PLYNLIMON (UK)

OPERATING INSTITUTE: NERC, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.

MAIN PURPOSE: Hydrology and hydro-chemistry.

ECOSYSTEM TYPE: Grassland, spruce forest.

EXPERIMENTAL TREATMENTS: Paired catchment experiment investigating effects of plantation forestry on hydrology and hydrochemistry.

LOCALISATION: 52.44197514460915 -3.7646484375

FACILITIES: This infrastructure consists of 10 instrumented research catchments representing different land use options on the same geological parent material. The infrastructure records high temporal resolution river flow and meteorological data (40 years data record) and fortnightly stream water and precipitation chemistry for cations, anions, trace metals, nutrients, pH and alkalinity (30 year data record) and some data for suspended sediment. The site has an extensive spatial data library including topography, DTM, soils, geology and vegetation/land-use available open access through the Environ-mental Information Data Centre.
Recent developments at the site include the ingestion of data into the Environmental Information Data Centre, one of NERC’s designated data centres and the issuing of Dols  for two major datasets from the Plynlimon work: (1) Plynlimon research catchment hydrochemistry (this dataset includes rainfall, cloud, river and stream hydro-chemistry of the Plynlimon research catchments); (2) Plynlimon research catch-ment high-frequency hydrochemistry data (this dataset includes rainfall, river and stream hydro-chemistry data from the River Hafren, Severn). It represents high-frequency (7 hourly) monitoring of stream hydro-chemistry at both the Lower and Upper Hafren site from 2007-2009.

CONTACT: B. COSBY (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

NOTE: Plynlimon is part of DURESS (Diversity of Upland Rivers for Ecosystem Service Sustainability) and EU-SOIL TREC (Soil Transformations in European Catchments) in acting as a satellite “Critical Zone” observatory site.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS:
●  Neal, C., Reynolds, B., Rowland, P., Norris, D., Kirchner, J. W., Neal, M., Sleep, D., Lawlor, A., Woods, C., Thacker, S., Guyatt, H., Vincent, C., Hockenhull, K., Wickham, H., Harman, S., Armstrong, L. 2012 High-frequency water quality time series in precipitation and streamflow: from fragmentary signals to scientific challenge. Science of the Total Environment, 434. 3–12. 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2011.10.072.
●  Rowland, A. P., Neal, C., Reynolds, B., Neal, M., Lawlor, A. J., Sleep, D.. 2012 Manganese in the upper Severn mid-Wales. Journal of Environmental Monitoring, 14 (1). 155-164. 10.1039/c1em10651a.
●  Kirchner, J. W., Feng, X., Neal, C.,  2000. Fractal stream chemistry and its implications for contaminant transport in catchments. Nature 403, 524–527.