item 1202
[21-06-2012 to 31-07-2012]
News Item:
£368k Biodiversity Research Award
Congratulations to Prof David Paterson who has been successful in gaining a grant from NERC for £368,947 entitled "A hierarchial approach to the examination of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem service flows across coastal margins." (CBESS)
NERC has funded “CBESS”, a new consortium award under the leadership of Professor David Paterson. The CBESS programme will create a study that spans coastal ecosystems over the landscape scale, investigating how biodiversity stocks provide the following ecosystem services (cf. National Ecosystem Assessment).
- Supporting services: nutrient cycling, healthy habitat - Provisioning services; goods obtained from the landscape
- Regulating' services: coastal protection, climate regulation (greenhouse gas exchange, carbon sequestration)
- Cultural services: Recreation (walking, canoeing, angling, birding, hunting and aesthetic appeal ). CBESS will combine the detailed study of two regional landscapes with a broad-scale UK-wide study to allow both specific and general conclusions to be drawn.
The Regional study will compare two areas of great local and national importance: Morecambe Bay on the west coast and the Essex coastline on the east coast of the UK. The overall programme is worth just over £3 million with £680K supporting the SOI contribution which includes biology (Paterson and Golléty) and Geosciences (Teh, Hill, Stojanovic).
The overall consortium is a strong mix of ecology, modelling and geosciences involving the strongest teams in the UK and with close links to NGO and Government partners (e.g., RSPB, BTO, CEH, SNH, JHI, NE and MASTS among others).
More information on the project can be found at http://cbess.weebly.com/index.html
see here for further details
contact: Prof David Paterson