The winter months are always fairly quiet for fieldwork but this winter we have had a few cold field visits. This month has involved two so far, the first of these was to the experimental site at Horton Quarry where I was adding nitrogen to investigate the impacts of atmospheric nitrogen deposition. This is a relatively quick job which is good because it was a very cold and windy day. I bring bottles of preprepared nitrogen solution or water, depending on the treatment plot and I put them out on the relevant plots to make sure none get missed. Then I dash round and apply the nitrogen to the grikes of the plots.

The second visit was with Marlon, out visitor from Brazil. Marlon will introduce himself and his work in next month’s blog. In brief, we are sampling soils to look at the microbial community. Soil sampling is quite static work, especially in limestone pavements, where getting even the small samples we need can be quite hard work and require multiple attempts to find soil. We have a couple more visits to do with Marlon’s work before the end of the month so we are hoping that the weather is not too wet and the wind isn’t quite as cold as earlier this week. This work will be really interesting because to our knowledge, nobody has looked at the microbial communities of limestone pavements before.

In the mean time we have also been very busy in the office too with lots of planning for the next field season and analysing data from last season. Our students, Sophie and Ezra, both have fantastic results from last year, and I am really looking forward to presenting them to you at our next conference on the 28^th April. Planning for the conference is underway, and details will follow within the next few weeks.

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  A busy year for the Limestone Pavement Partnership

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  Hannah Risser: Starting my PhD

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