Environmental Change Network Terrestrial

Part of: Environmental monitoring

Area of Expertise:
Services:

The Environmental Change Network (ECN) is a long-term monitoring and research programme established in 1992 to detect and understand the causes of environmental change across a range of habitats. Standardised data is collected for physical, chemical and biological parameters from 12 UK terrestrial ECN sites, including AFBI Hillsborough. This is relevant to a range of environmental policy issues including climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.

Objectives of ECN

  • To maintain a network of UK sites from which to obtain comparable long-term datasets through monitoring of range of variables of environmental importance
  • To provide for integration and analysis of data, to identify natural and man-induced environmental changes and improve the understanding of causes of change
  • To determine long-term trends and predict future changes due to environmental factors

Data collection

Monitoring at AFBI Hillsborough involves the collection of physical and chemical data (meteorology; atmospheric chemistry; surface water flow & chemistry; soil solution chemistry; precipitation chemistry; and soil surveys) and biological data (vegetation surveys; vertebrates including birds, rabbits, deer, bats and frogs; invertebrates including butterflies, moths, ground beetles and spittle bugs).

More information can be found on the ECN website:

http://www.ecn.ac.uk