Professor Andy Rees
Ocean Challenge Lead: Marine Pollution
"I have always been fascinated by our natural environment and have spent my lifetime poking around in watery systems to observe the inhabitants within. Working at PML fosters this passion and enables me to discover and communicate how biological, chemical and physical systems interact in pristine and impacted marine ecosystems. "
Andy Rees is Professor of Marine and Estuarine Biogeochemistry at PML where he is the Ocean Challenge Lead for Pollution and leads research activities into the cycling and transport of carbon, nutrients and greenhouse gases.
His work has taken him from polar to open oceans, through shelf seas, coastal waters and estuaries to farm ponds in the upper reaches of freshwater catchments. Funded projects have included not only the investigation of the natural functioning of these systems but also how stressors which include climate change, pollutants, ocean acidification and land-use change can impact on ecosystem function/service and biodiversity.
He has led research projects ranging in scale from 2 people to multi-institutional involvement over periods of two to eighteen years. Each has required the organisation and leadership of multiple land-based and oceanographic expeditions. Current research activities evaluate the flow of material between farmland and the coastal ocean under the changing influence of climate change and also evaluating the efficacy of a range of nature based solutions as mitigation tools.
Andy holds honorary positions at the Universities of Plymouth and East Anglia and sits on the steering group of the IUCN hosted Source to Sea initiative.
Key Projects
- AMT – Atlantic Meridional Transect
- CANDYFLOSS – CArbon/Nutrient DYnamics and FLuxes Over Shelf Systems (NERC: NE/K002058/1) (2013 – 2016)
- SONIC -Shortcut in the Oceanic Nitrogen Cycle. Fluxes and Microbial Pathways of Nitrogen Remineralisation in the Ocean’s Twilight Zone (NERC: NE/N00390X/1) (2016-2018)
- LOCATE – Land Ocean Carbon Transfer
- PETRA – Pathways and emissions of climate-relevant trace gases in a changing Arctic Ocean (NE/R012830/1)
- AtlantEco – Atlantic ECOsystems assessment, forecasting & sustainability (H2020-BG-2019-2)
Selected Publications
- Rees, A.P., Brown, I.J., Jayakumar, A. and Ward, B.B. (2016). The inhibition of N2O production by ocean acidification in cold temperate and polar waters. Deep-Sea Research II, 127, 93–101.
- Rees, A.P., Tait, K., Widdicombe, C.E., Quartly G.D., McEvoy, A.J. and Al-Moosawi, L. (2016). Metabolically active, non-nitrogen fixing, Trichodesmium in UK coastal waters during winter. J. Plankton Res. 38(3): 673–678.
- Rees, A.P., Turk-Kubo, K.A., Al-Moosawi, L., Alliouane, S., Gazeau, F., Hogan, M.E., Zehr, J.P. (2016). Ocean acidification impacts on nitrogen fixation in the coastal western Mediterranean Sea. Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science.
- Rees A.P., Nightingale P.D., Poulton A.L., Smyth T.J., Tarran G.A., Tilstone G.H. (2017). The Atlantic Meridional Transect Programme (1995 – 2016). Progress in Oceanography, 158, 3-18.
- Luo, Y.-W., Doney, S. C., Anderson, L. A., Benavides, M., Bode, A., Bonnet, S., Boström, K. H., Böttjer, D., Capone, D. G., Carpenter, E. J., Chen, Y. L., Church, M. J., Dore, J. E., Falcón, L. I., Fernández, A., Foster, R. A., Furuya, K., Gómez, F., Gundersen, K., Hynes, A. M., Karl, D. M., Kitajima, S., Langlois, R. J., LaRoche, J., Letelier, R. M., Marañón, E., McGillicuddy Jr., D. J., Moisander, P. H., Moore, C. M., Mouriño-Carballido, B., Mulholland, M. R., Needoba, J. A., Orcutt, K. M., Poulton, A. J., Raimbault, P., Rees, A. P., Riemann, L., Shiozaki, T., Subramaniam, A., Tyrrell, T., Turk-Kubo, K. A., Varela, M., Villareal, T. A., Webb, E. A., White, A. E., Wu, J., and Zehr, J. P. (2012). Database of diazotrophs in global ocean: abundances, biomass and nitrogen fixation rates. Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., 5, 47-106, doi:10.5194/essdd-5-47-2012, 2012.
- Katsiaryna Pabortsava, Richard S. Lampitt, J. Benson, Karen Casciotti, Christian Crowe, Robert McLachlan, Frédéric A. C. Le Moigne, C. Mark Moore, Corinne Pebody, Paul Provost, Andrew P. Rees, Gavin Tilstone and E. Malcolm S.Woodward. (2017). Carbon sequestration in the deep Atlantic enhanced by Saharan dust. Nature Geoscience, 10, 189–194.
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