New NERC CASE studentship award

Dr Katy Roucoux, Prof Nina Laurie and Dr Lera Miles (WCMC Cambridge) have been awarded a NERC CASE studentship to start in 2018 on “Human impact in Amazonian peatlands”. Application details will appear soon at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/gsd/opportunities/pg/phdfunding/.

Scottish Funding Council award

Dr Katy Roucoux, together with Prof. Nina Laurie, has been awarded £29,981.88 for a new project, “Valuing Intact Tropical Peatlands”. The project will focus on understanding the ways in which the peatlands of the Pastaza-Marañón Basin, Peru, are used and valued by the communities who live around them. The project will run from January to … Read more

New NERC grant

Ian Lawson, Katy Roucoux, Tim Baker, Ed Mitchard and Mat Williams have been awarded NERC funding to continue their research into Amazonian peatlands. The project, “Carbon Storage in Amazonian Peatlands: Distribution and Dynamics”, will run for three years and aims to improve our understanding of the distribution and functioning of these globally-significant ecosystems.

Tropical Peatlands at EGU

Ian Lawson convened a session on “Peatlands in the tropics and beyond”, along with Claudio Zanelli, Sue Page, Hinsby Cuadrillo-Quiroz, and Jorg Kaduk, at EGU in Vienna. The session took place, appropriately, in the basement, in a packed room. Talks spanned a range of topics, including conservation, biochemistry and palaeoecology, from sites across the tropics … Read more

New article in Conservation Biology on protecting intact tropical peatlands

In an article published this month in the journal Conservation Biology, Katy Roucoux and co-authors identify and map threats to the recently-described intact peatlands of the Pastaza-Marañón Foreland Basin (PMFB) in north-east Peru. We highlight the need to protect these peatlands to avoid future degradation, and identify several key pathways for conservation. In our study … Read more

Annual Meeting of the Society for tropical Ecology

Katy Roucoux co-organized a session on “Palaeoecology of tropical ecosystems” at Annual Meeting of the Society for tropical Ecology (GTö) in Brussels, on 6th–10th February 2017. She also presented a talk on “The contribution of palaeoecology to tropical peatland science.”

PhD opportunity to work on Amazonian peats

Drs Ed Mitchard, Ian Lawson and Simon Mudd are advertising a PhD position under the SAGES competition. Based in Edinburgh, the student will develop remote-sensing and fieldwork-based approaches to mapping peat properties in the Peruvian Amazon, building on previous work by Draper et al. For more information, see FindAPhd.