About the Project
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.
Application Process:
Please apply for admission to the ’Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Biological Science’ to ensure that your application is passed to the correct college for processing.
Please provide a copy of the degree certificate and transcript for each previous degree undertaken, a copy of your English language proficiency certificate (if relevant), and contact details of two referees who can comment on your previous academic performance (at least one should be from your current degree programme). Incomplete applications will not be considered.
References
Matthews, R.W. (1996) The influence of carbon budget methodology on assessments of the impacts of forest management on the carbon balance. In: Forest ecosystems, forest management and the global carbon cycle (eds. M.J. Apps and D.T. Price). NATO ASI Series I 40. Springer-Verlag: Berlin, 233-243.
Morison, J., et al. (2012) Estimating C and CHG fluxes during the management cycle (Ch 5., pp73-96). In: Understanding the carbon and greenhouse gas balance of forests in Britain. Forestry Commission Research Report, 149pp
Pyatt, G., et al (2001) An Ecological Site Classification for Forestry in Great Britain. Forestry Commission Bulletin 124. 75pp
Thompson, D.A., Matthews, R.W. (1989) The storage of carbon in trees and timber. Forestry Commission Research Information Note 160. Forestry Commission: Edinburgh, UK.
Smith, J.U., et al. 2010. Estimating changes in national soil carbon stocks using ECOSSE – a new model that includes upland organic soils. Part I. Model description and uncertainty in national scale simulations of Scotland. Climate Research 45, 179-192. doi: 10.3354/cr00899.
Vanguelova, E.I., Nisbet, T.R., Moffat, A.J., Broadmeadow, S., Sanders, T.G.M. and Morison, J.I.L. (2013). A new evaluation of carbon stocks in British forest soils. Soil Use and Management, 29, 2, 169-181.