The floods: Where do we go from here?

"Support, recovery and lessons learned" from 2015 Cumbria floods. Two months on from devastating flooding in the county various key figures and leaders give their responses to the next stage of recovery, including looking towards strategic solutions for flood prevention

Shaping the development of the UKCEH UK-SCAPE Data Science Framework. Workshop report

UKCEH held an event to share progress on the development of the UK-SCAPE Data Science Framework (DSF), explore community expectations for the DSF and get feedback from the participants on whether the DSF will meet their needs. Participants were able to offer feedback through interactive voting sessions, breakout groups and a feedback form

Accounting for nature: assessing habitats in the UK countryside.

Countryside Survey 2000 (CS2000) and the Northern Ireland Countryside Survey 2000 (NICS2000) have been designed to provide detailed information about the habitats and landscape features that are important elements of our countryside. They can tell us about the ‘stock’ of these resources, that is how much of them we have and where they are to be found, and they can give us an insight into their condition based on the variety and abundance of the plant species associated with them. Using information from previous surveys, we can also gain an understanding of how the stock and condition of these habitats and landscape features are changing over time. We can build up a sort of balance sheet or an account of natural assets in the UK countryside. In this report we look in particular at the period between the last two surveys, 1990 and 1998

Taking the environment's pulse

Long-term observation of our ecosystems is critical for us to understand environmental change. Andy Sier looks back on the contribution of 20 years of observation and research by the Environmental Change Network

ALTER-Net, a long-term biodiversity, ecosystem and awareness research network - Year 8

Van Dijk, J., Ulvund, K., Braat, L., Sier, A., Mirtl, M., Watt, A., Peltola, T. and Delbaere, B. 2012. ALTER-Net, a long-term biodiversity, ecosystem and awareness research network - Year 8 - NINA Report 815, 36 pp. The year 2011 was used to restructure and organize our work towards ALTER-Net after April 2012, when external funding for holding the secretariat will end. Early 2011 Council elected a new chairman for Council – Eeva Furman (SYKE) and a new chairman for the Management Board – Leon Braat (Alterra). During 2011 it became clear that all partner institutes were willing to continue with ALTER-Net in the future, that the secretariat work would be outsourced to different institutes with a rotating system for especially the financial administration as to increase institutional participation. ALTER-Net welcomed two new partner institutes to our consortium (VU-IVM and IGB). With the new structure ALTER-Net is currently scheduled to run until April 2014. During April 2011 – March 2012 the eight year of ALTER-Net our website was changed and moved to a new provider and we repeated our second Multi-Site Experiment on decomposition using 15 monitoring sites managed by 12 ALTER-Net partner institutes and 3 non ALTER-Net partner institutes. In addition ALTER-Net organized a Long-Term Social Ecological Research Workshop at SYKE in Helsinki and was actively involved in the two currently running EU projects on the Science-Policy interface, i.e. KNEU and SPIRAL. We also organized our yearly ALTER-Net summer school again. These processes help ALTER-Net to reach its objective to promote a better integrated and stronger European biodiversity research capacity. The result will be the establishment of a lasting infrastructure for integrated ecosystem research, combining ecological and socioeconomic approaches, and with greater emphasis on communication with relevant audiences.publishedVersio

ALTER-Net, a long-term biodiversity, ecosystem and awareness research network - Year 8

Van Dijk, J., Ulvund, K., Braat, L., Sier, A., Mirtl, M., Watt, A., Peltola, T. and Delbaere, B. 2012. ALTER-Net, a long-term biodiversity, ecosystem and awareness research network - Year 8 - NINA Report 815, 36 pp. The year 2011 was used to restructure and organize our work towards ALTER-Net after April 2012, when external funding for holding the secretariat will end. Early 2011 Council elected a new chairman for Council – Eeva Furman (SYKE) and a new chairman for the Management Board – Leon Braat (Alterra). During 2011 it became clear that all partner institutes were willing to continue with ALTER-Net in the future, that the secretariat work would be outsourced to different institutes with a rotating system for especially the financial administration as to increase institutional participation. ALTER-Net welcomed two new partner institutes to our consortium (VU-IVM and IGB). With the new structure ALTER-Net is currently scheduled to run until April 2014. During April 2011 – March 2012 the eight year of ALTER-Net our website was changed and moved to a new provider and we repeated our second Multi-Site Experiment on decomposition using 15 monitoring sites managed by 12 ALTER-Net partner institutes and 3 non ALTER-Net partner institutes. In addition ALTER-Net organized a Long-Term Social Ecological Research Workshop at SYKE in Helsinki and was actively involved in the two currently running EU projects on the Science-Policy interface, i.e. KNEU and SPIRAL. We also organized our yearly ALTER-Net summer school again. These processes help ALTER-Net to reach its objective to promote a better integrated and stronger European biodiversity research capacity. The result will be the establishment of a lasting infrastructure for integrated ecosystem research, combining ecological and socioeconomic approaches, and with greater emphasis on communication with relevant audiences

ALTER-Net, a long-term biodiversity, ecosystem and awareness research network. – Year 6. Nina report 569.

Van Dijk, J., Ulvund, K. Terrasson, D., De Blust, G., Sier, A., Braat, L., Kanka, R., Mirtl, M., Török, K., Furman, E., Kertész, M. & Stadler, J. 2010. ALTER-Net, a long-term biodiversity, ecosystem and awareness research network – Year 6. – NINA Report 569, 78 pp. During spring 2009, 22 of the 24 partner institutes decided to maintain and further develop the Network of Excellence on biodiversity research after the end of the European financial support in April 2009. With financial support from the Research Council of Norway and the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management, NINA hosts the ALTER-Net secretariat and two 0.5 fte positions were filled (one coordinator and one deputy coordinator) to coordinate the network activities. Year six of ALTER-Net can been seen as a transition year in which our Network of Excellence had to find its way from having the financial luxury of EU funding to a new setting in which partner institutes contributed cash and in-kind person days themselves. It is clear that the Network has to prove its added value of maintaining the network and to prove the significance of the partner contributions that have been spent on our network activities (i.e. Common Research Programme, Communication & Knowledge Transfer, Common Training Programme, Data Sharing Policy, Long Term Ecological Research - LTER, LifeWatch, InterDisciplinary Research - IDR and Multi-Site Experiment). During year six of ALTER-Net the draft Common Research Programme was approved by the ALTER-Net council and will be worked out in more detail, elaborated upon and implemented in the year to come. A new version of News and Views (http://newsandviews.ceh.ac.uk/), as communication tool on awareness, has been launched and a formal partnership between ALTER-Net and Ecsite, the European network of science centres and museums, has been established through the formation of a new Ecsite thematic group, the Nature Group. ALTER-Net is represented in Ecsite by CEH and also has a seat on the Steering Committee of the Nature Group. The ALTER-Net website (www.alter-net.info) has been transformed to the new situation showing our core activities and will replace the old version with all the work packages in April 2010. Work on Data Sharing Policy, LifeWatch and IDR are expected to come with visible outputs in the year to come. A Data Sharing Policy will be presented to the ALTER-Net council for approval and implementation and the case study on data exchange in the context of LifeWatch will be finished with publications. The IDR project on the Governance of Ecosystem Services will finish with an international workshop in 2010 and with publications. Although the work on LTER-Europe and ALTERNet’s support to the LTER-Europe secretariat is ongoing and has a maintenance structure the LTER activity has proven to be ALTER-Net’s key network driver. Two large EU proposals were sent in, dominated by LTER/ALTER-Net partners and several ALTER-Net partners were involved in debugging and improving LTER’s InfoBase. KEY WORDS : biodiversity, ecosystem, awareness, interdisciplinary research, research network, biomangfold, økosystem, formidling, tverrfaglig kunnskap, forskningsnettver

Enchytraeid worm abundance and delta 13C cholesterol data from Sourhope field experiment site, Scotland, 2000 [NERC Soil Biodiversity Programme]

This dataset comprises enchytraeid worm abundance and Delta 13C values from enchytraeid cholesterol. The data were collected as a component of the NERC Soil Biodiversity Programme, consisting of a one year study of the diversity and activity of Enchytraeid worms, small relatives of the earthworm. These worms are very common in upland soils and often outweigh all other fauna, including sheep. The project focused on investigating the importance of Enchytraeid species, or group diversity, in maintaining soil carbon cycling. The NERC Soil Biodiversity Thematic Programme was established in 1999 and was centred upon the intensive study of a large field experiment located at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute (now the James Hutton Institute)'s farm at Sourhope in the Scottish Borders. During this time, the site was monitored to assess changes in aboveground biomass production (productivity), species composition and relative abundance (diversity)