Comments - 22/04/14

Maria-Jain Askey: http://bsue53.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/bring-back-the-bog/comment-page-1/#comment-5

Comment:
" A good blog with only a few formatting and spelling errors - I suggest rereading the published blog and you'll pick these up (bullet points under the Threats imposed on bogs section are grey instead of black, etc.).
I think you've covered the main issues mentioned in the seminar really well but I don't get a sense that you were actually there. You haven't mentioned Chat Moss at all and don't really give your own opinion on the subject. How did you feel the Wildlife Trust were coping with the issue? Do you think the project has a long term future?
I really like the layout of this blog, with the large grey quotes, the picture and the bullet points it is quick and easy to read. I think you could improve it by putting some scientific names of species in and expanding certain points with further references etc. You have clearly read some good references around this subject so you should make sure you link them into the text so other people can go off and look at them too."

Larissa Fonseca:
http://zoologygeek.wordpress.com/2014/04/18/the-final-blog-entry-for-bio-enterprises-employability/comment-page-1/#comment-28

Comment:
"This is the first time I've visited your blog and I think the layout is very impressive. The header picture is really colourful and immediately made me want to read what you'd been writing about.
This blog is a nice summary of the topic you found most interesting within the seminars. I think it's a great idea to talk about one overarching concept rather than the specific topic within each seminar.
However, you've only mentioned mammals (and not put scientific names). Are you concerned with all the other invasive species ie plants, reptiles, insects, pathogens? How do you think we can reduce the chances of more invasives coming into the country?"

http://zoologygeek.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/the-world-of-business/comment-page-1/#comment-29

Comment:
"A very good summary of how you tackled the assignment. I particularly like the screenshots which, although small, definitely help explain how you did it! I also found the task quite difficult as I'm not sure what I want to do for a career. It was useful to know what each section entails, but an odd way of assessing it.
Do you think the assessment would have been easier if they'd got us to write up a business plan for the Dragon's Den business we came up with?
Also, finally, you've got a spelling mistake in your closing line. Defiantly should be definitely."

Rory Fairweather: http://bsue98.wordpress.com/2014/04/14/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-urban-forestry/comment-page-1/#comment-7

Comment:
"A really brilliant blog that was great and easy to read. It was really nice to see your own opinion on the subject, and not just a regurgitation of what the seminar was about.
I can't really offer any advice on improving the blog (it's great already), other than to put more references in. You've got some good articles linked but may state the source of the pictures and link some things into the text to back up what you've said.
Overall an excellent blog and I'm sad I haven't looked at it before today! May even go back through and read your other posts :-P"

04/04/14 - Business Plan

Although an informative task, I felt this assessment was rather pointless. We were told to describe what each section of a business plan is, and relate this to how we may use it in the future. 

I found it interesting researching each area, finding examples of each on the internet. However, we had already been given a handout with what each section entailed, and I feel most people would mainly have copied this.

Relating each section to my future career was helpful, but also highly speculative. Without actually knowing what my career will be, or being in a certain situation, it was very hard to invent a situation in which I would have to use each section.

I feel it would have been more useful to link this assessment with the Dragon's Den day. This way I could have written a short business plan for our Treborth development ideas and got a real feel for what should have gone into each section.

28/03/14 - Plant Conservation in the UK Overseas Territories

Like most people, the word plant in any lecture title used to make me groan and settle in for a boring hour. However, I've become a lot more interested in botanical ID and conservation recently, so this lecture promised to be very informative!

Surprisingly the lecture theatre was packed! The demographic seemed slightly older and greyer haired than normal, but the excitement in the room was palpable. I recognised a lot of the people as Treborth regulars, either as Friends of Treborth, or regular volunteers. This was unsurprising considering who the speaker was.

Colin Clubbe works at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens and is the head of the UK Overseas Territories and Conservation Training Scheme. http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/research-data/science-directory/people/clubbe-colin-p gives a brief summary of his credentials and published papers.

Colin Clubbe - A true field biologist!

There are 16 UK overseas territories (UKOT) that are arguably the site of the UK's most important plant species. The diversity of island endemics is astounding, and some unique communities and habitats cannot be found anywhere else in the world - for example the dwarf shrub heath (Falklands) and cloud forest (St Helena). Kew has a detailed plan to protect and preserve the biodiversity of these former colonies.

UKOT map [http://herbaria.plants.ox.ac.uk/bol/UKOT]
Click to enlarge

With the rising human population and increasing ease of international travel, a lot of these plants are under threat. Developments often fragment habitats and invasive species are often allowed to enter the countries through various transport links. It is these problems that Colin Clubbe and the Kew team are trying to address and combat.

Climate change is also becoming a threat. Many of these UKOTs are incredibly low lying - the British Indian Ocean Territory barely exceeds 2m above sea level. Climate change is bringing more regular, more intense hurricanes which cause storm surges. These often flood the low lying UKOTs, submerging the fauna in salt water. Most of the plants are adapted to be salt tolerant, but cannot cope with long periods of salt submergence. These plants and islands are also highly threatened by the rising sea levels. It is therefore imperative that these imminently threatened species are examined, catalogued and protected before they are lost forever. This is where Colin and his team come in.

His job is to organise the training of locals to implement plant conservation plans, and also to ID and catalogue all the species within the territories. The team are also digitising the entire UKOT herbarium collection in an attempt the standardise the nomenclature, and make the specimens far more readily available. The digitised records are all being made available through the UKOTs Online Herbarium.

This work also contributes to The Plant List which is aiming to catalogue all known world plant species. This task is immense but highly important if unknown specimens are to be easily identified, and accurate naming and distributions to be established.

Kew's work in the UKOTs also aims to train locals in plant ID and help create accurate distribution maps of all the important species there. This is essential if policies are to be created to protect threatened species, or remove invasive species. They also map key habitats and catalogue what the species composition of these are. This process was done across Montserrat and the results helped aid legislation decisions on where developments could or could not be made.

Cataloguing work like this has also helped get invasive species protocols implemented. A 2009 study of the invasive species on South Georgia has helped inform decisions on how best to control the established invasives, and reduce the chance of more colonising the island.

Kew are also making efforts to protect and preserve as many of the species in the UKOTs as possible. They are continually adding seeds to the Millenium seed bank and producing horticultural protocols to aid germination and propagation of these seeds when necessary.

Overall this talk was just as interesting as it promised to be. There wasn't much on specific plant ID, but was concentrated more on the work that the UKOTs project does, and how it intends to aid the protection of these fabulous and rare plants. I learnt a fantastic amount from Colin and he really opened my eyes to the world of international conservation collaboration. It is essential that countries with highly developed botanical resources share their expertise and skills, and help protect plants in these rare and diverse locations.

04/04/14 - The Chat Moss Project

This seminar, given by Elspeth Ingleby (uk.linkedin.com/pub/elspeth-ingleby/47/42/301), was about Chat Moss (https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Chat-Moss-Project/329943177133245) at the outer edge of Manchester, and the plans to restore this lowland raised bog to its original condition. 

Red marker indicates where Chat Moss is

Having worked at Lake Vyrnwy for the last 3 years, this talk promised to be very interesting to me. Lake Vyrnwy has thousands of hectares of raised blanket bog and I've helped restore small areas of this, so I assumed lots of the information from Elspeth would be comparable. However, I was very wrong.

Chat Moss has several different areas of bogs that have been separated over time through development and agriculture. By 1845, only 50% of the original extent of raised bog were left, most having been lost to agricultural land reclaim. The bog that did remain was being extensively used for peat extraction, and so those areas left were in a very poor state, compared to when it was in peak natural condition. By 1978 only 5 hectares of the original 2500 remained! However, more recently, conservationists have realised the importance of this rare habitat and have restored large areas so that there is now 300 hectares of good quality bog.

Unfortunately, although the habitat is good and healthy, the peat below this (that has been extracted for hundreds of years) is nothing like as deep as it was before humans began to change the habitat. It will take thousands of years to build the peat up again, and it is unlikely that conservationists will be able to protect the area from development for that long, especially with the ever growing human population.

What is a lowland raised bog?

This is an area where the drainage and nutrient content are so poor that most plants can't grow. Sphagnum mosses take hold and begin to grow within these areas. Over many thousands of years, the dead Sphagnum builds up to create peat and fills in the poorly drained hollow.

Formation of a raised bog [http://www.wesleyjohnston.com/users/ireland/geography/bogs.html]

This graphic shows the history of a particular bog in Ireland, but demonstrates the history and formation of most lowland bogs. There is a permanent layer of water trapped between the peat and the overlying Sphagnum that gives the area its boggy quality. The vegetative composition is extremely specialised to the poor nutrient availability characterised by this habitat. Therefore areas like this need to be protected if these species are to be maintained in Britain.

5 of the 120 species in the Sphagnum genus

Mossland destruction

The destruction of the original 2500 hectares of bog was mainly caused when the area was drained. Government schemes were put in place to encourage farmers to dig large drainage ditches through these areas, and then use the drained land for agriculture. This process happened across the country, including at Chat Moss and Lake Vyrnwy. The process was successful at Chat Moss and meant that vast areas of bog were destroyed. Over 99% of the original mosslands have been lost in the Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside areas. It was interesting listening to these facts having worked at Lake Vyrnwy. 

At Lake Vyrnwy drainage ditches were also dug...however they did not work. The area remained wet and unusable for agriculture, but the run off was much faster. To improve water quality and slow down direct drainage from the bogs into the reservoir, the government have recently paid for these ditches to be blocked up again. I find it highly amusing and ironic to know that the government paid farmers to dig the ditches, and then paid the next generation of farmers to block them up again!

Bog restoration

The importance of bogs is now being recognised (1) for their rare biodiversity (2) their water storing ability which reduces the flooding risk and (3) their carbon sequestration capabilities. Due to this, The Chat Moss project has got funding to restore the mosses in outer Manchester towards their natural state.  

To achieve this they must: 

• Relevel large areas where peat extraction occurred. This should help allow the surface water to spread evenly over the top layer and let Sphagnum grow throughout.
• Block ditches to raise the water table and allow surface water levels to increase.
• Clear scrub to allow the Sphagnum to spread across the entire area. This scrub must then be removed completely from the area so that its decay doesn't change the nutrient content of the area.
• Remove invasive species to allow the native flora to recolonise without unnecessary competition.
• Translocate Sphagnum and other important flora for the habitat. By sourcing these from other bog areas locally, it is hoped that the species present, and the community as a whole, will eventually establish to something very similar to what was there originally.

The future of the Chat Mosses is looking promising at the moment as peat extraction licenses aren't being renewed, and funding has been secured to restore large areas and decrease habitat fragmentation. However, the long term future of the area is highly uncertain as funding is always difficult to maintain, and the Manchester population is ever expanding!

I personally found this talk very interesting! There were some parallels with the blanket bog at Vyrnwy, but I was amazed to find that there were so many differences between raised and lowland bogs (mainly due to the lack of nearby human habitation around raised bogs). Lowland bogs also sequester carbon faster than raised bogs and are therefore, currently, a far more valuable habitat to maintain, restore and expand. I hope that the Chat Moss project is successful in the long term, and that scientific and governmental policy makers are intelligent enough to recognise the potential benefits of such a habitat and protect it.

14/03/14 - The hitchhikers guide to urban forestry

The seminar was presented by Tim Hall of the Woodland Trust Scotland (https://www.linkedin.com/pub/tim-hall/21/7a9/46). He opened the talk by giving a very simple, but enlightening definition of a tree: "A plant you can climb". As a fairly avid tree climber myself, this is a definition I will remember for a long time (not sure I fancy climbing a monkey puzzle tree though)!

He began the talk by giving some very simple, but highly revealing statistics. 50% of the global population of humans lived in urban areas in 2010. This is predicted to rise to 70% by 2050 [http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/urbanization/urban-rural.shtml]. In Britain, 80% of the population live in urban areas. Considering the relatively recent development of urban areas globally, I found these figures astonishingly large. I wasn't surprised by the 80% in Britain, as we're a highly developed, small island, but the global figures were very interesting. It really highlights the extent to which we (humans) have developed the planet!

Urban Forests

Tim then went on to define what an urban forest is. The name was new to me, but the concept is simple when viewed from above. All the trees and plants in urban areas create a forest that is interwoven with the buildings and infrastructure. These trees aren't only found in parks and gardens, but also along streets, paths and even on buildings!

An urban forest.
[http://susty.com/urban-forest-benefits-trees-climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-sequestration-water-air-quality-wildlife-habitat-economic-health-lifestyle-environmental/]

Bosco Verticale - Milan. [http://webodysseum.com/art/bosco-verticale-urban-forest-buildings/]

Urban forests do also include woodlands within 1km of areas where 2000+ people are living. By this definition the woods along the Menai Strait and at the top of Roman camp count as urban forest. I find these woodlands interesting, but it's the benefits given by the trees and shrubs that are fully integrated with the urban environment that I found really interesting! 

Benefits

Tim outlined the major benefits that these urban trees provide

• Act as a windbreak - Streets act as wind funnels and the trees minimise this effect.
• Provide shade in summer - This provides a nice cool environment on the street and prevents the sun warming offices too much, thus reducing the need for air conditioning.
• Provide light in winter - The loss of leaves in the winter allows light to get to the offices so they heat up. This reduces the demand for internal heating.

Shade and light differences during the seasons

• Transpire 450L of water a day - This also reduces the need for air conditioning.
• Reduce urban heat effect - Urban areas can be up to 4*C warmer than the surrounding countryside. The transpiring urban trees cool the surrounding area and reduce this heating effect.
• Reduce rainfall impact - Urban areas are notoriously bad for rainfall run off. When large amounts of rain fall in a short period, floods can occur. Urban trees help to soak up excess water and reduce the chance of flooding and property damage.
• Health benefits 
• Clear air pollution - Photosynthesis and other chemical processes help remove pollutants from the air and improve the air quality for the inhabitants. 24,000 people die prematurely each year due to illnesses associated with air pollution. In Chicago the trees remove 10.8 tonnes of pollutant material from the air each day! These include CO2, CO, Sulphur dioxide.
• The UK has the worlds highest rate of child asthma (15%) - the highest rate of these are found in the lower socioeconomic areas where there are fewer trees. The link between the two has not been scientifically proven, but there is an interesting correlation between the two.
• Improve mental health - It has been shown that having trees in any area can improve and maintain good and stable mental health. This is particular important in areas where many people live and work in highly stressful, mentally draining environments.
• The "Branching Out" project in Scotland encourages people with mental health issues to get out into woodlands.This costs money to run, but it's believed to cost less than would otherwise be spent on medication for the participants.
• 1/6 people in the UK have a mental health issue during their lifetime. A planned increase in the density of urban forests is likely to help reduce this number.
• It has been shown that people are also more likely to walk to work if there are trees on their route. This also improves mental health and physical fitness.

Management

Tim's job involves the management and maintenance of Scottish urban forests. He says this is very challenging because although people enjoy having trees in their area, they don't want them to block light, spoil the view, have the roots break up the pavement, have the leaves block drains etc. People management seems to be the major part of the job!

Tree roots damage property including pavements and drives

The idea of urban forests is quite recent but is coming into the public mainstream more and more. Some universities even offer courses in urban forestry now! 

I think the concepts covered by Tim were all very interesting and it's great to know that planting of trees and vegetation is now a major governmental target. I'm likely to get involved in some sort of forest management in the future, and it would be great to take these skills into an urban environment. I don't think I'll ever get heavily involved in this kind of work. The prospect of having to deal with angry householders daily is not at all appealing, but I do think it's important to have trees in urban spaces!

Comments - 03/04/14

Elizabeth Hopkinson: http://elizabethhopkinson.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/illegal-hunting-and-the-bushmeat-trade-an-emerging-crisis-in-african-savannahs-by-peter-lindsay/comment-page-1/#comment-10.

Comment:

"I like this post. It sums the talk up very briefly, but making sure the key points are obvious. I really like your conclusion. You're definitely right, killing animals for trophies is wrong. However, how long do you think it'll take to retrain an entire culture? The main issue is not that fact that bushmeat is being eaten, but the fact it is being eaten by too many people.
The bushmeat trade was once sustainable. Unfortuneatly, humans have become so good at cheating death that there are now 7 billion of us! The cultural traditions dictate that these people must eat bushmeat, and that is unlikely to ever change. The only way to reduce the bushmeat trade is to reduce the demand for. It is likely that education is the only way forward for this. Producing legal bans against such a trade is highly unlikely given the current global economy. Legal action would only produce a profitable black market, and likely actually increase the trade as prices rise and more people get drawn into the lucrative business.
It would be better to acknowledge the problem and try and reeducate the perpetrators into sustainable culling methods, or entice them into the tourist market.
Overall this is a very difficult subject and one mainly fuelled by the expanding human population. Can you think of any good ways to produce more jobs and money in local areas that don't encourage the bushmeat trade?"

Iain Detrey: http://biologystudent93.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/dont-panic-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-urban-forestry/comment-page-1/#comment-36.

Comment:

"A good blog that very accurately reports what Tim said. However, it could use some pictures, or something to break the text up a bit. Having gone to the seminar, I don't feel like I learnt anything new from this post. It would be good to know your opinion on the topic, and how you think it could develop in future.
Also, have you looked into the suject any further since the talk? I haven't had a chance to do an back ground reading yet, but I'm sure there's lots of useful information out there, given what Tim tlked about.
Overall this is a very well written blog (apart from a few spelling mistakes) and was easy to follow; I just found the lack of pictures made it a bit hard to remain interested throughout."