Mid 2015 Group activity update

Another super busy year – it is already June 2015. I have not posted an update since Harriett’s news on ‘Microclimates’. Woops… I keep twitter up-to-date, but not in detail, so in reverse order here are some highlights from the group activity. I will update on publications in the next post.

1. We now almost have one year or water table depth and soil moisture measurements form the Malaysian oil palm plantation with have grid-instrumented (from NERC-IoF funding). The kit is working well and so is the collaboration with Malaysian colleagues so I am pleased we have a one-year no-cost extension to collect another year of data and have some measure of inter-annual variability.
2. PhD student Hazel Long has been awarded a place on the NERC/BAS Training Course: Delivering Safe and Effective Fieldwork in the Polar Regions. Lucky her. The course consists of three days learning at the Cambridge-based British Antarctic Survey and three days of practical training exercises on the ice in the Arctic. And she is also off to Baikal this summer. It was Greenland last summer, so her research is taking her to some fantastic places.
3. I am just back from Zurich where I presented ‘The Underground is also our Environment’ to the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency EEA (June 3rd) for a special topic symposium on ‘The Underground’. It was a wide-ranging meeting with presentations from legal concerns to planning requirements – essentially the EEA SC were talking soundings and will condense to a report for the EEA. The talks were filmed and will be on-line. Contact me if interested and I can direct you to these.
4. I ran a small workshop for the XVth IWRA World Water Congress on fluvial greenhouse gas emissions (27th May). I love how small the world becomes sometimes, spending time discussing shared interests with global ‘friends’, from Japanese ecohydrologists to French lawyers. I hope to run this again, so if anyone would be interested in attending such a workshop, please get in touch.
5. Interns Marie Denis (from ENGEES-Strasbourg) and Lidia Escudero (from ENSTA-Paris) arrived in May and will be here until the end of July. They are researching respectively, the effect of turbulence on fluvial CO₂ efflux, and modelling of 4-year long water table time series from Blacklaw windfarm (at 12 sites within the windfarm).
6. PhD students Ying Zheng and Hazel Long both gave talks at EGU 2015, respectively ‘Spatial and temporal variation in dissolved organic carbon composition in a peaty catchment draining a windfarm’ and ‘Quantifying the magnitude, spatiotemporal variation and age of aquatic CO₂ fluxes in western Greenland’.
7. I was in China  twice in the past year, most recently in April 2015 for the joint NERC-NSFC pre-grant submission meeting on Critical Zone Science. Then mega hard-work to submit the follow-on grant for 27th May (here’s hoping). After the April meeting and in my earlier trip in Nov. 2015 I visited with colleagues there our field area – a fascinating karst catchment with some water quality challenges.
8. My application to the Scottish Government Hydro Nation Scholarship programme for PhD funding to investigate ‘Micro-and Nanoplastics in Wastewater Treatment Systems and Receiving Waters’ was successful (Feb. 2015) and I am so pleased that Maricela Blair will be rejoining the group in September 2015 to undertake this research.
9. (Dr.!) Harriett Richardson passed swimmingly her PhD viva in August and then worked as KE officer on the microclimates project until Feb. 2015 when she left to take up a new role as a Knowledge Transfer Partnership Associate for the CRETE project (Community Renewable Energy Toolkits and Engagement) with SEI York. The past two posts reflect some of her activity.