You may spot samples being taken from the Colly Brook over the next 12 months, as part of the “LOCATE” project being undertaken by NERC with Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
The samples from the Colly Brook will feed into their wider project work on the Tavy (sampling point at Hill Bridge), and will be taken monthly from 29th May for the next 12 months.
Our climate is profoundly influenced by the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. This project is looking at reservoirs of carbon which are currently locked away from the atmosphere but which might enter the atmosphere as climate changes. One key pool is soil carbon, but each year some of this leaches into rivers and streams. As this material gets into estuaries and coastal waters some of it gets returned to the atmosphere when bacteria use it to grow or when it’s destroyed by sunlight, some is buried and some enters the open ocean. The LOCATE project will establish the current status of our peatland stocks and how much soil carbon is getting into our rivers and estuaries; and then determine what happens to this material in our estuaries
For more information, see https://www.pml.ac.uk/Research/Projects/Land_ocean_carbon_transfer_(LOCATE)