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Research title Assessing carbon and nutrient leakage from peatland soils arising from the Gordonbush Renewable Energy Development. Summary of research In September 2010 Scottish and Southern Energy Renewables (SSER) commenced construction of the Gordonbush Windfarm, comprising 35 turbines on a upland peatland site within the Gordonbush Estate, Brora, Sutherland.
As part of the Habitat Management Plan (Fig. 1) and in keeping with Principle 4 of ‘Windfarms and Peatland Good Practise’ to ‘support applied research into key areas of peatland science relevant to understanding the impacts of development on the various peatland qualities including biodiversity, carbon and hydrology’, SSE, in conjunction with EPSRC and ETP, have funded a 3.5 year Ph.D. research programme to assess resilience and adaptation of the landscape to hosting land-based renewables.
There are two key components of this research programme:
1. The construction of budgets for aquatic carbon export from the windfarm ultimately required to better inform the payback time calculator used in windfarm planning.
2. As assessment of particulate carbon and sediment export from the landscape over timescales longer than windfarm construction. This is required to contextualise losses during windfarm construction. We focus here on presenting our results on this to date.
Supervisors Professor Susan Waldron
Dr Andrew Henderson
Dr Hugh Flowers (School of Chemistry, University of Glasgow)
Prof David Gilvear (University of Stirling) |
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