• Energy Research

Abstract Soil emissions of NO and N2O from typical land uses across Lowland and Highland Scotland were simulated under climate change conditions, during a short-term laboratory study. All locations investigated were significant sources of N2O (range: 157–277 µg N2O–N m−2 h−1) and low-to-moderate sources of NO emissions (range: 0.4–30.5 µg NO–N m−2 h−1), with a general tendency to decrease with altitude and increase with fertiliser and atmospheric N inputs. Simulated climate warming and extreme events (drought, intensive rainfall) increased soil NO pulses and N2O emissions from both natural and managed ecosystems in the following order: natural Highlands < natural Lowlands < grazed grasslands < natural moorland receiving high NH3 deposition rates. Largest NO emission rates were observed from natural moorlands exposed to high NH3 deposition rates. Although soil NO emissions were much smaller (6–660 times) than those of N2O, their impact on air quality is likely to increase as combustion sources of NO x are declining as a result of successful mitigation. This study provides evidence of high N emission rates from natural ecosystems and calls for urgent action to improve existing national and intergovernmental inventories for NO and N2O, which at present do not fully account for emissions from natural soils receiving no direct anthropogenic N inputs.

Abstract This review identifies the major trends in physical, chemical and biological data between 1993 and 2007 at the 12 terrestrial sites in the United Kingdom Environmental Change Network (ECN) and assesses the effectiveness of the programme. Temperature and precipitation increased and sulphur (S) deposition decreased across the network. There were also significant local trends in nitrogen (N) deposition. The decreasing S deposition was associated with increasing pH of rainfall and soils and there was widespread evidence of soil pH showing recovery from acidification. Warm-adapted butterfly species tended to increase at northern, upland sites, consistent with an effect of increasing temperatures. In contrast, carabid beetle species associated with cooler northern and upland areas showed declining populations. The increasing trend in precipitation may account for a decline in ruderal plant species in the lowlands, reversing an increase associated with drought in the early part of the time series. There was no general shift in the composition of plant communities which might reflect rising soil pH. This may reflect the slow dynamics of plant community processes or a distinction between pH trends at the surface and lower soil horizons. The ECN is effective in detecting trends in a range of different variables at contrasting sites. Its strength is the ability to monitor causes and consequences of environmental change in the same programme, improving the ability to attribute causes of change, which is essential to developing conservation policy and management in the 21st century.

Understanding the responses of tundra systems to global change has global implications. Most tundra regions lack sustained environmental monitoring and one of the only ways to document multi-decadal change is to resample historic research sites. The International Polar Year (IPY) provided a unique opportunity for such research through the Back to the Future (BTF) project (IPY project #512). This article synthesizes the results from 13 papers within this Ambio Special Issue. Abiotic changes include glacial recession in the Altai Mountains, Russia; increased snow depth and hardness, permafrost warming, and increased growing season length in sub-arctic Sweden; drying of ponds in Greenland; increased nutrient availability in Alaskan tundra ponds, and warming at most locations studied. Biotic changes ranged from relatively minor plant community change at two sites in Greenland to moderate change in the Yukon, and to dramatic increases in shrub and tree density on Herschel Island, and in subarctic Sweden. The population of geese tripled at one site in northeast Greenland where biomass in non-grazed plots doubled. A model parameterized using results from a BTF study forecasts substantial declines in all snowbeds and increases in shrub tundra on Niwot Ridge, Colorado over the next century. In general, results support and provide improved capacities for validating experimental manipulation, remote sensing, and modeling studies.

Data are collected by Automatic Weather Stations at all of ECN's terrestrial sites using a standard protocol. Prior to deposit of the data in the EIDC, data are managed by the ECN Data Centre at CEH Lancaster according to defined protocols. Verification steps include numeric range checks (i.e. checking if a value falls within a specified range), categorical checks (e.g. checking that a species code appears on the standard code list), formatting (i.e. that the dataset conforms to the specified data format) and logical integrity checks (i.e. checking the data make sense, e.g. that the dates in one dataset match those in a related dataset). Appropriate range settings for ECN variables have been selected following discussion with specialists in each field. Where data fall outside these ranges, a cautious approach has been adopted towards discarding data on the principle that apparent errors may be valid outliers. Such values are discarded only if there is a clear explanation (e.g. an instrumentation error) and corrections are made where possible. If the reason is unclear, the values are stored, but are qualified using pre-defined quality codes or free-text descriptions. Data providers also use these codes or free text to describe factors affecting sampling outside their control, instrument damage or site management effects. Meteorology data from the UK Environmental Change Network (ECN) terrestrial sites. Variables measured include albedo (ground and sky), temperature (dry bulb, wet bulb and soil (at 10cm and 30cm)), relative humidity, radiation (net. and solar), rainfall, surface wetness, soil moisture, wind direction and wind speed. These data are collected by Automatic Weather Stations at all of ECN's terrestrial sites using a standard protocol. They represent continuous hourly records from 1991 to 2015. ECN is the UK's long-term environmental monitoring programme. It is a multi-agency programme sponsored by a consortium of fourteen government departments and agencies. These organisations contribute to the programme through funding either site monitoring and/or network co-ordination activities. These organisations are: Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru - Natural Resources Wales, Defence Science & Technology Laboratory, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Environment Agency, Forestry Commission, Llywodraeth Cymru - Welsh Government, Natural England, Natural Environment Research Council, Northern Ireland Environment Agency, Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Scottish Government and Scottish Natural Heritage.

AbstractCurrent analyses and predictions of spatially explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long‐term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate‐forcing factors that operate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions are overlooked. This is particularly important in relation to effects of observation height (e.g. vegetation, snow and soil characteristics) and in habitats varying in their exposure to radiation, moisture and wind (e.g. topography, radiative forcing or cold‐air pooling). Since organisms living close to the ground relate more strongly to these microclimatic conditions than to free‐air temperatures, microclimatic ground and near‐surface data are needed to provide realistic forecasts of the fate of such organisms under anthropogenic climate change, as well as of the functioning of the ecosystems they live in. To fill this critical gap, we highlight a call for temperature time series submissions to SoilTemp, a geospatial database initiative compiling soil and near‐surface temperature data from all over the world. Currently, this database contains time series from 7,538 temperature sensors from 51 countries across all key biomes. The database will pave the way toward an improved global understanding of microclimate and bridge the gap between the available climate data and the climate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions relevant to most organisms and ecosystem processes.