The Bangor University and CEH-Bangor team have had a great summer campaign, sampling salt marsh vegetation, spiders and beetles, and sediment cores for our erosion studies.
Monthly Archives: October 2013
Autumn 2013: ecological data collection is over
In August 2013, the CBESS Team began the final push to collect data for the Summer Field Campaign in Morecambe Bay and the Essex Marshes. Conditions were very different to winter with fieldworkers suffering sunburn and dehydration, compared to suspected frost bite!
University of Southampton: invertebrates and soil/sediment health
The University of Southampton is tasked with assessing the biodiversity of the soils and sediments across six different marsh and mudflat systems in Essex and Morecambe.
Queen’s University Belfast: muddy but productive
Staff and students (*) from Queen’s University Belfast spent a muddy, but productive, four weeks in Morecambe Bay and the Essex marshes as part of the CBESS 2013 summer campaign.
Dr John Bothwell on the mud in the Essex Marshes
We deployed double Fyke nets for 24 hours at each quadrat, using these nets to collect meiofauna and floating seaweeds, and also collected quadrat sediment cores, giving us a good overview of meiofaunal species richness. Additional deployments of seine and push nets were carried out to supplement the Fyke net catches and improve the baseline for trophic web analysis.
Our summer Fyke net catches were much higher than in winter, with Morecambe Bay yielding large numbers of flounder and brown wracks, and Essex yielding very high numbers of crabs and the green sea lettuces (Ulva spp.); many less common species (e.g. jellyfish, eels, Crangon) were also observed at each site. All collected net samples have been preserved in formaldehyde and will be processed over the autumn for the stable isotope analysis that will allow us to build meiofaunal trophic webs.
We have also begun the hire process for our ecoinformatic Post-Doctoral Research Assistant, and expect to appoint towards the end of Nov 2013.
* In alphabetical order: Lydia Bach, John Bothwell, Mark Emmerson, Justin Grainger, and Carl Reddin
University of St Andrews: are salt marshes and mudflats dominated by producers or consumers?
As part of the fieldwork campaigns, The University of St Andrews has been measuring the community metabolism of salt marsh and mudflat areas, i.e. the CO2 fluxes due to either primary production or respiration of the mud or marsh and everything living in and on it.
CCRU: the salt marsh experiment
Salt marshes as sea defences
Salt marsh ecosystems are important to the local, regional, and global community for many reasons, these include providing a buffer against waves and tidal currents.