Nature Based Solutions Research Centre

Good land management plays an essential role in ensuring that the Earth system is protected whilst sustaining the growing global population. Legislation agreed between nations commits the UK to delivering good land management. But there is an information deficit with regards to the beneficial and harmful outcomes of different land management practices, and many problems effectively translating science into policy (Stringer and Dougill 2013). 

Globally, many of the UN sustainable development goals (United Nations, 2012; Griggs et al 2013) are underpinned by aspirations for better land management (e.g. goals 1, 2, 6, 7, 12, 13, 15) which needs to be evidence-based but also accounting for regional differences and the needs of people to exploit the land.

The Cuckoo Tors research site is a degraded upland area, similar to many such sites in the UK and globally which are of marginal productive value but have substantial potential, with appropriate management, to underpin government actions to ensure a sustainable future for everyone.

What we are doing:

In 2021, we started research at Cuckoo Tors to provide data and evidence to support the above needs. Importantly, we are working with stakeholders in the surrounding area to help us deliver the complex accounting of benefits and costs from different perspectives that are needed to enable positive climate actions to be taken. The combined ecosystem services of the adjoining Combs Moss moorland is likely to be worth millions and these services can be sold to relevant stakeholders to pay for works and protections for those services – including water storage, biodiversity protection, carbon storage, and flood risk mitigation. For this to happen, it is essential that the ecosystem services are auditable. So, robust monitoring needs to be established to measure benefits over the long term – which is exactly what we set out to do with the research at Cuckoo Tors.

It is important to note that selling only the “carbon” services unlikely to be viable here and elsewhere; it is necessary to stack the multiple benefits into a package to make these projects work. Hence, through stacking of environmental benefits, the full scope of environmental science in encompassed within the university’s net zero theme. This project also has global reach through its role in the global research network DRAGnet (Disturbances and Resources Across Global Grasslands).

Key information:

Uplands are crucial ecosystems, recognised for their role in carbon storage, hydrology and as a habitat. Peatlands, in particular, are the most widespread type of wetland that covers about 3% of the world’s land area. The UK hosts up to 15 % of European peatlands and these have been designated in the EU and UK Biological Action Plan as a priority habitat (Littlewood et al., 2010). Lal (2001) notes that approximately 80% of ecosystem services are connected to soils and thus research into the effects of different land uses on soil health should be a key focus with the vital aim to restore soil function.  

• Soils store 3x more carbon than vegetation  
• Soils contain 2x more carbon than the atmosphere  
• The soil to atmosphere carbon flux (~98 Pg/year) is about 10x more than that from fossil fuels and cement manufacturing (~9 Pg/year) [2010]  
• The net carbon flux from soils is imbalanced by land management change (e.g. cutting down forests).  
• Microbial respiration is the main mechanism for carbon loss from soils into atmosphere  

A report from the Office for National Statistics evaluated peatlands as covering 12% of the UK land area (2,962,626 hectares) and providing a quarter of drinking water supplies. In this report, they estimate the cost of restoring 100 % of peatlands as being between £8 - 22billion. Considerably less than the 2020 budget committed to road building. Although it sounds like a lot, the analysis found that the carbon emission benefits of doing that restoration would be worth much more than the expenditure (5 to 10-fold).

Globally, grasslands make up approximately 40% of the earth's land surface area. As such they form an important ecosystem and supply vital ecosystem services such as nectar provisioning. They hold substantial carbon stocks, currently estimated to be 50% greater than that of forests. However, over the last decade, 20% of grasslands have been converted to other land uses, and many are degraded.

Agricultural grasslands and their management are complex. They are often grazed by livestock which can affect the plant communities, in turn affecting biodiversity, biomass, soil characteristics and carbon balances. As a result, there are complex relationships between grassland management, productivity, biodiversity and ecosystem services.

These complexities, combined with the large variety of grasslands and farming practices, and the variety of stakeholders, make it very difficult to optimise the management of grasslands. Adding to these difficulties is the relatively low amount of data from grasslands, particularly long-term data. This is something that we are trying to address in our work.

What we are doing:

We have been running a long-term experiment in a lightly grazed meadow at Meynell Langley Estate, just outside Derby. This is composed of 113, 3m X 3m quadrats for each of which we have been recording the coverage of every plant species each year for the last 10 years. For the last five years we have also recorded the biomass produced (productivity) in each quadrat. We are also able to estimate nectar production and structural complexity (often a good proxy for invertebrate diversity). Three years ago, we also took soil samples in order to characterise the soil in each quadrat as well as the soil microbial and fungal communities. At the start of the project, one of three treatments was applied to each of the quadrats: control, scarification of the soil or scarification of the soil plus the sowing of wildflower seed. This has enabled us to track the changes resulting from these management strategies over the long-term, and importantly we have high replication (at least 31 replicates for each treatment). 

A second project is complementing this work, but is focussed on examining aspects of grasslands at a larger, landscape spatial scale. The primary aim of this project is to examine the relationship between plant diversity and carbon fluxes between the soil and the atmosphere. Fluxes will be measured across the landscape at Meynell Langley across the yearly cycle. Importantly, the same approach will also be applied at another field site (Cuckoo Tors) at higher elevation near Buxton, allowing for a comparison of the two systems.

Along with the experimental work, we are also part of a collaboration taking a modelling approach. The aim is to explore how different relationships between key components (biodiversity, productivity, land management) interact and affect the optimisation of land-use. Of course, optimisation is dependent on the specific primary goals, and these will change between stakeholders. There are often strong trade-offs between biodiversity and land productivity. We are trying to understand these complex relationships, and how management options taken now, may impact on the options available, and what can be achieved at a later date. 

We believe that by combining experimental work, long-term monitoring, modelling approaches and working with landowners we are more likely to achieve a level of understanding of the complex and important grassland ecosystems and their management. This will enable us to be able to design appropriate management strategies for balancing levels of biodiversity, productivity and ecological impact.

Coral reefs and neighbouring habitats such as seagrass beds are ecologically and economically immensely valuable. More than 500 million people are directly dependent on them. However, they are deteriorating rapidly at a global scale due to environmental impacts caused by anthropogenic activities.

These effects are both direct (e.g. pollution, overfishing), and indirect (e.g. increasing sea surface temperatures due to climate change). The result is the impaired health of the key ecosystem engineers such as the corals themselves and the seagrass plants.  
It has been estimated that, globally, more than 50% of coral reefs and 58% of seagrass meadows have already been lost since the Industrial Revolution. Coral mortality has increased in frequency and intensity in the last two decades and, by 2030, 90% of reefs may become functionally extinct. That gives us only eight years to stop and reverse the devastation we are seeing.  

While political policy mechanisms must be used to reduce the causes of climate change, our researchers are seeking practical ways to conserve corals and seagrass meadows for as long as possible. To achieve this, we are investigating several approaches.  

What we are doing:

We are working on several projects with our international collaborators, which includes: 

• Creating probiotics (a cocktail of ‘beneficial’ bacteria) which can improve the health of corals and seagrass, making them more resistant to diseases and the impacts of increased sea surface temperatures  
• Developing novel technology to aid coral restoration efforts around the world, and partnering with companies to ensure these are delivered where they need to be.

“What makes our work special (in our eyes) is our close collaborations with other groups from charities, trusts, universities and the United Nations and other policy makers. These tight collaborations span many countries and continents, including projects running in America, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Maldives, Brazil, and Palau.” - Dr Michael Sweet

Probiotics for coral:

One strand of our research focuses on the microbial communities that are associated with corals. These are the groups of microorganisms which share the corals’ living space.

As with any animal, corals host rich and diverse microbial communities, often referred to as the coral’s ‘microbiome’. Unlike most other animals, however, corals also host single-cell algae from the family Symbiodiniaceae. These algae are extremely important to the corals, as they provide the corals with essential nutrition.  

Other microbes, for instance, bacteria acquire and recycle nutrients for the coral. They are also involved in mechanisms that support the coral’s immunity. The coral microbiome therefore plays a crucial role in the health of corals, and this becomes particularly relevant when the corals are stressed due to climate change impacts.

In this context, we co-created an international network, the Beneficial Microorganisms of Marine Organisms (BMMO), to assist in the understanding of the functions of specific microbes and to investigate the potential for employing them as ‘probiotics’. 
The goal is to apply microbes to corals, like humans eating probiotic yogurts to support the microbial community in their gut. This has the potential to offer increased resilience of some corals in the face of ongoing environmental changes.

Cultivating microbes:

The manipulation of microbes for specific purposes has been successful in plant research. For example, to clean contaminated soil and water, and in aquaculture (the farming in water of fish, shellfish, aquatic plants etc). In comparison, coral probiotics is very much in its infancy.

However, due to improved laboratory techniques, large portions of the coral microbiome are now culturable, meaning we can cultivate them in the lab. This has led us to identify the first collection of bacterial groups which, upon inoculation of corals, increase coral resilience to heat stress.

However, the enormous complexity of the coral microbiome presents a substantial challenge to identifying specific functions of individual key or core microbes, and the mechanism by which they benefit their host.

“Our team is amongst the world leaders in culturing marine microbes – from this starting point we can address a wide range of questions regarding probiotics. For example: how does the symbiosis between corals and their microbial partners really work? And can we manipulate the seagrass microbiome to make plants more resistant to disease?

We really believe in the power of our tiny microbial partners, and exploring how they shape and drive functionality in any given host always brings to light something exciting and novel with each and every experiment we undertake.” - Dr Michael Sweet

We have now turned our attention to seagrass meadows. Seagrasses are coastal ecosystems capable of sequestering carbon faster than most terrestrial systems and can store carbon for millennia. However, like many marine habitats, seagrasses are threatened by anthropogenic impacts and are in decline worldwide.

Our research is now exploring how we can help seagrass restoration through microbiome manipulation and probiotics using beneficial bacteria which may help seagrass to grow, survive and tolerate stress after transplantation. Through this research, we may be able to slow down marine habitat degradation and contribute to the fight against global climate change.

As coral reefs continue to degrade at an alarming rate, a research team at the University of Derby are helping to turn the tide with a ground-breaking approach to rearing young corals which could be transplanted onto damaged reefs.

Since 2014, the University’s Aquatic Research Facility, which sits within the Nature-based Solutions Research Centre, has developed a world-leading framework to tackle the pressures climate change has placed on coral reef health and reproduction. Although based thousands of miles away from the environments it strives to protect, the research team has influenced conservation projects in many locations including mainland Europe (Germany, France, Portugal), the Maldives, Palau, Guam, the United States of America, Saudi Arabia, Australia and British Overseas Territories such as the Cayman Islands.

The value of coral reefs, both ecologically and economically, cannot be overstated. Containing some of the planet’s most diverse ecosystems (they are home to approximately 25% of all marine life), they also sustain thousands of jobs and provide income for local, regional and national economies through the fishing and tourism industries. However, according to UNESCO, the majority of the world’s reefs are in grave danger of dying out completely by the year 2100, ravaged by pollution, over-fishing, land run-off and rising sea temperatures.

Research breakthroughs:

Led by Professor Michael Sweet, the team’s most substantial achievement was to ‘break the code’ for successful coral spawning in laboratory settings, allowing an entire reproductive cycle to be completed in captivity for the very first time. Through a long-term collaboration with the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London, researchers have created aquarium systems replicating the natural conditions of many reefs around the world. Overcoming significant challenges in logistics and husbandry, they have been able to induce spawning in 35 different coral species to date.

Another important breakthrough was the co-culturing of lab-spawned corals with juvenile sea urchins which graze on the algae that can otherwise overwhelm developing corals. This provided the first evidence that the presence of juvenile urchins can boost survival rates in young coral in captivity by up to eight times. Such findings will ensure that higher numbers of surviving offspring are available for future reef restoration projects.

Research developments:

The University’s work represents a major leap forward for coral conservation, opening up the possibility of year-round reproductive events in laboratories and the chance for other research teams worldwide to rear large numbers of coral larvae and juveniles to restore damaged reefs. The techniques have since been adopted by leading institutions such as Florida Aquarium’s Centre for Conservation, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and, more recently, the King Abdulla University of Science and Technology. At least fifteen further coral species, some with endangered status such as the Caribbean pillar coral and the knobby cactus coral, have now been spawned in other institutes using the technology designed in the UK. The technology has now been brought to the market as part of a knowledge exchange project with Aquarium Connections and has resulted in the formation of the Coral Spawning Lab (About us | Coral Spawning Lab). Anyone can now obtain these systems and spawn coral for restoration or commercial purposes.  

International developments:

Underpinning international policies, Prof. Sweet also led a United Nations report making far-reaching recommendations for how to reduce the impact of plastics on shallow water coral reefs. This report, launched during the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Assembly, was presented to delegates from governments worldwide and is now informing future action by an expert UNEP group investigating marine litter and microplastics (Plastics and shallow water coral reefs: Synthesis of the science for policy-makers | UNEP - UN Environment Programme). 

Where our research has been featured:

One of the team’s key priorities is to raise greater public awareness of the environmental threats facing coral reefs. The coral spawning research has featured on the Blue Planet TV series and was shared through Facebook videos which attracted some 60,000 views worldwide. A bespoke exhibition at the Horniman Museum has reached an average of 143,000 visitors per year. Prof. Sweet also visits learning institutes, teaching students and reef practitioners. This has included visits to the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) UK and the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat, Israel.

Nature Connectedness research has pioneered the first interventions to bring about sustained improvements in the human-nature relationship, bringing about greater pro-nature behaviours and improving mental wellbeing. 
 
The groups research and pathways to nature connectedness design framework has been adopted by dozens of organisations including the National Trust, The Wildlife Trusts and RSPB. The pathways inform the Government’s Green Influencers Scheme and Green Recovery Challenge Fund projects such as Generation Green, seeing the pathways used by the Scouts, YHA, National Parks and Girl Guiding. The group’s nature-based approach to mental health underpinned the 2021 Mental Health Awareness week – the largest such event in the world.

What we are doing:

The group of researchers work closely with Natural England, developing the Nature Connection Index which is monitored in Government surveys, alongside the Pro-nature Conversation Behaviour Scale, the first measure of human behaviours related to biodiversity outcomes. 

In 2018, the group's work was named by Universities UK as one of the UK’s 100 best research breakthroughs for impact. The team won the institutional award for research impact at the 2021 Green Gown Awards. After working on the £1.3 million NERC funded Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature project, the team is currently leading a work package on a £1.7 million NERC funded UK Future Treescapes project. Lead on the nature connectedness research, Professor Miles Richardson is also a lead author on ‘Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (IPBES) global transformative change assessment which will set out options for Governments to improve the human-nature relationship. 
 
Professor Richardson also developed the ‘biodiversity stripes’ which show the fall of variety and abundance of nature over time in order to raise awareness of the loss of wildlife. Since creation in 2022 the stripes have featured in the French Parliament, COP27 and COP15 as the image of the global Nature Positive Campaign led by WWF and some of the world’s biggest civil society groups.

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• Alexander L. Peace, Jordan J.J. Phethean, 2022. "The African continental divide: Indian versus Atlantic Ocean spreading during Gondwana dispersal", In the Footsteps of Warren B. Hamilton: New Ideas in Earth Science, Gillian R. Foulger, Lawrence C. Hamilton, Donna M. Jurdy, Carol A. Stein, Keith A. Howard, Seth Stein 
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• Peixoto, R.S., Voolstra, C.R., Sweet MJ, Duarte, C.M., Carvalho, S., Villela, H., Lunshof, J.E., Gram, L., Woodhams, D.C., Walter, J. and Roik, A., (2022). Harnessing the microbiome to prevent global biodiversity loss. Nature Microbiology, pp.1-10. 
• Schultz, J., Modolon, F., Rosado, A.S., Voolstra, C.R., Sweet MJ. and Peixoto, R.S., (2022). Methods and Strategies to Uncover Coral-Associated Microbial Dark Matter. mSystems. 
• Li, J., Zou, Y., Yang, J., Li, Q., Bourne, D.G., Sweet MJ., Liu, C., Guo, A. and Zhang, S., (2022). Cultured Bacteria Provide Insight into the Functional Potential of the Coral-Associated Microbiome. mSystems. 
• Dubreuil T, Baudry T, Mauvisseau Q, Arqué A, Courty C, Delaunay C, Sweet MJ, Grandjean F. The development of early monitoring tools to detect aquatic invasive species: eDNA assay development and the case of the armored catfish Hypostomus robinii. Environmental DNA. (2022);4(2):349-62. 
• Greenhalgh, J.A., Collins, R.A., Edgley, D.E., Genner, M.J., Hindle, J., Jones, G., Loughlin, L., O’donnel, M., Sweet MJ. and Battarbee, R.W., (2022). Environmental DNA‐based methods detect the invasion front of an advancing signal crayfish population. Environmental DNA. 
• Burian, A., Pinn, D., Peralta-Maraver, I., Sweet MJ, Mauvisseau, Q., Eyice, O., Bulling, M., Röthig, T. and Kratina, P., (2022). Predation increases multiple components of microbial diversity in activated sludge communities. The ISME journal, 16(4), pp.1086-1094. 
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• Lees K.J., Carmenta R., Condliffe I., Gray A., Marquis L., Lenton T.M. (in press) Protecting peatlands requires understanding stakeholder perceptions and relational values: A case study of peatlands in the Yorkshire Dales. Ambio 
• Timothy M. Lenton, Joshua E. Buxton, David I. Armstrong McKay, Jesse F. Abrams, Chris A. Boulton, Kirsten Lees, Thomas W. R. Powell, Niklas Boers, Andrew M. Cunliffe and Vasilis Dakos (2022) A resilience sensing system for the biosphere. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 377:1857. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0383 
• Richardson, M. (2023). GC Insights: Nature stripes for raising engagement with biodiversity loss. Geoscience Communication, 6(1), 11-14. 
• White, M. E., Hamlin, I., Butler, C. W., & Richardson, M. (2023). The Joy of birds: the effect of rating for joy or counting garden bird species on wellbeing, anxiety, and nature connection. Urban Ecosystems, 1-11. 
• Pocock, M. J., Hamlin, I., Christelow, J., Passmore, H. A., & Richardson, M. (2023). The benefits of citizen science and nature‐noticing activities for well‐being, nature connectedness and pro‐nature conservation behaviours. People and Nature. 
• Walker, H., Jena, A., McEwan, K., Evans, G., & Campbell, S. (2023). Natural Volatile Organic Compounds (NVOCs) Are Greater and More Diverse in UK Forests Compared with a Public Garden. Forests, 14(1), 92. 
• Sheffield, D., Butler, C. W., & Richardson, M. (2022). Improving Nature Connectedness in Adults: A Meta-Analysis, Review and Agenda. Sustainability, 14(19), 12494. 
• Richardson, M., & Butler, C. W. (2022). Nature connectedness and biophilic design. Building Research & Information, 50(1-2), 36-42. 
• Richardson, M., Hamlin, I., Butler, C. W., Thomas, R., & Hunt, A. (2022). Actively Noticing Nature (Not Just Time in Nature) Helps Promote Nature Connectedness. Ecopsychology, 14(1), 8-16. 
• McEwan, K., Potter, V., Kotera, Y., Jackson, J. E., & Greaves, S. (2022). ‘This Is What the Colour Green Smells Like!’: Urban Forest Bathing Improved Adolescent Nature Connection and Wellbeing. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(23), 15594. 
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