Twelfth year of the UCL’s Chironomid Identification Course
2012 cohort pictured with Steve Brooks second left.
This year was the twelth year that the ECRC, Environmental Change Research Centre ran its Chironomid identification course at the University College London. Since the course’s inception about one hundred students from around the world have taken part in this prestigious course. This year students came from universities in Poland, Scotland and England to study on the one week course.
The course trains palaeolimnologists to identify sub-fossil, chironomid* heads and use the data to reconstruct prehistoric environmental conditions. The course is managed by Dr Steve Brooks of the British Natural History Museum, and it was Steve who invited Dr Les Ruse to teach an additional module on chironomid pupal exuviae and their use in bio-monitoring.
Basically, following radiometric-dating of lake mud cores the students learn to infer ambient conditions in the past, from chironomid data using multivariate analysis techniques. This is by far the best way to determine environmental reference conditions and to track the effects of climatic change. The mathematical relationship between different chironomid species abundances and environmental gradients in acidification, nutrient enrichment, oxygen, temperature and toxic pollution found across a data set of contemporary lakes can be used to infer variation in these gradients over hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago.
Les Ruse’s part of the course also attracts biologists more interested in contemporary water quality surveillance and monitoring and has therefore been attended by biologists from Water companies, the Environment Agency and it was during these courses that Les first met APEM staff. Since then Les has become increasingly involved with APEM and in 2011 he became an Associate of the company, after a long and successful career with the Environmental Agency. Les developed the CPET methodology for assessing the trophic status and acidification of waterbodies, an area with increasing importance under the new Water Framework Directive regime.
The ‘students’ are frequently postgraduates, post-doctoral, lecturers and professors wanting to learn these techniques. They come from all over the world; however, this year’s attendees were unusual in their youthfulness and all but one was from the UK. Les frequently meets graduates of the course at seminars and has been interested to read papers published by them as they apply the skills and knowledge gained on the course in their chosen field of study.
For more information on this or any of the other courses run by Dr Les Ruse please download a copy of the attached leaflet.
2012FBACourse.pdf
*Chironomids are non-biting midges whose larvae are ubiquitous in freshwaters and tell us a lot about the conditions of the environment.
