Monks Wood Research
Monks Wood Research
Last week the Wild Carbon team went to recce and plan for a UWE masters led by soil ecologist Dr Sam Bonnet and Jacob Maughan.
The Monks Wood Wilderness sites are a series of former fields of arable farmland and grassland, which are next to the ancient woodland of Monks Wood National Nature Reserve in Cambridgeshire, eastern England.
The site was originally home to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology that now manage the site in collaboration with Natural England. The fields were taken out of farming production or management and allowed to return to woodland by natural succession for up to 60 years, with no management or inputs.
The sites are a long-term study of passive rewilding and woodland colonisation and succession, and represent one of the most comprehensive examples in Britain.
There are plots that represent a chronosequence of abandonment covering 26, 35, 60, 180 and 400 years! This means that we can evaluate the long-term impact of natural woodland regeneration on soil carbon dynamics due to the close spatial distribution of the sites that all have a similar soil type, topography, climate and texture.
In this MSc project, we will be evaluating differences in soil greenhouse gas flux, microbial biomass, soil carbon stores and extracellular enzyme activities between the different sites. We hypothesise that soil carbon microbial dynamics will show a relationship with the age of the sites.
#rewilding #regeneration #soilhealth #soilscience #carbon #offsetting
