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Lessons learned in the Antarctic will impact UK agriculture.
“A lot of people see Pathways to Impact as a pain or distraction. But as long as you plan the activities properly and ensure you have at least one good communicator on the team, it is a worthwhile activity.” - Professor Davey Jones, Bangor University
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is well-known across the globe because of its dissemination activities. So when Professor Davey Jones and his colleagues at the University of Bangor applied for a NERC grant to carry out work in the Antarctic, it was only natural that they team up with BAS. “Kevin Newsham from BAS is co-principal investigator on our NERC grant,” explains Professor Jones. “He has done a lot of the Pathways to Impact planning.”
The project will continue Professor Jones’s work into investigating the greening up of the Antarctic. Professor Jones and his colleagues have found that Antarctic hairgrass (Deschampsia Antarctica) is more effective at absorbing organic nitrogen from the soil than the mosses that it lives alongside. “The Antarctic is greening up differently to how we would have predicted,” says Professor Jones. “Some plants are taking over and we need to find out why.”
These findings will be of interest to a wide variety of people, but Professor Jones admits that identifying users for the Pathways to Impact was a challenge. An obvious group of users are policy makers working on climate change. In order to reach these users and make sure they benefit from the research, one of Professor Jones’s post-doc students will be seconded to the UK Polar Regions Unit in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for two weeks each in years 1 and 3 of the project. The purpose of the exchange will be to build links with policy makers and to understand their requirements for research and knowledge exchange. “The main goal will be to produce policy briefing notes, which provide representatives from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research with the latest information on the impact of climate change on the stability of Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems.”
Another set of users identified by Professor Jones are those working in the agricultural industry, specifically the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and companies developing nitrogen fertilizers. “We will be looking in detail at the nitrogen cycle and at how Antarctic hairgrass takes up nitrogen,” says Professor Jones. “Although the work is focused on the polar regions, the fundamental science we hope to address is also highly relevant to the design of sustainable agricultural systems in the UK to make better use of nitrogen fertilizers.”
In order to reach these users, Professor Jones will be using the traditional dissemination routes of journal papers and conference talks. However, he is also considering using the general media too, as he has had a positive experience of publicising a previous research project which culminated in a paper in Nature Climate Change. A press release by BAS generated a large amount of interest and Professor Jones admits that without Pathways to Impact he may not have thought of issuing a press release. Professor Jones’s colleague Paul Hill dealt with most of the press enquiries, which was a time-consuming activity. “A lot of people see Pathways to Impact as a pain or distraction,” admits Professor Jones. “But as long as you plan the activities properly and ensure you have at least one good communicator on the team, it is a worthwhile activity.”
Institution: University of Bangor
Funding council: NERC
Links
BAS press release