Welcome to our blog!

Hi there and welcome to our new blog site for the Water Sciences Group at the University of Birmingham. We are a group of researchers who are interested in all things watery from ecology to water chemistry to hydrology and on! We hope that this page will be a place where we can discuss issues and advances in the science, provide some details of the research that we are doing and keep everyone informed of conferences, publications and such like that are coming up. Please feel free to post as much or as little as you want.

Friday 17 June 2011

Debb Finn gets the prestigious Hynes Award!

Deb Finn and Sandy Milner attended the 2011 Annual Meeting of the North American Benthological Society in Providence, Rhode Island May 22 to the 26th with the subject theme “Responding to the Global Water Crisis”.  Deb, a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow, received the prestigious 2011 Hynes Award for New Investigators for being senior author of an outstanding primary publication in benthic science published within the last three years. The award was for her paper: “Demographic stability metrics for conservation prioritization of isolated populations”, published in Conservation Biology in 2009 (23: 1185–1194). The paper draws on population genetic theory to derive a composite metric of “demographic stability”, which relates observed patterns of mtDNA sequences to a population’s recent history in terms of connectivity, expansion, and bottlenecking.

Deb also presented a paper on her Marie Curie research entitled “Negative biodiversity trends expected in streams following loss of small glaciers in the Pyrenees” with Khamis and Milner as co-authors.  Sandy Milner presented a paper in the same session (Sustaining freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem services) entitled “The effects of changing water quantity and quality in a warming climate on stream biodiversity and ecosystem services within the European Alps” with Brown, Hannah, Khamis and Beniston as co-authors.

It is notable that the North American Benthological Society voted at this meeting to change its name to the Society for Freshwater Science and its journal title (until now “Journal of the North American Benthological Society”) to “Freshwater Science”.


Thursday 2 June 2011

New NERC thematic action plans

NERC have now announced their new thematic action plans for the next 5 years which will involve a 60 million pound investment in these key areas
There are several that are directly relevant to those working in Water Sciences including Flooding from Intense Rainfall, UK droughts and several relating to waste within the environment.  Further information can be found here
 NERC thematic action plans