The Coastal Carbon Library and Atlas: Open source soil data and tools supporting blue carbon research and policy.

Quantifying carbon fluxes into and out of coastal soils is critical to meeting greenhouse gas reduction and coastal resiliency goals. Numerous 'blue carbon' studies have generated, or benefitted from, synthetic datasets. However, the community those efforts inspired does not have a centralized, standardized database of disaggregated data used to estimate carbon stocks and fluxes.

Greater local cooling effects of trees across globally distributed urban green spaces.

Urban green spaces (UGS) are an effective mitigation strategy for urban heat islands (UHIs) through their evapotranspiration and shading effects. Yet, the extent to which local UGS cooling effects vary across different background climates, plant characteristics and urban settings across global cities is not well understood. This study analysed 265 local air temperature (T) measurements from 58 published studies across globally distributed sites to infer the potential influence of background climate, plant and urban variables among different UGS types (trees, grass, green roofs and walls).

Robust spatial estimates of biomass carbon on farms.

The drive for farm businesses to move towards net zero greenhouse gas emissions means that there is a need to develop robust methods to quantify the amount of biomass carbon (C) on farms. Direct measurements can be destructive and time-consuming and some prediction methods provide no assessment of uncertainty. This study describes the development, validation, and use of an integrated spatial approach, including the use of lidar data, and Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) to quantify total biomass carbon stocks (C) of i) land cover and ii) landscape features such as hedges and lone trees for five case study sites in lowland England.

A loss function to evaluate agricultural decision-making under uncertainty: a case study of soil spectroscopy.

Unlabelled: Modern sensor technologies can provide detailed information about soil variation which allows for more precise application of fertiliser to minimise environmental harm imposed by agriculture. However, growers should lose neither income nor yield from associated uncertainties of predicted nutrient concentrations and thus one must acknowledge and account for uncertainties. A framework is presented that accounts for the uncertainty and determines the cost-benefit of data on available phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) in the soil determined from sensors.

Spatial modelling approach and accounting method affects soil carbon estimates and derived farm-scale carbon payments.

Improved farm management of soil organic carbon (SOC) is critical if national governments and agricultural businesses are to achieve net-zero targets. There are opportunities for farmers to secure financial benefits from carbon trading, but field measurements to establish SOC baselines for each part of a farm can be prohibitively expensive. Hence there is a potential role for spatial modelling approaches that have the resolution, accuracy, and estimates to uncertainty to estimate the carbon levels currently stored in the soil.

Comparing the effect of different sample conditions and spectral libraries on the prediction accuracy of soil properties from near- and mid-infrared spectra at the field-scale.

The prediction accuracy of soil properties by proximal soil sensing has made their application more practical. However, in order to gain sufficient accuracy, samples are typically air-dried and milled before spectral measurements are made. Calibration of the spectra is usually achieved by making wet chemistry measurements on a subset of the field samples and local regression models fitted to aid subsequent prediction.

Predicting the growth of lettuce from soil infrared reflectance spectra: the potential for crop management.

How well could one predict the growth of a leafy crop from reflectance spectra from the soil and how might a grower manage the crop in the light of those predictions? Topsoil from two fields was sampled and analysed for various nutrients, particle-size distribution and organic carbon concentration. Crop measurements (lettuce diameter) were derived from aerial-imagery. Reflectance spectra were obtained in the laboratory from the soil in the near- and mid-infrared ranges, and these were used to predict crop performance by partial least squares regression (PLSR).

Estimating food production in an urban landscape.

There is increasing interest in urban food production for reasons of food security, environmental sustainability, social and health benefits. In developed nations urban food growing is largely informal and localised, in gardens, allotments and public spaces, but we know little about the magnitude of this production. Here we couple own-grown crop yield data with garden and allotment areal surveys and urban fruit tree occurrence to provide one of the first estimates for current and potential food production in a UK urban setting.

Urban meadows as an alternative to short mown grassland: effects of composition and height on biodiversity.

There are increasing calls to provide greenspace in urban areas, yet the ecological quality, as well as quantity, of greenspace is important. Short mown grassland designed for recreational use is the dominant form of urban greenspace in temperate regions but requires considerable maintenance and typically provides limited habitat value for most taxa. Alternatives are increasingly proposed, but the biodiversity potential of these is not well understood.

Evidence for functional state transitions in intensively-managed soil ecosystems.

Soils are fundamental to terrestrial ecosystem functioning and food security, thus their resilience to disturbances is critical. Furthermore, they provide effective models of complex natural systems to explore resilience concepts over experimentally-tractable short timescales. We studied soils derived from experimental plots with different land-use histories of long-term grass, arable and fallow to determine whether regimes of extreme drying and re-wetting would tip the systems into alternative stable states, contingent on their historical management.

Linking ecosystem services, urban form and green space configuration using multivariate landscape metric analysis.

Context: Landscape metrics represent powerful tools for quantifying landscape structure, but uncertainties persist around their interpretation. Urban settings add unique considerations, containing habitat structures driven by the surrounding built-up environment. Understanding urban ecosystems, however, should focus on the habitats rather than the matrix.

Ecological connectivity networks in rapidly expanding cities.

Urban expansion increases fragmentation of the landscape. In effect, fragmentation decreases connectivity, causes green space loss and impacts upon the ecology and function of green space. Restoration of the functionality of green space often requires restoring the ecological connectivity of this green space within the city matrix.

A bird's eye view: using circuit theory to study urban landscape connectivity for birds.

Context: Connectivity is fundamental to understanding how landscape form influences ecological function. However, uncertainties persist due to the difficulty and expense of gathering empirical data to drive or to validate connectivity models, especially in urban areas, where relationships are multifaceted and the habitat matrix cannot be considered to be binary.

Objectives: This research used circuit theory to model urban bird flows (i.

Distinct respiratory responses of soils to complex organic substrate are governed predominantly by soil architecture and its microbial community.

Factors governing the turnover of organic matter (OM) added to soils, including substrate quality, climate, environment and biology, are well known, but their relative importance has been difficult to ascertain due to the interconnected nature of the soil system. This has made their inclusion in mechanistic models of OM turnover or nutrient cycling difficult despite the potential power of these models to unravel complex interactions. Using high temporal-resolution respirometery (6 min measurement intervals), we monitored the respiratory response of 67 soils sampled from across England and Wales over a 5 day period following the addition of a complex organic substrate (green barley powder).

On the origin of carbon dioxide released from rewetted soils.

When dry soils are rewetted a pulse of CO is invariably released, and whilst this phenomenon has been studied for decades, the precise origins of this CO remain obscure. We postulate that it could be of chemical (i.e.

Defining and quantifying the resilience of responses to disturbance: a conceptual and modelling approach from soil science.

There are several conceptual definitions of resilience pertaining to environmental systems and, even if resilience is clearly defined in a particular context, it is challenging to quantify. We identify four characteristics of the response of a system function to disturbance that relate to "resilience": (1) degree of return of the function to a reference level; (2) time taken to reach a new quasi-stable state; (3) rate (i.e.

Landscape scale estimation of soil carbon stock using 3D modelling.

Soil C is the largest pool of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere, and yet the processes of C accumulation, transformation and loss are poorly accounted for. This, in part, is due to the fact that soil C is not uniformly distributed through the soil depth profile and most current landscape level predictions of C do not adequately account the vertical distribution of soil C. In this study, we apply a method based on simple soil specific depth functions to map the soil C stock in three-dimensions at landscape scale.

The short-term effects of prescribed burning on biomass removal and the release of nitrogen and phosphorus in a treatment wetland.

Nutrient removal by constructed wetlands can decline over time due to the accumulation of organic matter. A prescribed burn is one of many management strategies used to remove detritus in macrophyte-dominated systems. We quantified the short-term effects on effluent water quality and the amount of aboveground detritus removed from a prescribed burn event.

Spatial patterns of labile forms of phosphorus in a subtropical wetland.

Phosphorus (P) has been identified as the key constituent defining wetland productivity, structure, and function. Our goal was to investigate the spatial patterns of total P and three labile forms of P (labile organic, inorganic, and microbial biomass P) across a subtropical wetland located in east-central Florida, the Blue Cypress Marsh Conservation Area (BCMCA), and link spatial patterns to ecosystem processes. The wetland received a continual input of nutrients primarily from the south and intermittently from the west and east, respectively, which ceased in the mid-1990s.

Response of biogeochemical indicators to a drawdown and subsequent reflood.

Temporal oscillations in hydrology are a common occurrence in wetlands and can result in alternating flooded and drained conditions in the surface soil. These oscillations in water levels can stimulate microbial activities and result in the mobilization and redistribution of significant amounts of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P). The goal of this study was to experimentally simulate a drawdown and reflood of marsh soil from a nutrient-enriched site and a reference site of a wetland (Blue Cypress Marsh Conservation Area, Florida).

A robust inducible-repressible promoter greatly facilitates gene knockouts, conditional expression, and overexpression of homologous and heterologous genes in Tetrahymena thermophila.

The Cd(2+)-inducible metallothionein (MTT1) gene was cloned from Tetrahymena thermophila. Northern blot analysis showed that MTT1 mRNA is not detectable in the absence of Cd(2+), is induced within 10 min of its addition, is expressed in proportion to its concentration, and rapidly disappears upon its withdrawal. Similarly, when the neo1 gene coding region flanked by the MTT1 gene noncoding sequences was used to disrupt the MTT1 locus, no transformants were observed in the absence of Cd(2+), and the number of transformants was proportional to increased Cd(2+) concentration.

Adaptation of the CAS test system and synthetic sewage for biological nutrient removal. Part II: design and validation of test units.

A global increase in biological nutrient removal (BNR) applications in wastewater treatment and concern for potential effects of anthropogenic substances on BNR processes resulted in the adaptation of the Continuous Activated Sludge (CAS) laboratory test system (cf. guideline OECD 303A or ISO 11733). In this paper two novel systems are compared to the standard CAS unit: the Behrotest KLD4 and a University of Cape Town system (CAS-UCT).

Adaptation of the CAS test system and synthetic sewage for biological nutrient removal. Part I: development of a new synthetic sewage.

A new synthetic medium has been developed for routine use in laboratory-scale sewage treatment simulation and biodegradation tests, such as OECD guideline 302A & 303A or ISO method 11733. The new medium, Syntho, was designed to meet the following objectives: 1) to be more representative of real sewage than the existing standard OECD synthetic sewage, 2) the COD:N:P ratio and mineral composition must allow a good degree of biological nutrient (N, P) removal, and 3) the medium should result in stable unit operation, including good sludge settling and minimal need for control actions. The IAWQ Activated Sludge Model No.