the application's development, as this has been shown to improve the chances of technology being adopted and used. This will consequently improve the chances of the application achieving its aims of improving communication between patients and caregivers and of improving population health and reducing disease burden through more targeted interventions.

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/T014288/1
    Funder Contribution: 13,241 GBP

    MRC : Lampros Bisdounis : MR/N013468/1

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V009877/1
    Funder Contribution: 8,778 GBP

    NERC: Isobel Turnbull: NE/S007334/1 Tiny single-celled plants, called phytoplankton, need nutrients such as carbon to live and grow in the surface waters of the ocean. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere naturally dissolves into the surface ocean, providing phytoplankton with a source of carbon which can be used and turned into organic matter; a process known as photosynthesis which helps to regulate global climate. In addition to carbon, phytoplankton also require other essential nutrients to grow and one critical nutrient is iron. Unfortunately, iron does not dissolve well in seawater, and therefore the dissolved concentrations are generally found at low levels throughout the oceans. In certain oceanic regions, the levels of dissolved iron drop so low that they can limit phytoplankton growth, one such region is the Southern Ocean. Fortunately, seawater contains a wide variety of dissolved organic compounds, ones that we are familiar with such as carbohydrates and amino acids, as well as ones that we know little about. These lesser known organic compounds (known as ligands) bond to iron and help keep it dissolved. These ligands significantly impact the amount of iron that can be acquired by phytoplankton, making it more 'bioavailable'. Hence, both iron availability and the presence of these ligands can affect phytoplankton growth/photosynthesis and therefore have an impact on our climate. However, a lack of understanding of what makes up the ligand pool in natural seawater makes it difficult to determine the bioavailability of iron. One way to assess this, is to inject natural seawater with radioactive iron which will attach itself to the various ligands present; a process known as radiolabelling. The amount of actual iron that is bioavailable can then be assessed through the rate of radiolabelled-iron uptake by natural phytoplankton cultures that have been added to the seawater mix. This project aims to do this with seawater taken on an expedition to the southeast Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean. Iron uptake rates will be obtained for seawater collected from three different stations and three different depths, and provide a proxy for how 'bioavailable' the iron in the study region is. This information can then be used in climate models, enabling us to better understand the impact of iron availability in this region on carbon uptake by phytoplankton and predict how future changes to the ocean state may impact the carbon cycle.

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/T014210/1
    Funder Contribution: 7,535 GBP

    NERC : Holly Chubb : NE/S007512/1 Mountainous environments present a variety of risks to human population in the surrounding communities. Damages resulting from triggered natural hazards can cost governments and individuals millions of pounds annually to restore public buildings, roads, and houses. Landslides in mountainous regions are a particularly deadly form of natural hazard due to their unpredictability and potential scale, resulting in thousands of deaths every year. Regions such as Canada and Chile have extensive mountainous ranges in the form of the Canadian Rockies and the Patagonian Andes respectively, placing higher populations at-risk; but this risk is often not well understood. There is still debate in the scientific community about the different factors that cause an area to be at risk of a landslide, as well as a lack of research into how to accurately communicate the posed risk to affected communities. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges that humans as a species have faced in modern history, inflating the risk of natural disasters in both frequency and magnitude with landslides being no exception. As the planet warms, ice and snow from ice sheets and glaciers is decreasing. This is an important factor as ice helps to stabilise mountain slopes by acting as a cement between rock particles. Ice loss results in large areas of unstable and weakened mountain slopes that no longer have a sufficient amount of ice to keep them intact. A small trigger, such as a day of intense rainfall or a minor earthquake, can result in the collapse of huge areas of rock creating a landslide as it progresses down slope. Research into predicting these failures and understanding how we can determine the size of a failure is essential to protect communities that live within mountainous regions. This research aims to use satellite imagery, alongside primary surveying data and sediment sampling, to help further understand this hazard. By looking at previous landslide events on satellite imagery it will be possible to identify pre-conditioning factors such as cracks, faults, or minor rock falls, that precede a movement. This information can be applied to slopes that we already understand to be unstable to monitor their deformation and predict future catastrophic failure. Sediment samples from previous landslide events will also inform us of the behaviour and dynamics of previous landslide events which could help to predict the area that a future event may affect, assisting in hazard mitigation strategies. Both the Mount Meager Massif and Southern Patagonian Ice field have experienced ice loss at an unprecedented rate in the 21st century as a consequence of climate change, which makes it highly likely that their communities will continue to suffer from increased and more frequent landslide events. Populations are also increasing in these areas, further extending the impact of landslide risk. It is therefore important that any research undertaken in this field is communicated to local people in an understandable and informative manner. This requires investigation into the existing perception of risk from landslides and how individuals would like both scientific organisations and research teams, as well as governments, to communicate this risk to them. It is only through geographical and social research, combined with effective communication strategies, that this risk can be effectively mitigated.

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  • Funder: SNSF Project Code: 191127
    Funder Contribution: 97,600
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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V020757/1
    Funder Contribution: 6,676 GBP

    NERC : Thomas Weeks : NE/S007415/1 Land-use change and biological invasions are two of the three major drivers of biodiversity decline globally, however, interactions between these drivers can often have synergistic effects on native ecosystems. This is a phenomenon which is well known but relatively understudied. In particular, little is known about how these drivers interact to affect whole community diversity and function This proposal serves to add to this knowledge gap by collaboration with the long-term ecological monitoring programme from Toronto Region and Conservation Agency, which has consolidated high-resolution time-series data of land-usage in southern Ontario as well as comprehensive ecological surveys including both native and invasive species. Using this data we propose to model the effects of both urbanization and invasive species on native biodiversity in local assemblages in Toronto and the surrounding region. We pay specific attention to how increasing degradation of natural habitats interacts with invasive species abundance its effects to native functional-trait and phylogenetic biodiversity. By using high-resolution projection of land-use change into the remainder of the 21st century we will highlight areas where biodiversity is most at risk as well as areas which would be least resilient to further spread of invasive species.

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/X008622/1
    Funder Contribution: 181,067 GBP

    Microscopic organisms in the ocean called phytoplankton use the sun's energy to convert carbon dioxide (CO2), nutrients and water into organic matter, just as plants do on land. This organic matter is grazed upon by tiny animals called zooplankton that are found throughout the global ocean. Marine zooplankton are so abundant that the total weight of their global population greatly exceeds that of the ~8 billion humans alive on Earth today. Like all animals, zooplankton produce vast quantities of faecal matter that they eject into the surrounding environment. Some of this waste sinks down into the abyss, carrying with it carbon that was once in the atmosphere as CO2. Any faecal carbon that reaches the deep ocean may be locked away down there for 100's or even 1000's of years. The process of exporting carbon in this way occurs on such a scale that it plays a fundamental role in global climate regulation, keeping our planet cool by slowing the rate at which CO2 accumulates in our atmosphere. Zooplankton are cold-blooded, and as such, their physiological rates increase as their environment warms. By contrast, the body size of zooplankton decreases with warming, although the mechanism underlying this phenomenon remains uncertain. Indeed, there are many gaps in our understanding of how temperature affects zooplankton physiology. For example, does the rate at which they can capture food increase at the same rate at which their demand for energy increases with warming? If it does, perhaps they will simply eat their way out of the climate crisis? But what if it doesn't? Continued ocean warming may then result in zooplankton having to use more and more of their food to meet the temperature-driven increase in their energy demands, leaving less and less for growth and reproduction. Does this situation get worse if the amount of food available to zooplankton decreases with ocean warming? And do different sized individuals respond differently to temperature? Our incomplete understanding of the interplay between temperature, food supply and zooplankton body size means that we cannot reliably predict their response to ocean warming. Indeed, most global models of the ocean ecosystem that are used to help predict future climate assume that these aspects of zooplankton physiology are fixed, with no sensitivity to warming. We therefore have only limited confidence in our ability to forecast how the zooplankton contribution to global climate regulation via ocean carbon storage will change as the ocean warms throughout the 21st century. Our project, C-QWIZ, will determine how zooplankton of different sizes respond to increasing temperatures at different levels of food. In doing so, we will fill many of the knowledge gaps in our fundamental understanding of their physiological response to climate change. The C-QWIZ team is uniquely placed to translate this new understanding into existing mathematical models of the global ocean ecosystem; we will be the first to mechanistically assess how global warming affects zooplankton-mediated ocean carbon storage throughout the 21st century. Our chosen model is used by scientists around the world to forecast how Earth's future climate will change. These forecasts are used by politicians and policy makers to decide on how best to manage the future of our planet. Improving these models therefore ensures that our science delivers real and lasting change for the benefit of all society.

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V009001/1
    Funder Contribution: 83,027 GBP

    Rivers emit ~2-3 Pg of carbon as the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere, each year. This is equivalent to 20% of annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions and an important component of the global carbon cycle. Methane (CH4) emissions from river networks are very poorly understood. CH4 is a potent greenhouse gas, 34 times stronger than CO2 over a 100-year timeframe. Rivers are estimated to emit ~27 Tg of CH4 each year, equivalent to 8% of anthropogenic CH4 emissions. However, these CH4 emissions vary greatly both spatially and over time. Rivers, acting as conduits for terrestrial greenhouse gases, can thus influence ongoing climate change. Landscape disturbance, either through human activity or climate change, can enhance river carbon emissions adding substantially to an already overloaded atmospheric carbon pool. This may represent a feedback to the global climate system as river carbon emissions can be enhanced by the impact of climate change on the terrestrial carbon cycle. Characterising the magnitude and source of river carbon emissions across globally representative ecosystems is therefore urgently needed for us to understand and predict current and future climate change. Carbon emissions from rivers are primarily derived from the landscapes they drain. But sources within these landscapes can vary depending on the ecosystem. Carbon sources can include recent atmospheric CO2 fixed into biomass via photosynthesis, carbon that has accumulated in organic soils over millennia such as in Arctic, temperate and tropical peatlands, and even ancient geological carbon derived from erosion and weathering. With such a diverse range of potential carbon sources across ecosystems, it is vital to establish a framework from which to determine whether the source of carbon observed in river networks matches what would be expected from normal landscape function, or if it represents signals of a disturbed carbon cycle. I.e. are older and slower carbon cycles becoming shorter and faster? Isotopes, especially radiocarbon (14C), are a powerful tool for identifying disturbed carbon cycles. Through a network of leading researchers, this project will bring together novel techniques and study sites to serve as a foundation for in-depth investigations into river carbon emissions around the globe. The project will utilise low-cost sensors for measuring the magnitude of river carbon emissions developed by the international Project Partners. These will be combined with in-depth isotopic investigations using novel techniques developed by the UK investigators. A network of existing study site and measurement infrastructure will be established covering a diverse range of ecosystems. The project will therefore provide a springboard from which to constrain the magnitude and source of river carbon emissions through direct observations at globally representative scales. Rivers can drain large landscape areas and as such their water chemistry represents an integrated signal of landscape carbon loss. This project will provide the techniques to tease apart these signals and determine if they represent natural or disturbed carbon cycling. The project will build a database of existing observations of these signals. In addition, we will use the interacting, complimentary techniques brought together in this project to carry out a scoping project to provide preliminary observations of the magnitude and source of carbon emissions from a subset of disturbed landscapes. CONFLUENCE will also include planning for an international meeting of researchers in relevant fields to grow the network of people, techniques and sites beyond the lifetime of this project. CONFLUENCE will be used as a launchpad for consortium funding to use this unprecedented infrastructure to make a step-change in observational capability of freshwater carbon emissions at spatial and temporal scales that individual research groups alone cannot achieve.

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V008293/1
    Funder Contribution: 83,979 GBP

    The air we breathe is teaming with microorganisms, with air currents transporting microbes globally. The earliest efforts to describe the distribution of airborne microbes were carried out by the founding father of microbiology, Louis Pasteur, over 125 years ago; but since then airborne microbes have been largely ignored. One reasons for this is that there are significant technical challenges in collecting airborne microorganisms,and thus microbial ecologists have focused on the low hanging fruit of soil and waterborne microorganisms. Even when efforts have been made to study airborne microorganisms, the research has been largely focused at a local/national level, but air pollution does not respect national boarders. Therefore, we have assembled a new network of world-leading experts in bioaerosols biomonitoring to take a global perspective on the ecology and human and environmental health effects of airborne microorganisms. Collectively, airborne microorganisms are referred to as bioaerosols, which is simply the fraction of air particles that are from a biological origin. Exposure to poor air quality is a major global driver of poor health, killing 1 in 8 people. Pollen is probably the best known example of a bioaerosol, which as an allogen, has a direct impact on public health. However, live bacteria, fungi, and viruses in the air pose a significant health risk through infectious respiratory diseases such as Legionellosis and Aspergillosis. The negative public health risks in themselves makes research into bioaerosols worthwhile. However, bioaerosols also play central roles in the life cycles of microorganisms, global ecology, and climate patterns. Analysis of bioaerosols at landscape scales has shown that even marine and terrestrial environments are connected over vast distances by exchange of bioaerosols. Indeed, it is well known that bioaerosols can be transported between continents on 'microbial motorways' in the sky (e.g. Saharan dust). Further to this, bioaerosols influence the climate by acting as nucleation forming particles and promoting precipitation. Due to the vast distances involved it is not possible to get the full picture from studies carried out at a local or national level, instead a global perspective is required to study these processes. A major recent methodological advancement in microbial ecology is the application of 'next generation sequencing' technology. Isolation of DNA from the environment and its analysis with high throughput sequencing has been a key tool in revolutionizing our understanding of the ecology of microbes from soil and water environments. Due to the lower concentrations of microorganisms in air samples this is technically challenging for bioaerosols. Consequently molecular methods are underutilised in bioaerosols research. Nevertheless a number of research groups across the globe have developed methods for molecular (DNA based) analysis of bioaerosols. However, a lack of standardisation between these methods makes it challenging to compare results and draw conclusions from combined datasets. This new network brings these experts together for the first time in order to standardise and further improve these methods. However, a key objective of this network is to make these methods more widely available. The largest burden of air pollution is in lower and middle income countries, where access to advanced molecular methods is limited. Through the network, researchers in lower and middle income countries can access these tools, pushing research forward where the need is greatest.

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147 Projects
  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/P002099/1
    Funder Contribution: 580,838 GBP

    The role of external drivers of climate change in mid-latitude weather events, particularly that of human influence on climate, arouses intense scientific, policy and public interest. In February 2014, the UK Prime Minister stated he "suspected a link" between the flooding at the time and anthropogenic climate change, but the scientific community was, and remains, frustratingly unable to provide a more quantitative assessment. Quantifying the role of climate change in extreme weather events has financial significance as well: at present, impact-relevant climate change will be primarily felt through changes in extreme events. While slow-onset processes can exacerbate (or ameliorate) the impact of individual weather events, any change in the probability of occurrence of these events themselves could overwhelm this effect. While this is known to be a problem, very little is known about the magnitude of such changes in occurrence probabilities, an important knowledge gap this project aims to address. The 2015 Paris Agreement of the UNFCCC has given renewed urgency to understanding relatively subtle changes in extreme weather through its call for research into the impacts of a 1.5oC versus 2oC increase in global temperatures, to contribute to an IPCC Special Report in 2018. Few, if any, mid-latitude weather events can be unambiguously attributed to external climate drivers in the sense that these events would not have happened at all without those drivers. Hence any comprehensive assessment of the cost of anthropogenic climate change and different levels of warming in the future must quantify the impact of changing risks of extreme weather, including subtle changes in the risks of relatively 'ordinary' events. The potential, and significance, of human influence on climate affecting the occupancy of the dynamical regimes that give rise to extreme weather in mid-latitudes has long been noted, but only recently have the first tentative reports of an attributable change in regime occupancy begun to emerge. A recent example is the 2014 floods in the Southern UK, which are thought to have occurred not because of individually heavy downpours, but because of a more persistent jet. Quantifying such changes presents a challenge because high atmospheric resolution is required for realistic simulation of the processes that give rise to weather regimes, while large ensembles are required to quantify subtle but potentially important changes in regime occupancy statistics and event frequency. Under this project we propose, for the first time, to apply a well-established large-ensemble methodology that allows explicit simulation of changing event probabilities to a global seasonal-forecast-resolution model. We aim to answer the following question: over Europe, does the dynamical response to human influence on climate, manifest through changing occupancy of circulation regimes and event frequency, exacerbate or counteract the thermodynamic response, which is primarily manifest through increased available moisture and energy in individual events? Our focus is on comparing present-day conditions with the counterfactual "world that might have been" without human influence on climate, and comparing 1.5 degree and 2 degree future scenarios. While higher forcing provides higher signal-to-noise, interpretation is complicated by changing drivers and the potential for a non-linear response. We compensate for a lower signal with unprecedentedly large ensembles. Event attribution has been recognised by the WCRP as a key component of any comprehensive package of climate services. NERC science has been instrumental in its development so far: this project will provide a long-overdue integration of attribution research into the broader agenda of understanding the dynamics of mid-latitude weather.

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    visibilityviews15
    downloaddownloads51
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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V010093/1
    Funder Contribution: 6,377 GBP

    The proposed research aims to progress the development of a cloud-based application that will help healthcare professionals to identify and predict exposures in early life which may affect the chances of their patients experiencing ill-health in later life. It will do this by incorporating the views, values and requirements of its intended users (and those who will be affected by it) in the application's development, as this has been shown to improve the chances of technology being adopted and used. This will consequently improve the chances of the application achieving its aims of improving communication between patients and caregivers and of improving population health and reducing disease burden through more targeted interventions.

    more_vert
  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/T014288/1
    Funder Contribution: 13,241 GBP

    MRC : Lampros Bisdounis : MR/N013468/1

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V009877/1
    Funder Contribution: 8,778 GBP

    NERC: Isobel Turnbull: NE/S007334/1 Tiny single-celled plants, called phytoplankton, need nutrients such as carbon to live and grow in the surface waters of the ocean. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere naturally dissolves into the surface ocean, providing phytoplankton with a source of carbon which can be used and turned into organic matter; a process known as photosynthesis which helps to regulate global climate. In addition to carbon, phytoplankton also require other essential nutrients to grow and one critical nutrient is iron. Unfortunately, iron does not dissolve well in seawater, and therefore the dissolved concentrations are generally found at low levels throughout the oceans. In certain oceanic regions, the levels of dissolved iron drop so low that they can limit phytoplankton growth, one such region is the Southern Ocean. Fortunately, seawater contains a wide variety of dissolved organic compounds, ones that we are familiar with such as carbohydrates and amino acids, as well as ones that we know little about. These lesser known organic compounds (known as ligands) bond to iron and help keep it dissolved. These ligands significantly impact the amount of iron that can be acquired by phytoplankton, making it more 'bioavailable'. Hence, both iron availability and the presence of these ligands can affect phytoplankton growth/photosynthesis and therefore have an impact on our climate. However, a lack of understanding of what makes up the ligand pool in natural seawater makes it difficult to determine the bioavailability of iron. One way to assess this, is to inject natural seawater with radioactive iron which will attach itself to the various ligands present; a process known as radiolabelling. The amount of actual iron that is bioavailable can then be assessed through the rate of radiolabelled-iron uptake by natural phytoplankton cultures that have been added to the seawater mix. This project aims to do this with seawater taken on an expedition to the southeast Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean. Iron uptake rates will be obtained for seawater collected from three different stations and three different depths, and provide a proxy for how 'bioavailable' the iron in the study region is. This information can then be used in climate models, enabling us to better understand the impact of iron availability in this region on carbon uptake by phytoplankton and predict how future changes to the ocean state may impact the carbon cycle.

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/T014210/1
    Funder Contribution: 7,535 GBP

    NERC : Holly Chubb : NE/S007512/1 Mountainous environments present a variety of risks to human population in the surrounding communities. Damages resulting from triggered natural hazards can cost governments and individuals millions of pounds annually to restore public buildings, roads, and houses. Landslides in mountainous regions are a particularly deadly form of natural hazard due to their unpredictability and potential scale, resulting in thousands of deaths every year. Regions such as Canada and Chile have extensive mountainous ranges in the form of the Canadian Rockies and the Patagonian Andes respectively, placing higher populations at-risk; but this risk is often not well understood. There is still debate in the scientific community about the different factors that cause an area to be at risk of a landslide, as well as a lack of research into how to accurately communicate the posed risk to affected communities. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges that humans as a species have faced in modern history, inflating the risk of natural disasters in both frequency and magnitude with landslides being no exception. As the planet warms, ice and snow from ice sheets and glaciers is decreasing. This is an important factor as ice helps to stabilise mountain slopes by acting as a cement between rock particles. Ice loss results in large areas of unstable and weakened mountain slopes that no longer have a sufficient amount of ice to keep them intact. A small trigger, such as a day of intense rainfall or a minor earthquake, can result in the collapse of huge areas of rock creating a landslide as it progresses down slope. Research into predicting these failures and understanding how we can determine the size of a failure is essential to protect communities that live within mountainous regions. This research aims to use satellite imagery, alongside primary surveying data and sediment sampling, to help further understand this hazard. By looking at previous landslide events on satellite imagery it will be possible to identify pre-conditioning factors such as cracks, faults, or minor rock falls, that precede a movement. This information can be applied to slopes that we already understand to be unstable to monitor their deformation and predict future catastrophic failure. Sediment samples from previous landslide events will also inform us of the behaviour and dynamics of previous landslide events which could help to predict the area that a future event may affect, assisting in hazard mitigation strategies. Both the Mount Meager Massif and Southern Patagonian Ice field have experienced ice loss at an unprecedented rate in the 21st century as a consequence of climate change, which makes it highly likely that their communities will continue to suffer from increased and more frequent landslide events. Populations are also increasing in these areas, further extending the impact of landslide risk. It is therefore important that any research undertaken in this field is communicated to local people in an understandable and informative manner. This requires investigation into the existing perception of risk from landslides and how individuals would like both scientific organisations and research teams, as well as governments, to communicate this risk to them. It is only through geographical and social research, combined with effective communication strategies, that this risk can be effectively mitigated.

    more_vert
  • Funder: SNSF Project Code: 191127
    Funder Contribution: 97,600
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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V020757/1
    Funder Contribution: 6,676 GBP

    NERC : Thomas Weeks : NE/S007415/1 Land-use change and biological invasions are two of the three major drivers of biodiversity decline globally, however, interactions between these drivers can often have synergistic effects on native ecosystems. This is a phenomenon which is well known but relatively understudied. In particular, little is known about how these drivers interact to affect whole community diversity and function This proposal serves to add to this knowledge gap by collaboration with the long-term ecological monitoring programme from Toronto Region and Conservation Agency, which has consolidated high-resolution time-series data of land-usage in southern Ontario as well as comprehensive ecological surveys including both native and invasive species. Using this data we propose to model the effects of both urbanization and invasive species on native biodiversity in local assemblages in Toronto and the surrounding region. We pay specific attention to how increasing degradation of natural habitats interacts with invasive species abundance its effects to native functional-trait and phylogenetic biodiversity. By using high-resolution projection of land-use change into the remainder of the 21st century we will highlight areas where biodiversity is most at risk as well as areas which would be least resilient to further spread of invasive species.

    more_vert
  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/X008622/1
    Funder Contribution: 181,067 GBP

    Microscopic organisms in the ocean called phytoplankton use the sun's energy to convert carbon dioxide (CO2), nutrients and water into organic matter, just as plants do on land. This organic matter is grazed upon by tiny animals called zooplankton that are found throughout the global ocean. Marine zooplankton are so abundant that the total weight of their global population greatly exceeds that of the ~8 billion humans alive on Earth today. Like all animals, zooplankton produce vast quantities of faecal matter that they eject into the surrounding environment. Some of this waste sinks down into the abyss, carrying with it carbon that was once in the atmosphere as CO2. Any faecal carbon that reaches the deep ocean may be locked away down there for 100's or even 1000's of years. The process of exporting carbon in this way occurs on such a scale that it plays a fundamental role in global climate regulation, keeping our planet cool by slowing the rate at which CO2 accumulates in our atmosphere. Zooplankton are cold-blooded, and as such, their physiological rates increase as their environment warms. By contrast, the body size of zooplankton decreases with warming, although the mechanism underlying this phenomenon remains uncertain. Indeed, there are many gaps in our understanding of how temperature affects zooplankton physiology. For example, does the rate at which they can capture food increase at the same rate at which their demand for energy increases with warming? If it does, perhaps they will simply eat their way out of the climate crisis? But what if it doesn't? Continued ocean warming may then result in zooplankton having to use more and more of their food to meet the temperature-driven increase in their energy demands, leaving less and less for growth and reproduction. Does this situation get worse if the amount of food available to zooplankton decreases with ocean warming? And do different sized individuals respond differently to temperature? Our incomplete understanding of the interplay between temperature, food supply and zooplankton body size means that we cannot reliably predict their response to ocean warming. Indeed, most global models of the ocean ecosystem that are used to help predict future climate assume that these aspects of zooplankton physiology are fixed, with no sensitivity to warming. We therefore have only limited confidence in our ability to forecast how the zooplankton contribution to global climate regulation via ocean carbon storage will change as the ocean warms throughout the 21st century. Our project, C-QWIZ, will determine how zooplankton of different sizes respond to increasing temperatures at different levels of food. In doing so, we will fill many of the knowledge gaps in our fundamental understanding of their physiological response to climate change. The C-QWIZ team is uniquely placed to translate this new understanding into existing mathematical models of the global ocean ecosystem; we will be the first to mechanistically assess how global warming affects zooplankton-mediated ocean carbon storage throughout the 21st century. Our chosen model is used by scientists around the world to forecast how Earth's future climate will change. These forecasts are used by politicians and policy makers to decide on how best to manage the future of our planet. Improving these models therefore ensures that our science delivers real and lasting change for the benefit of all society.

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V009001/1
    Funder Contribution: 83,027 GBP

    Rivers emit ~2-3 Pg of carbon as the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere, each year. This is equivalent to 20% of annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions and an important component of the global carbon cycle. Methane (CH4) emissions from river networks are very poorly understood. CH4 is a potent greenhouse gas, 34 times stronger than CO2 over a 100-year timeframe. Rivers are estimated to emit ~27 Tg of CH4 each year, equivalent to 8% of anthropogenic CH4 emissions. However, these CH4 emissions vary greatly both spatially and over time. Rivers, acting as conduits for terrestrial greenhouse gases, can thus influence ongoing climate change. Landscape disturbance, either through human activity or climate change, can enhance river carbon emissions adding substantially to an already overloaded atmospheric carbon pool. This may represent a feedback to the global climate system as river carbon emissions can be enhanced by the impact of climate change on the terrestrial carbon cycle. Characterising the magnitude and source of river carbon emissions across globally representative ecosystems is therefore urgently needed for us to understand and predict current and future climate change. Carbon emissions from rivers are primarily derived from the landscapes they drain. But sources within these landscapes can vary depending on the ecosystem. Carbon sources can include recent atmospheric CO2 fixed into biomass via photosynthesis, carbon that has accumulated in organic soils over millennia such as in Arctic, temperate and tropical peatlands, and even ancient geological carbon derived from erosion and weathering. With such a diverse range of potential carbon sources across ecosystems, it is vital to establish a framework from which to determine whether the source of carbon observed in river networks matches what would be expected from normal landscape function, or if it represents signals of a disturbed carbon cycle. I.e. are older and slower carbon cycles becoming shorter and faster? Isotopes, especially radiocarbon (14C), are a powerful tool for identifying disturbed carbon cycles. Through a network of leading researchers, this project will bring together novel techniques and study sites to serve as a foundation for in-depth investigations into river carbon emissions around the globe. The project will utilise low-cost sensors for measuring the magnitude of river carbon emissions developed by the international Project Partners. These will be combined with in-depth isotopic investigations using novel techniques developed by the UK investigators. A network of existing study site and measurement infrastructure will be established covering a diverse range of ecosystems. The project will therefore provide a springboard from which to constrain the magnitude and source of river carbon emissions through direct observations at globally representative scales. Rivers can drain large landscape areas and as such their water chemistry represents an integrated signal of landscape carbon loss. This project will provide the techniques to tease apart these signals and determine if they represent natural or disturbed carbon cycling. The project will build a database of existing observations of these signals. In addition, we will use the interacting, complimentary techniques brought together in this project to carry out a scoping project to provide preliminary observations of the magnitude and source of carbon emissions from a subset of disturbed landscapes. CONFLUENCE will also include planning for an international meeting of researchers in relevant fields to grow the network of people, techniques and sites beyond the lifetime of this project. CONFLUENCE will be used as a launchpad for consortium funding to use this unprecedented infrastructure to make a step-change in observational capability of freshwater carbon emissions at spatial and temporal scales that individual research groups alone cannot achieve.

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V008293/1
    Funder Contribution: 83,979 GBP

    The air we breathe is teaming with microorganisms, with air currents transporting microbes globally. The earliest efforts to describe the distribution of airborne microbes were carried out by the founding father of microbiology, Louis Pasteur, over 125 years ago; but since then airborne microbes have been largely ignored. One reasons for this is that there are significant technical challenges in collecting airborne microorganisms,and thus microbial ecologists have focused on the low hanging fruit of soil and waterborne microorganisms. Even when efforts have been made to study airborne microorganisms, the research has been largely focused at a local/national level, but air pollution does not respect national boarders. Therefore, we have assembled a new network of world-leading experts in bioaerosols biomonitoring to take a global perspective on the ecology and human and environmental health effects of airborne microorganisms. Collectively, airborne microorganisms are referred to as bioaerosols, which is simply the fraction of air particles that are from a biological origin. Exposure to poor air quality is a major global driver of poor health, killing 1 in 8 people. Pollen is probably the best known example of a bioaerosol, which as an allogen, has a direct impact on public health. However, live bacteria, fungi, and viruses in the air pose a significant health risk through infectious respiratory diseases such as Legionellosis and Aspergillosis. The negative public health risks in themselves makes research into bioaerosols worthwhile. However, bioaerosols also play central roles in the life cycles of microorganisms, global ecology, and climate patterns. Analysis of bioaerosols at landscape scales has shown that even marine and terrestrial environments are connected over vast distances by exchange of bioaerosols. Indeed, it is well known that bioaerosols can be transported between continents on 'microbial motorways' in the sky (e.g. Saharan dust). Further to this, bioaerosols influence the climate by acting as nucleation forming particles and promoting precipitation. Due to the vast distances involved it is not possible to get the full picture from studies carried out at a local or national level, instead a global perspective is required to study these processes. A major recent methodological advancement in microbial ecology is the application of 'next generation sequencing' technology. Isolation of DNA from the environment and its analysis with high throughput sequencing has been a key tool in revolutionizing our understanding of the ecology of microbes from soil and water environments. Due to the lower concentrations of microorganisms in air samples this is technically challenging for bioaerosols. Consequently molecular methods are underutilised in bioaerosols research. Nevertheless a number of research groups across the globe have developed methods for molecular (DNA based) analysis of bioaerosols. However, a lack of standardisation between these methods makes it challenging to compare results and draw conclusions from combined datasets. This new network brings these experts together for the first time in order to standardise and further improve these methods. However, a key objective of this network is to make these methods more widely available. The largest burden of air pollution is in lower and middle income countries, where access to advanced molecular methods is limited. Through the network, researchers in lower and middle income countries can access these tools, pushing research forward where the need is greatest.

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