Integration and reflection - paperblog 8

This week we concentrate on recent papers with CEH scientists as the first author.

PhD student Philip Martin recently published a major paper summarising his research over the last few years. You can read more about "Carbon pools recover more quickly than plant biodiversity in tropical secondary forests" (published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B) on the CEH website and on Philip's blog.

Another PhD student, Christopher Malley, has a new paper out in Atmospheric Research which takes a detailed look at how well two of the UK's atmospheric monitoring 'supersites', including the site run by CEH at Auchencorth Moss in Scotland, represent the UK's background ozone conditions.

CEH is a Centre that carries out both ecological and hydrological science, sometimes together (the clue is in the name!). Our scientists produce many papers that seek to bring together varied data on water quantity, freshwater ecology, and water quality. In recent weeks, CEH scientists have published on estimating concentrations in rivers of different chemicals originating from sewage treatment plants (Keller et al., open access in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry), and a new approach for predicting phosphorus concentrations in rivers (Greene et al., Journal of Hydrology).

Sometimes it is necessary to take a step back from day to day research to ponder some fundamental questions on how scientific knowledge can be used in wider society. Two examples have recently appeared. Alan Gray has a new paper in Transgenic Research examining whether applied ecology has failed the transgenic crops debate. Stefan Reis and colleagues from CEH, Universities and Health Institutes across the UK have put together a new analysis on how to integrate health and environmental impact analysis to address some of the new public health challenges.

Nitrogen science plays a big role in CEH activities. Laurence Jones and CEH colleagues have produced a new review of the evidence for nitrogen impacts on ecosystem services. Read it in the journal Ecosystem Services, where the paper is open access (full text freely available). Meanwhile, Mark Sutton is lead author on another new open access paper in Environmental Development looking at "Green Economy thinking" and relevance to control of nitrous oxide emissions.

Finally, Robert Mills, who completed a PhD at CEH's site in Bangor, North Wales, has just published a new paper on organic carbon turnover rates in natural and semi-natural topsoils. Working with Professor Ed Tipping, the study concludes with the interesting result that turnover is faster under trees than non-trees. Read more in the journal Biogeochemistry.

That's it. As ever, we welcome suggestions and comments on the material presented in the paperblog. Let us know what you think!

Barnaby Smith, Media Relations Manager

Additional information

If you'd like a fuller picture of new papers from CEH, just follow the CEH Paper Alerts Twitter feed, which lists CEH peer-reviewed papers newly published online. Full details of Centre for Ecology & Hydrology science publications, including those published in peer-reviewed science journals, are eventually catalogued on the NERC Open Research Archive (NORA).

Those of you who follow the scientific literature will know some journal websites require registration and some are subscription-only. CEH, as part of NERC, is working with publishers and funders to make more of our output open access, and we have indicated above where this is the case.

We also publish lots of our other outputs including biological records atlases and project reports. More details can be found in the publications section of the CEH website.