Evaluate dependencies and impacts on nature
EVALUATE DEPENDENCIES AND IMPACTS ON NATURE
Our integrated and multi-scale monitoring and modelling capabilities across land, water and air enable us to produce comprehensive natural capital audits and explore future scenarios. UKCEH can not only identify organisations’ dependencies and impacts on nature against established frameworks, but also gauge their severity. And our long-term environmental data can be used for benchmarking ecosystem health.
Information products
Laboratory services
As a major custodian of environmental datasets, UKCEH hosts a wealth of historic records and tracks the drivers of nature change over time, including greenhouse gas emissions, pollutants, water quantity and ecosystem conditions.
We incorporate some of this data into innovative information products. Our approach to licensing is flexible, tailored to meet the needs of commercial, non-commercial and academic customers. This flexibility enables use within organisations and supports the development and sale of value-added products.
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We produce the UK’s annual Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) inventory, which quantifies the UK’s greenhouse gas (GHG ) sources and sinks. The UK National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI) is used to produce the annual inventory of greenhouse gas emissions published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. The data are compiled by devolved governments and disaggregated to local authority area, providing information to local authorities and land managers on GHG pollution sources, levels, and trends.
UKCEH scientists have developed expert laboratory services to support the research community and better understand how the release of pollutants impacts nature and ecosystems. These services are available to academic institutions as well as commercial and non-commercial organisations.
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Our highly qualified and experienced staff use advanced equipment to analyse large numbers of samples for various factors. Our areas of expertise include:
Identifying and measuring a wide range of elements in a variety of matrices;
Analysing a range of water, soil and vegetation samples in matrices including leachates, rain, stream, river, cloud and pore waters;
Focusing on biotic and abiotic samples for a large variety of organic substances found in the environment;
Analysing biological, terrestrial and environmental materials via the National Environmental Isotope Facility (NEIF) located within UKCEH’s labs in Lancaster.
Through sample analysis, our scientists ascertain the concentration, type, shape, size of microplastics detected in various environments such as soil, slurry, inland waters, and treated waters, among others. Within our laboratories, our ecotoxicologists investigate the toxic impacts of these microscopic plastic pollutants.
The world-leading UK Centre for Multimodal Correlative Microscopy and Spectroscopy (CoreMiS) is the first platform in the UK dedicated to micro-spectroscopic analysis of environmental samples by RISE-EDS. CoreMiS, funded by NERC and established by UKCEH, delivers the capacity for nanoplastics analysis.
The nutrient enrichment of rivers and lakes from human activity is one of the major problems affecting freshwater ecology. We have developed a new technique that uses flow cytometry to quantify and characterise algal populations in freshwater.
