Gearagh

The Gearagh is a mixed deciduous riverine woodland located on the river Lee not far from Macroom. The Gearagh essentially forms an inland delta, with many small islands, seperated by anastomising river channels. These islands make ideal replicatable ecosystems where we can explore the effects of biodiversity change.

We have been using the islands as replicated units for the study of how biodiversity loss might affect ecosystem functioning across multiple trophic levels (biodiversity loss in a food web context). Orla McLaughlin has been documenting the ground faunal food webs of these small islands. She has been collecting data on the body size, abundance and food web structure of these discrete systems. In addition we've also established exclosures to manipulate the functional diversity of the predatory ground beetle assemblage (where the functional traits of species are equated with body size), this latter work is being carried out by a postgrad student Henriette Stoop (from the Netherlands).

We have been removing the predatory ground beetles from the exclosures (and latterly the islands) using a mixture of approaches, including pitfall traps, hand searches and vacuuming the plots with a modified leaf blower.

Nice outfits!

This is especially for Orla's mum!

In broadly the same area Clement Akumu has been investigating the plant diversity of the Gearagh system (largely unstudied except for a few early papers). Clement is co-supervised by myself and Simon Harrison.

The Gearagh is a truly spectacular place to work, its very isolated and undisturbed (with no management of the forest at all) and we are really very priveliged to work within the system (with the permissions of the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the ESB who own the site). The Gearagh is a national nature reserve, a biogenetic reserve, a ramsar site and a candidate SAC. The Gearagh can also be a very dangerous place (to those not familiar with it), it is very easy to get lost, there are deep areas, muddy banks and floods do occur regularly. Despite this its a haven to otters, herons, frogs, smooth newts and pigmy shrews, never mind the beetles....!