ABSTRACT
Peatland areas provide a range of ecosystem services, including biodiversity, carbon storage, clean water, and flood mitigation, but many areas of peatland in the UK have been degraded through human land use including drainage. Here, we explore whether remote sensing can be used to monitor peatland resilience to drought. We take resilience to mean the rate at which a system recovers from perturbation; here measured literally as a recovery timescale of a soil surface moisture proxy from drought lowering. Our objectives were (1) to assess the reliability of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) backscatter as a proxy for water table depth (WTD); (2) to develop a method using SAR to estimate below-ground (hydrological) resilience of peatlands; and (3) to apply the developed method to different sites and consider the links between resilience and land management. Our inferences of WTD from Sentinel-1 SAR data gave results with an average Pearson's correlation of 0.77 when compared to measured WTD values. The 2018 summer drought was used to assess resilience across three different UK peatland areas (Dartmoor, the Peak District, and the Flow Country) by considering the timescale of the soil moisture proxy recovery. Results show clear areas of lower resilience within all three study sites, which often correspond to areas of high drainage and may be particularly vulnerable to increasing drought severity/events under climate change. This method is applicable to monitoring peatland resilience elsewhere over larger scales, and could be used to target restoration work towards the most vulnerable areas.
ABSTRACT
In yeast, RNase MRP (mitochondrial RNA processing), a ribonucleoprotein precursor rRNA processing enzyme, possesses one putatively catalytic RNA and ten protein subunits and is highly related to RNase P. Structural analysis of the MRP RNA provides data that closely match a previous secondary-structure model derived from phylogenetic analysis, with the exception of an additional stem. This stem occupies an equivalent position to the P7 stem of RNase P RNA and its inclusion confers on MRP RNA a greater similarity to the core P RNA structure. In vivo studies indicate that the P7-like stem can form, but is not a part of, the active enzyme structure. Stem formation would increase RNA stability in the absence of proteins and our alternative structure may be a valid intermediate species in RNase MRP assembly. Further ongoing studies of this enzyme reveal an extensive network of interactions between subunits and a probable central role for the Pop1, Pop4 and Pop7 subunits.
