Research Facilities and Field Sites
Soil and Ecosystem Ecology Laboratory has state of the art facilities for the measurement of a wide range of soil biological properties and of nutrients in environmental samples, including soils, plant material and waters. The laboratory also has state of the art facilities for measurement of soil carbon pools and fluxes, and for assessment of microbial community structure, activity and biomass.
Hazelrigg Field Station is on the University campus and provides facilities for field manipulation experiments and large-scale mesocosm studies. The famed solar domes are also located at Hazelrigg, and provide facilities for controlled glasshouse experiments on aspects of global change. Current experiments at Hazelrigg are examining how changes in plant diversity and composition influence ecosystem service delivery in mixed grassland communities. These studies are coupled with field-based stable isotope labeling facilities that allow the tracing of carbon through the plant-soil system.
Insect and Parasite Ecology Laboratory has extensive facilities for the maintenance and analysis of insects and their natural enemies, as well as immune function assays. This includes a state of the art suite of constant environment rooms and glasshouses for culturing invertebrates and their host plants. Insects regularly maintained in culture include Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Orthoptera and Hemiptera; natural enemies include baculoviruses, bacteria, entomophagous fungi, ento mopathogenic nematodes, parasitoids and predatory beetles. We also have microscopes, spectrometers, spectrophotometers, PCR machines, DGGE apparatus and access to TGGE, HPLC, GC-MS and LC-MS facilities for assaying various aspects of insect immune function and physiology.
Bird Behaviour and Ecology Facilities: We have local access to a colour-ringed, nest-box breeding population of blue tits, which have been used in a variety of behavioural and ecological studies, especially relating to family conflicts, parental care and mating system research. Additionally, we have a captive breeding population of zebra finches which have been used for more closely controlled experiments on sexual and parent-offspring conflict.
Colt Park Meadows, Yorkshire Dales National Park: Our work at Colt Park, which is about 20 miles from Lancaster, is exploring links between the restoration of botanical diversity in agriculturally improved meadows and the delivery of various ecosystem services, including soil carbon sequestration. These studies are based on a long term biodiversity restoration experiment at Colt Park, managed by Natural England, and have been supported by funding from Defra and BBSRC. More recently, studies at Colt Park have been examining the impact of re-wilding on small mammals, their parasites and their food supply, and biogeochemical cycling.
Moor House National Nature Reserve: Our work at Moor House National Nature Research (NNR), which is approximately 60 miles from Lancaster, focuses on peatlands, and how plant species and their functional groups (mosses, graminoids, and shrubs) affect carbon cycling and nutrient dynamics under climate and land use change. As well as using the natural environment for observational studies, we make use of a long-term experiment that has manipulated fire frequency and grazing for more than 50 years, and have recently set up a plant functional group diversity and climate change experiment. This work will provide significant insight into how changes in plant communities in response to different management practices and climate change affect carbon cycling.
Thiaki Creek Rainforest property, North Queensland, Australia. We are working in the Australian Wet tropics exploring the effects of rainforest modification and fragmentation on the diversity of insects (butterflies and dung beetles). We have just started a long-term reforestation experiment testing several approaches for reforesting cattle pasture into secondary rainforest for the purpose of recovery of native biodiversity.
European Mountains. We are surveying dung beetles in several mountain areas across Europe. Our work is trying to understand the effect of climate warming on species distributions, biodiversity and the consequences for ecosystem services provided by this group of insects (UK sites: North Pennines, Snowdonia; French sites: Vanoise NP and Mercantour NP; Spanish sites: Picos de Europa NP, Sierra de Gredos and Sierra Nevada NP).
Amazonian research base, Jari, Brazil. Jos Barlow is coordinating a long-term biodiversity monitoring program in the Jari region of the Brazilian Amazon. The research base is in the small town of Monte Dourado which provides access to a variety of different forest types across a 1.7 million hectare landholding (picture). Visit their website for more details of the biodiversity research that has been carried out in this region.