EMG Projects

People

• William van Dijk
• Ana Carolina Atala Lombelo Campos
• Alex Douglas
• David Salt
• Pete Smith

This project combines geographic information systems and genetic approaches to identify the genes that control the way plants take up mineral nutrients found in fertilizers such as potassium and phosphorus and potential toxic substances such as sodium (for the plant), and arsenic and cadmium (for humans that eat the plants). By understanding how different forms of the genes we discover are used by plants to allow them to grow in soils containing different levels of mineral nutrients or potentially toxic elements we can understand the role these genes play in allowing plants to adapt to the varied soil conditions they are exposed to in their natural habitats. A better understanding of these adaptations in natural populations of plants would have significant practical benefits for agriculture by providing the information needed for the development of new varieties of crops better able to provide the increased yields needed to meet the future demand for more cereals for biofuels, more grain for meat, and more food for the additional 2 billion people expected by 2050.

The approach will combine genome-wide association mapping (validated by linkage mapping and molecular genetics) with landscape scale modelling. It utilizes the large pool of genetic diversity in natural populations of A. thaliana to identify genes, alleles and mechanisms of value in adaptation to the varied edaphic conditions A. thaliana populations encounter across the landscape. Once characterized this natural diversity offers potentially new approaches to manipulate such agriculturally important traits as salinity tolerance and mineral nutrient efficiency to develop crop varieties that are more resilient to the predicted impacts of climate change on soil fertility, and to improve yields in a more sustainable manner to deliver the yield gains required to meet future population growth.

People

• Matthias Kuhnert
• Pete Smith

The project FACCE MACSUR is organised as a Knowledge-Hub and has the aim to link agricultural modelling approaches with political aspects and agricultural trade.

The objective is to determine the impact of climate change on the food production in Europe. As part of the project scaling and the impact of data aggregation on simulation results is one emphasis.

For a study area (about 34000 km²) input data are aggregated for 5 different scales (1km², 10 km², 25km², 50km² and 100 km² grid cells) and ecosystem relevant variables are simulated by 13 different models (crop and biogeochemical models). More details are on the web page http://www.scale-it.net/ .

People

• Dr Mohamed Abdalla
• Dr Mark Richards
• Prof Pete Smith

Website

• Glastir

The Welsh Government is committed to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture, protecting the environment and combating the effects of future climate change. To achieve these objectives, the Glastir programme is in force, in which farmers are financially supported to adopt a range of on-farm measures to protect soil C, reduce GHG emissions, improve water quality and enhance biodiversity. As part of this project we are simulating GHG and soil organic carbon (SOC) fluxes for Wales using ECOSSE-model.

The main aims of the ECOSSE simulations were: 1) to estimate average annual GHG and SOC fluxes for Wales; 2) to investigate the effects of the reduced N fertilizer application Glastir measure on GHG fluxes; and 3) to investigate the impacts of future climate change on the fluxes of GHG and SOC and plant net primary productivity (NPP).

People

• Mark Richards
• Pete Smith

Website

• www.greenhouse-gases.org.uk/greenhouse

GREENHOUSE uses extensive existing UK field data and targeted new measurements to build accurate greenhouse gases (GHG) inventories and improve the capabilities of two land surface models (JULES and CTESSEL) to estimate GHG emissions.

Sinks and sources of GHGs vary in space and time across the UK because of the landscape's mosaic of managed and semi-natural ecosystems, and the varying temporal sensitivities of each GHG's emissions to meteorology and management.

Understanding spatio-temporal patterns of biogenic GHG emissions will lead to improvements in flux estimates, allow creation of inventories with greater sensitivity to management and climate, and advance the modelling of feedbacks between climate, land use and GHG emissions.

GREENHOUSE is a collaborative effort involving 20 organisations. Our role within this consortium is to build CH₄ and N₂O emissions emulators of three established soil models: ECOSSE, Landscape DNDC and DailyDayCent. The model emulators will be embedded in the CTESSEL land surface model to enable it to simulate soil CH₄ and N₂O emissions.

People

• Nuala Fitton
• Arindam Datta
• Pete Smith

Website

• www.ghgplatform.org.uk/Home/WhatistheGHGResearchPlatform.aspx

This project seeks to improve the accuracy and resolution of our reporting system by providing new experimental evidence on the factors affecting emissions and statistics relevant to changing farming practices in the UK. It will provide the evidence for a UK specific method of calculating methane and nitrous oxide emissions that will reflect the adoption of mitigation practices by the industry, enabling the forecasting and monitoring of performance against target emissions reductions set by the UK Climate Change Act. This will build upon previous research, combining field experimentation, modelling and scoping of data sources to fill knowledge gaps.

The overall platform is divided into three separate work packages, the work packages we are directly involved in include:

AC0114 - Data synthesis, modelling and management

This aims to provide a synthesis of existing and new evidence on GHG emission factors and the effectiveness of mitigating measure. This will involve use of computer models linked to survey data to develop improved methodologies that will represent the spatial pattern of agricultural activities and inputs across the UK in relation to climate and soil types.

AC0116 - Measurement of nitrous oxide emissions from soils

Key soils and climate zones and sources of the N₂O that have been identified as requiring further measurements to generate country specific emission factors were identified within this project. Then based on a clear set of protocols that cover experimental design, data handling and other aspects, N₂O measurements will be collated over an year. Measurements made as part of this project will then be used to calibrate mechanistic models such as DailyDayCent and Landscape DNDC. From this we will then generate spatial emissions of N₂O based on the most recent survey data and in addition test the potentiality of some mitigation strategies for both grass and cropland across the UK.

People

• Nuala Fitton
• Ed Jones
• Pete Smith

Website

• www.climatexchange.org.uk

ClimateXChange's aim is to provide independent advice, research and analysis to support the Scottish Government as it develops and implements policies on adapting to the changing climate and the transition to a low carbon society.

CXC's ongoing woodlands project builds on existing work in the RESAS Strategic Research Programme (SRP), specifically the work on soil carbon and woodland expansion for multiple benefits, by focusing on the implications of different woodland planting scenarios in different areas of Scotland for net Global Warming Potential. As part of this collaborative project we aim to simulate the effect of land use change to forestry on soil C stocks across Scotland. To do this land cover and soils data will be combined with different tree species suitability, yield and productivity and their effect on soil C will be simulated until 2050 under both current climate conditions and future climate change (as outlined in UKCP09).

People

• Marvin Beckert

The carbon sequestration potential of soils depends on the turnover time of the organic carbon inputs. Carbon turnover models partition soil carbon into distinct pools with different turnover times. Soil carbon fractionation methods can relate those model pools to measurable soil fractions. Approaches have been developed that successfully relate mineral soil fractions to model pools, but those approaches fail for highly organic soils.

Carbon stabilisation is mostly achieved by physical protection in mineral soils, whereas organic soil stabilisation depends on environmental conditions and chemical recalcitrance. Based on existing approaches, a fractionation scheme that can potentially expand fractionation to organic soils is developed. The approach combines a widely tested mineral soil fractionation scheme with a chemical fractionation method to capture the full range of stabilisation mechanisms in mineral, organo-mineral and organic soils.

The fractions, ranging from labile to highly recalcitrant, are tested against modelled pools of the RothC/ECOSSE soil carbon turnover model. The approach is tested on mineral and peaty soil samples in Scotland and Tasmanian moorland peat samples to capture the processes of a wide range of peat forming materials and climates.

Both the Scottish and the Tasmanian ecosystems are subjected to regular burning and the influence of those burning regimes of the formation of labile and stabilized carbon pools will also be investigated. These data can help to estimate the long term carbon storage capabilities of those locally and globally important ecosystems.

People

• Fitri Aini

This work is measuring greenhouse gas fluxes in mineral soils where indigenous forest has been converted to oil palm and rubber plantation and measuring the effect of land use change on greenhouse gas emissions.

To measure the impact of this land use change, we assessed the impact of forest change to rubber and oil palm plantations on nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in Pasir Mayang, Jambi, Sumatra.

We conducted measurements over fourteen months in a forest, disturbed forest, one year rubber plantation, twenty years rubber plantation and eight years oil palm plantation. Intensive daily measurements were taken following fertilizer application in the oil palm plantation.

All of the plantations are managed by smallholder farmers and have never been fertilised. To assess the effect of common farmer management practices, we add nitrogen fertilizer (urea) at a rate of 33.3 kg N ha-1.

There was no seasonal variability measured in this area for CH4 and CO2 fluxes. Termite activity is measured to explain the trends in CH4 fluxes as there is evidence that termites have a significant impact on CH4 emissions.

This project will simulate soil carbon change and greenhouse gas emissions from UK forests, under current and future conditions. The project will couple a model of organic matter turnover and greenhouse gas emissions from soils, with models describing the greenhouse gas balance in forest vegetation.

The soil model used will be ECOSSE (Smith et al., 2010). The forest vegetation models will be the ESC (Pyatt et al., 2001), Carbine (Thompson and Matthews, 1989; Matthews, 1996) and CSORT (Morison et al., 2012) family of models.

The simulations will be evaluated against the extensive forest soil datasets available at Forest Research, including the 220 Biosoil network sites (Vanguelova et al., 2013).

Additional sites will be included where pair wise plot comparisons allow sequential model calibration and evaluation; this will provide the opportunity for a more detail analysis of model performance.

The model will be used to simulate greenhouse gas balances and changes in soils in forests across the UK under different scenarios of land use and climate change.

This information will be valuable to both policy makers and the Forestry Commission for quantifying the greenhouse gas mitigation potential of current and future forestry planting schemes.

Termites are considered ecosystem engineers, and in some cases keystone species in tropical and subtropical regions, and aside from being well documented pests of crops and timber, play major roles in ecosystem functioning via their various effects on soils. Their roles as agents of decomposition and in nutrient cycling, soil processing and formation is particularly important in dryland areas where fungal and bacterial influence on soils tends to be less significant.

This project will seek to characterise the diversity of the termite community in areas of land across a soil restoration gradient, using the Alaba watershed in southern Ethiopia as a case study.

Soil erosion and loss of agriculturally productive land is a major concern in Ethiopia, including the study area, where exclosure zones have been established of differing ages in the hope of mitigating the effects of soil degradation, and restoring soils back to productive use.

The spatial influence of distinct functional groups of termites on key ecological properties relating to soil carbon, water and nutrients in the landscape will be characterised across a soil restoration gradient, by mapping their mounds at the landscape level in different land use zones across the study area.

Field sampling and laboratory analyses of soils and termites will be employed to obtain detailed information on ecological properties using standard environmental methods (such as soil Carbon, Nitrogen, texture and moisture in the field) as well as isotopic analysis back in laboratories at the James Hutton Institute.

Management changes associated with increasing soil carbon will also be investigated for their potential effect on termite diversity and, by extension, implications for ecosystem functioning.

This project will investigate

i) techniques for mapping ecosystem services and ecosystem service beneficiaries,

ii) how investments in wetland ecosystem can be made to maximise multiple objectives and mitigate trade-offs among stakeholders.

Research will develop a better understanding of the supply of ecosystem services from wetland organic soils; how wetland ecosystem services are generated and distributed within the landscape, and how ecosystem service benefits are appropriated and by whom.

This understanding will be used to analyse trade-offs from wetland investments under different wetland management scenarios.

This will build an analysis framework to guide targeted investments for sustainable wetland management in Uganda for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and alleviation of poverty.

This project is in collaboration with the James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen.

People:

• Jo Smith
• Saeed Karbin

Timeline:

• 2025-2026

Description:

This NERC-funded project investigates the environmental and ecological factors driving methane (CH₄) emissions from tropical peatlands—critical carbon stores and significant contributors to rising atmospheric methane levels.

The project reduces uncertainties in CH₄ flux estimates by integrating long-term field measurements with advanced modelling. Fieldwork takes place in the Pastaza-Marañón Foreland Basin in Peru, where researchers measure CH₄ fluxes alongside ecosystem productivity, peat properties, and nutrient dynamics across peatlands with varying vegetation types and nutrient availability.

The project aims to model CH₄ emissions at the field scale and upscale these estimates to the regional level. It develops a simple, scalable model that operates effectively with limited data inputs, making it suitable for broader application in data-scarce regions.

To achieve this, the team links CH₄ production to biological activity, which is simulated using the ECOSSE model. Methane production is also correlated with CO₂ levels, providing a practical method for estimating CH₄ fluxes. The model incorporates newly collected data from Central African peatlands—an ecologically similar but understudied region—and applies the refined model to upscale CH₄ flux estimates across South American peatlands. This approach also tests hypotheses about the drivers of increasing CH₄ emissions, including changes in hydrology, vegetation inputs, and climate warming.

Collaborating Institutions:

• University of Nottingham
• Cranfield University

People:

• Jo Smith
• Saeed Karbin

Timeline:

• 2023-2025

Description:

ELGAR is one of three interconnected research projects within the Hydrogen Environmental Impacts Programme, funded by UKRI/NERC and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). Running from 2023 to 2025, the programme explores the environmental implications of a hydrogen-based energy future, focusing on emissions, atmospheric chemistry, and soil interactions.

Hydrogen (H₂) is a secondary greenhouse gas that indirectly extends the atmospheric lifetime of methane by competing for hydroxyl radicals. Soils serve as a major sink for atmospheric hydrogen, making it critical to understand and predict hydrogen uptake at regional and global scales.

ELGAR aims to improve the modelling of soil hydrogen sinks by integrating laboratory experiments and field observations. Unlike previous models that emphasized abiotic factors, ELGAR introduces a novel microbial activity rate modifier, highlighting the role of soil organic carbon (SOC) in regulating microbial hydrogen uptake.

The project uses the RothC model to simulate microbial activity based on climate data and soil properties such as texture, pH, electrical conductivity (EC), and SOC. This approach accounts for both current and historical climate influences and enhances estimates of hydrogen deposition velocity across diverse datasets.

Collaborating Institutions:

• UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
• University of East Anglia
• University of Bristol

ELGAR works alongside two sister projects—HECTER and COSH-AIR—to provide a comprehensive understanding of hydrogen’s environmental footprint.

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