An investigation towards real time dose rate monitoring, and fuel rod detection in a First Generation Magnox Storage Pond (FGMSP).

The First Generation Magnox Storage Pond (FGMSP) is located on the Sellafield Nuclear Site, housing legacy spent Magnox nuclear fuel. Some of which has since corroded, forming a layer of Corroded Magnox Sludge (CMS) creating one of the largest decommissioning challenges the UK has faced. In this work the composition, physical properties and potentially high hazard nature of CMS are discussed, as are the gamma emission spectra of spent Magnox fuel rods typical of the ilk stored. We assess the potential use of a RadLine gamma detector to dose rate map this area and provide fuel rod detection. RadLine consists of a small scintillator, fibre optic cable and photon counter. The probe has the unusual advantage of not being electrically active and therefore fully submersible underwater, with the option to deploy hundreds of metres in length. Our experimental method encompasses general purpose Monte Carlo radiation transport code, MCNP, where we describe the modelling of CMS and pond liquor in comprehensive detail, including their radiological spectrum, chemical composition data, and physical properties. This investigation concludes that the maximum energy deposited within the scintillator crystal due to ambient CMS corresponds to a dose rate of 5.65Gy h(-1), thus above this value positive detection of a fuel rod would be anticipated. It is additionally established that the detectable region is within a 20cm range.

Ecosystem service benefits of contrasting conservation strategies in a human-dominated region.

The hope among policy-makers and scientists alike is that conservation strategies designed to protect biodiversity also provide direct benefits to people by protecting other vital ecosystem services. The few studies that have examined the delivery of ecosystem services by existing conservation efforts have concentrated on large, 'wilderness'-style biodiversity reserves. However, such reserves are not realistic options for densely populated regions. Here, we provide the first analyses that compare representation of biodiversity and three other ecosystem services across several contrasting conservation strategies in a human-dominated landscape (England). We show that small protected areas and protected landscapes (restrictive zoning) deliver high carbon storage and biodiversity, while existing incentive payment (agri-environment) schemes target areas that offer little advantage over other parts of England in terms of biodiversity, carbon storage and agricultural production. A fourth ecosystem service-recreation-is under-represented by all three strategies. Our findings are encouraging as they illustrate that restrictive zoning can play a major role in protecting natural capital assets in densely populated regions. However, trade-offs exist even among the four ecosystem services we considered, suggesting that a portfolio of conservation and sustainability investments will be needed to deliver both biodiversity and the other ecosystem services demanded by society.

Incorporating private lands in conservation planning: protected areas in Britain.

Evaluations of the effectiveness of protected areas often report their inadequate representation of regional variation in environmental conditions, land cover, and biological diversity. One frequent contributory explanation is the heavy reliance placed upon the designation of public as opposed to private lands for statutory protection. Given that protected area designation in Britain has no such constraint, and indeed that more than half of such areas are on private lands, we tested the a priori assumption that within this region the representation of environmental conditions and land cover within statutory protected areas would be more equitable. Despite the reduction in land ownership constraints on where protected areas can be established, a marked bias in protected area coverage remains. Protected areas in Britain tend toward regions of higher elevation, soils of lower economic potential, and coastal/estuarine habitat and fail adequately to represent areas of lower elevation and woodland habitats. Improving the current situation requires not only a more systematic approach to site selection, but a more equitable and diverse portfolio of incentives for private landowners to facilitate the decision to manage sites for conservation.

Protected areas in Europe: principle and practice.

Systematic conservation planning provides a structured, target-driven approach to ensuring the long-term maintenance of biodiversity. However, reviews of how well the steps of such a planning process are applied in different regions are scant; some steps may be implemented although there is no formal systematic conservation planning process taking place. Here we conduct such a review for Europe. Taking in turn the six recognized steps of systematic conservation planning, for this region: (i) The availability of data on biodiversity remains a significant constraint on conservation planning because, although species occurrences have often been better mapped in Europe than elsewhere, there is a continuing mismatch between the spatial resolution at which data coverage is adequate and that of habitat fragmentation. (ii) Although there are important legal frameworks for conservation planning, explicit quantitative goals for the representation and persistence of biodiversity are largely lacking. (iii) Assessment of the effectiveness of existing protected area systems is patchy and rather ill developed, with a substantial gulf between the work being conducted in more academic and policy-oriented arenas. (iv) Nonetheless, particularly through the Natura 2000 process, there has been an extraordinary program to select additional protected areas. (v) Although it has taken longer than originally envisaged, this program is resulting in a substantial expansion of the protected area system. (vi) There are significant concerns over the extent to which existing protected area systems can maintain their biodiversity values, particularly given the small size of many of these areas and likely impacts of climate change.

Global distribution and conservation of rare and threatened vertebrates.

Global conservation strategies commonly assume that different taxonomic groups show congruent geographical patterns of diversity, and that the distribution of extinction-prone species in one group can therefore act as a surrogate for vulnerable species in other groups when conservation decisions are being made. The validity of these assumptions remains unclear, however, because previous tests have been limited in both geographical and taxonomic extent. Here we use a database on the global distribution of 19,349 living bird, mammal and amphibian species to show that, although the distribution of overall species richness is very similar among these groups, congruence in the distribution of rare and threatened species is markedly lower. Congruence is especially low among the very rarest species. Cross-taxon congruence is also highly scale dependent, being particularly low at the finer spatial resolutions relevant to real protected areas. 'Hotspots' of rarity and threat are therefore largely non-overlapping across groups, as are areas chosen to maximize species complementarity. Overall, our results indicate that 'silver-bullet' conservation strategies alone will not deliver efficient conservation solutions. Instead, priority areas for biodiversity conservation must be based on high-resolution data from multiple taxa.

Species traits and the form of individual species-energy relationships.

Environmental energy availability explains much of the spatial variation in species richness at regional scales. While numerous mechanisms that may drive such total species-energy relationships have been identified, knowledge of their relative contributions is scant. Here, we adopt a novel approach to identify these drivers that exploits the composite nature of species richness, i.e. its summation from individual species distributions. We construct individual species-energy relationships (ISERs) for each species in the British breeding avifauna using both solar (temperature) and productive energy metrics (normalized difference vegetation index) as measures of environmental energy availability. We use the slopes of these relationships and the resultant change in deviance, relative to a null model, as measures of their strength and use them as response variables in multiple regressions that use ecological traits as predictors. The commonest species exhibit the strongest ISERs, which is counter to the prediction derived from the more individuals hypothesis. There is no evidence that predatory species have stronger ISERs, which is incompatible with the suggestion that high levels of energy availability increase the length of the food chain allowing larger numbers of predators to exist. We find some evidence that species with narrow niche breadths have stronger ISERs, thus providing one of the few pieces of supportive evidence that high-energy availability promotes species richness by increasing the occurrence of specialist species that use a narrow range of resources.