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Monthly Archives: October 2019

Drinking water ponds in southern Bangladesh: blending traditional and scientific management approaches

Drinking water ponds in southern Bangladesh: blending traditional and scientific management approaches

We are looking for a student with strong interests in freshwater sciences and complex development problems to work with a large transdisciplinary international team. Bangladesh has a profound drinking water crisis which threatens the country’s 160 million inhabitants. Contamination of groundwater with arsenic or salinity has rendered many drinking water sources either unusable or linked […]

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Abundance within species’ ranges: understanding species’ responses to environmental change

Abundance within species’ ranges: understanding species’ responses to environmental change

Accelerated climate change and environmental degradation make it necessary to improve our understanding of, and ability to predict, species’ responses to environmental change. The availability of large-scale species distribution databases and information on environmental change, e.g. from satellite measurements, has resulted in thousands of studies using data on species’ geographical ranges to predict their movements […]

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Drivers of tropical freshwater biodiversity: a DNA metabarcoding approach

Drivers of tropical freshwater biodiversity: a DNA metabarcoding approach

We are looking for a versatile student with a keen interest in tropical freshwater ecology and conservation, and willing to undertake exciting molecular analyses to define biodiversity. This project will assess the patterns and drivers of freshwater invertebrate diversity in a Bornean river basin. This will be done by combining methods from hydro-ecology, molecular ecology […]

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The evolution of mimicry in a changing world: how shifting bumblebee communities affect selection on a colour-polymorphic hoverfly

The evolution of mimicry in a changing world: how shifting bumblebee communities affect selection on a colour-polymorphic hoverfly

Complex species interactions make the impacts of global environmental change difficult to foresee. Understanding the ecological and evolutionary relationships between species, and the way that the fitness of a species is affected by changes in community composition, is essential in order to predict shifts in species distributions and patterns of biodiversity. In this project, we […]

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Tracing the Anthropocene, its history and hazards

Tracing the Anthropocene, its history and hazards

You have probably heard of the Anthropocene? But, what is it and when did it actually begin? Scientists are certainly still arguing over the second of these questions. The most recent epoch in Earth’s history is defined by the pollution that Man has created – microplastics, technofossils and synthetic chemicals, to name but three. Radioactive […]

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Clean air for all? Air pollution, deprivation and health

Clean air for all? Air pollution, deprivation and health

Poor outdoor air quality, particularly that associated with high concentrations of very fine particles (PM2.5) has been identified globally as a major cause of early mortality. In the UK, DEFRA have identified it as the country’s largest environmental health risk, contributing to long-term illness and shorter life expectancy. This impact appears to be greatest in […]

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Maya collapse: solar irradiance and drought

Maya collapse: solar irradiance and drought

The potential role of changes in total solar irradiance (TSI) (sun spots) in driving climatic variability has been widely cited and hotly debated. This is particularly true in the tropical Americas, where a ~200 year irradiance cycle, has been identified in a number of key records, including Lake Chichancanab, in the Maya lowlands of southern […]

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Soil microbes to mitigate climate change

Soil microbes to mitigate climate change

Human populations are expected to increase by 50% to 9 billion by 2050 as climate change continues. The global challenge is to manage terrestrial ecosystems sustainably whilst mitigating climate change. One option is to reverse global soil organic carbon (SOC) losses and increase soil carbon stocks by 0.4% per year (i.e. the ‘4 per mille’ […]

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Reducing Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Emissions – RAGGE

Reducing Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Emissions ‘RAGGE’

Nitrogen inputs into agricultural systems are an essential requirement for healthy, high yielding crop production, but they can also result in the release of excess N either by leaching or by emission of the highly reactive greenhouse gas (GHG) N2O. In the UK, direct N2O emissions from soil accounted for about 50.5% of all N2O […]

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Soil ecological function in a 163 year grassland experiment

Soil ecological function in a 163 year grassland experiment

The need to produce healthy and food sustainably is reliant on healthy soil. This is certainly true of grassland ecosystems on which over half of the people of the Earth rely for their livelihoods and wellbeing. Grasslands supply food, fibre, fuel and more to humans globally and are under pressure and management to deliver more. […]

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