Researching ecosystem change in Amazonia and Africa
Freddie Draper and colleagues have a new paper in Ecography, online as an accepted article. The paper, Peatland forests are the least diverse tree communities documented in Amazonia, but contribute to high regional beta-diversity, uses floristic data from a network of plots to show that peatland palm swamps and pole forests host distinctive floras. Although, at … Read more
Our new NERC-funded project officially begins today, with the appointment of Dr Greta Dargie as a PDRA at St Andrews. Greta will be leading field and lab data collection, initially working with colleagues at IIAP in Iquitos. Greta has been in the news recently in relation to her pioneering work in mapping Congolese peatlands: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/12/congo-basin-swamps-peatlands-carbon-climate-change.
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/.
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
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.
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
Greenpeace have published an interesting take on our recent paper on conserving intact peatlands here.
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
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.”