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Still in the lab…and there seems not to be light in the tunnel soon. Currently, I am weighing all samples for C/N analyses. One of our undergrad students is helping out on chemical analyses on the plant material as part of her BSc thesis. Great to have some help!

The site synopses is now with Daphne, so should be available to all of you.

Jasper and I are also working on the paper for which we now have a provisional title: Are plant and microbial composition in Sphagnum-dominated peatlands determined by microscale across a latitudinal gradient? we were thinking about Plant Ecology and Diversity as a journal for this work. Here I would also like to thank Magali, Jane, Bosse and Per-Eric for their valuable PLFA data. We appreciate this very much and we of course keep you updated on the procedure and the outcome. Should not take very long anymore before you will get the first MS. Keep an eye on your inbox.

All Pb samples are now in Bayreuth, so also there things are progressing and my freezer is getting empty (which I like!). The MMU samples are leaving our freezer this week!

All the best, Bjorn

Dear PEATBOGGERS,
Last Tuesday, I officially started to work on my new project. I am really excited about that. The last week, I have been think about you all as I was reading in the book you gave me (for which many thanks again). Bill Bryson is really brilliant in describing his travels through Europe…what the man has seen a lot of strange things. I wish I had just as sharp an eye as he has, but I can assure that Magali, Kasia and I certainly have seen some peculiar things in Europe as well.

That I started my new project does, however, not mean that i did nothing for PEATBOG last weeks. Definitively not. Yesterday, I finished sorting out the (510!) biomass samples into PFTs (ericoids, graminoids, herbs, lichens, equisetum, ferns, shrubs, trees) and weigh them. Also half of the CNP samples (1 graminoid, 1 ericoid, 1 cuspidata, 1 acutifolia)  are now grinded and ready for weighing in for CN and P analyses. Still a lot of work to do, but we are slowly pushing this forward.

BTW: I have a deposition sheet ready for everyones use. It now has EMEP data, but Albert and I (in close collaboration with MMU) will soon start working on the IDEM model data. Could those experts please comment on Nancy’s question: “Models:   I believe with BEGIN we calculated three different sets of estimates:

1. IDEM for all sites
2. IDEM for all sites except UK, and CEH model for UK
3. IDEM for all sites except Germany, NL, UK – national models for these.

The advantage of (1) is consistency, but the disadvantage is that, with IDEM based on EMEP, there is (or was at the time) a serious under-estimate of UK deposition.  (3) is probably most accurate, but the least consistent.  It also had the problem that N deposition was the most ‘lumped’  – I think we could only get total N-dep, as not all national models distinguished between oxidised and reduced or dry and wet.   As I recall, we (Albert and I) recommended (2), but were overruled and ultimately the paper was based on (3).   I remember that between (2) and (3) there wasn’t much difference.”

All advise welcome!

Cheers, Bjorn

Progress continues good at Borth, we now have control valves fitted on the individual pumping tubes and all pumped plots have water-table lowered, in some cases by around 20cm. We lost another impeller blade over the weekend but the pumps are holding up much better than last year. The weather has been good most of the time I’ve been here (until today that is!) which means that as well as work being pleasant we have also had the chance to collect lots of RS data. I haven’t yet had a proper look at the numbers but a bit of playing in the field suggests much reduced NDVI in the pumped plots where the Sphagnum is dried to a crispy yellow colour. Hopefully we may also detect changes in the chlorophyll fluorescence data.

While I remember, there are also a couple of older bits of news I neglected to mention in previous posts.

On our last pre-drought visit to both sites we were joined by a couple of extra colleagues. I have worked with Mariusz Lamentowicz from the University of Poznan in Poland for several years now. By background we’re both palaeoecologists but we’ve both realised that we need to understand the modern ecosystems to interpret the palaeoecological record. Mariusz has just received funding from a Polish-Swiss funding call to set up a new PEATBOG-type experiment, investigating the effect of warming on a peatland in Poland so we thought it was the ideal time to meet up and for Mariusz to learn from our experiences. It was really good to have Mariusz’s help in the field and we had some really interesting chats. We really need to find ways to integrate the results of the PEATBOG WP2 and other similar experiments on peatlands across Europe, I think this could be really exciting. At Borth Dr Angela Harris from the University of Manchester also joined us to talk about our plans for remote sensing work.

For some pictures from Mariusz’v vist take a look at his picasa page.

The second bit of old news is that my second nitrogen-related paper has now been accepted in European Journal of Soil Biology. This paper investigated the response of different groups of organisms to nitrogen in Simon’s long-term experiment at Ruabon. We found significant changes in testate amoebae, no evidence for changes in enchytraeid worms but the most marked change in plant communities. Our results are good news for plant-based bioindication, suggesting that changes in plant communities may also represent changes in other components of the ecosystem.

So it’s now the start of the fourth week of the WP2 field experiments which means it’s change-over time with me going to Borth and James to Whixall. We do this so we get a bit of a change of scene and both of us get the advantages of accommodation (better at Whixall) and experiment (easier at Borth). Last week Simon came out to make a start on the veg survey at Whixall and it looks like our qualitative observations of increased cover of cranberry and probably birch are being borne out by the data.

Last year this was the stage of the experiment where I was starting to get tired and do silly things like wiring up the batteries the wrong way round (3 times!). Although this year is undoubtedly easier I think all four of us are pretty knackered and last week at Whixall we made a bit of a hash of the IRGA data through a combination of missing collars and forgetting to properly charge up the kit overnight. Here at Borth the pumping is definately going easier than at Whixall, when it’s working well it’s great to see the water fountaining out of the outflow pipes! That said the water table lowering is not great in all plots and there’s a balance to strike between getting the water table down and burning out the pumps. Today we lost the first impeller blade at Borth and, of course, the only spare was back in Aberystwyth requiring a big trip back to get and then return and install the replacement.

So overall progress is still good but we’ve got a way to go yet!

So, it’s the beginning of week 3 of the field experiments and it’s all going remarkably well, so much better than last year when I was a broken man by this stage! Last Monday was a big day for the experiment with the switch-on of the pumps for the first time. This year we have one new component of the pumping set-up with foot-valves installed at the bottom of each pumping tube to try and keep water in the system. These seem to be working well and mean that we are mostly pumping water, unlike last year when we were mostly pumping air! The other big problem of last year was that the different pumping tubes were filling up at different speeds- I guess due to some fine-scale features of the peat stratigraphy. At the moment this is still causing problems but I have just done some trials with regulator valves to allow us to control each tube independently and these seem to work nicely, we  have a big batch on order. Overall it sounds like the pumping is working nicely at Borth with water table a good 10+cm lower in the pumped plots. Here at Whixall it’s going a bit less well, in one pumped plot the water table is down by the best part of 20cm while in others there’s little or no lowering. The problem is that the bog is so dry (water table at almost 50cm even in some control plots!) that it’s really hard to dry further. Hopefully the new valves will do the trick. As well as the new pumping set-up last week was also made easier by another helpful field assistant as Wayne’s girlfriend Kay joined us out on the bog, thanks for your help Kay! This week Simon will be joining us at Whixall to do the vegetation survey. We only do this once a year and I’m quite excited to see the results. It seems pretty clear that the open top chambers are boosting the cranberry fruiting with loads of berries around the edge of the warmed plots, I really hope that this will show up in the survey results. Less clearly it also looks to me like the warming is encouraging birch. As invasive birch is a big problem at Whixall and many similar sites in the UK, this would be a worrying result for conservation managers.

It took 4 full, strenuous days of field work and a half a day of preparation in the lab but we did it – 15N has been applied on 24 plots at our two field experimental sites at Whixall and Cors Fochno, UK! The working procedure at each site was as follows: on day 1 we sampled peat, plants and pore water for 15N natural abundance and on day 2 we applied the 15N tracer to all our plots. The spraying device with an auto pump (so called ‘Unkrautsprizer’ in German) did marvellous job and I can only recommend it for the future fertilization experiments! It’s unbelievable, but it’s my third time at the sites in UK, and gain I had a marvellous sunny weather, with only a bit of rain at Cors Fochno on Thursday. I guess, the ‘typical English weather’ should be substituted by ‘typical German weather’, meaning rain and temperatures below 20, as this is what we’ve had here since the beginning of summer…

Of course this week would not have turned out to be a success without help of my colleagues. Great thanks to Simon, Richard, Wayne, James, Martin and Joni. You are the BEST!

one of the 1x1m plots

tracer application and the best sprayer ever!

James - the profi peat core taker!