Uncategorized

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.

Ian Lawson represented the group at the PAGES C-PEAT TropPEAT meeting in Honolulu, hosted by Dave Beerling at the University of Hawai’i.

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.

A new paper in Palaeo3 by our group is now online here. The paper, “The vegetation history of an Amazonian domed peatland” by Kelly et al., reports the first pollen record from a domed mire in Amazonia. The record includes the first evidence from the region for discontinuous peat accumulation, which suggests that carbon sequestration … Read more

River levels are dropping in Loreto, northern Peru at this time of year, and that means that access is briefly possible to some of the fascinating peatland forests that we have been working on over the last few years. And for the first field season ever, the vegetation and carbon map published by Freddie Draper … Read more

The results of Freddie Draper concerning the high carbon stocks of the peatlands of Loreto, northern Peru were featured in El Peruano – a Peruvian national newspaper. The article is based on our presentation on the margins of COP20, Lima, Peru in December 2014, and emphasises the role of the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonia … Read more

Two recent reports suggest that the potential threats to Amazonian peatlands from deforestation for oil palms and cacao, and gold mining and other extractive industries, are growing. The EIA published a particularly critical report last month, and MAAP also claims to have found evidence of significant deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon in its analyses of LandSat imagery. This raises the concern that … Read more

Tom Kelly passed his PhD viva at the University of Leeds, with well-deserved commendations from his examiners Rob Marchant (University of York) and David Galbraith (Leeds). His supervisors (Ian Lawson, Katy Roucoux and Tim Baker) are very proud! Tom has already led or contributed to several papers through his research, and we look forward to … Read more

Draper et al. “The distribution and amount of carbon in the largest peatland complex in Amazonia” shows, using a wide range of new field data, that peatland pole forest is the most carbon-dense type ecosystem in Amazonia, when below-ground carbon storage is taken into account. This work also revised the central estimate for carbon storage … Read more

Some nice new images of Eschweilera, Mauritia, and a detail of Mauritia sculpture, taken by Tom Kelly.