Natural England EES (England Ecosystem Services)
Project Background
The England Ecosystem Survey (EES), the largest field survey ever undertaken in the UK, is now well underway. Working at thousands of sites on a 5-year cycle, surveyors are collecting information on soils, vegetation, and landscape change across the country. The results will allow us to make national-scale assessments on the state of these vital resources, and their ability to keep underpinning ecosystem services like food production and biodiversity.
Our Involvement:
We are responsible for the soil sampling for the South/South East region of this project. This project has seen us working in areas all around the south from Devon to Kent and Norfolk to Gloucestershire and everywhere in between. Our teams take on the challenge each year of surveying in all conditions on a wide variety of land uses in order to provide data for this momentous project.
Why are Natural England doing it?
Data on ecosystems and landscape is often of variable quality, expensive to collect, difficult to access, and out of date. In order to make informed environmental decisions, government and other organisations require better data, and this is what England Ecosystem Survey has been set up to provide.
EES differs from other surveys not just in its scale but also in the wide range of landscape types it covers, from protected sites and priority habitats to farmland and urban-edge habitats. It will let us draw comparisons between these land use types and across the country.
What are they surveying?
The survey takes place within 1km2 squares. Over a five-year cycle we’re aiming to survey at least 2500 of these squares, with ecological surveyors spending up to a week at a time in each one. There they record information on plants, habitats, hedgerows, streams and rivers, trees outside of woodlands, ponds, landscape, and soils.
In the case of soils, we’re taking at least 24 different measurements (depending on how you count!). They range from the physical and chemical properties of soil, to the number and species of earthworms found in a given patch. We also identify types of microorganisms, such as fungi and bacteria, from their DNA. We want to understand what communities (which combinations of different species) are present, and how this relates to other soil properties. This is a step towards understanding the functioning of an ecosystem.
We’re also sending samples to the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew so they can study mycorrhizal (fungus root) networks in the soil. These fungi live in symbiotic relationships with plant roots, and are a key aspect of good soil health and function.
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