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2018 NPIF

Sensitivity of aquatic insect eggs to elevated fine sediment and phosphate concentrations in rivers

Insect populations are declining at an alarming rate, globally. Aquatic insects have a crucial functional role in the environment and are used to monitor stream impairment. Despite the significance of aquatic insects, the majority of research is focused on the larval stage of these animals, with very little consideration of eggs. This is despite pollutants […]

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Reducing Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Emissions ‘RAGGE’

Nitrogen inputs into agricultural systems are an essential requirement for healthy, high yielding crop production, but they can also result in the release of excess N either by leaching or by emission of the highly reactive greenhouse gas (GHG) N2O. In the UK, direct N2O emissions from soil accounted for about 50.5% of all N2O […]

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Plant adaptations to wetland conditions as regulators of methane oxidation and emissions from tropical wetlands

Natural wetlands are the greatest emitters of atmospheric methane. Plants are important controls of this as they can both stimulate high methane production and suppress emissions by releasing oxygen into the ground supporting bacterially mediated oxidation of methane drastically cutting emissions. Tropical wetlands are particularly important in the global methane cycle, however, the mechanisms behind […]

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Next generation landscape mapping: machine learning and big data methods for exploiting earth observation data

This is an exciting opportunity to explore machine learning and big data methods, in combination with earth observation data, to extract information on land cover and habitat condition. It will use a range of remote sensing data sets, including LIDAR, aerial photography and high resolution satellite data. Land cover is a key environmental variable and […]

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Natural capital, biodiversity and ecosystem services – tackling scaling issues

This multi-disciplinary PhD will study natural capital, biodiversity and ecosystem services at a range of scales, to tackle critical questions in ecosystem services research: Does natural capital produce the same amount of benefit, regardless of scale? How do those scale relationships change when you consider interactions with social factors which can alter demand for ecosystem […]

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Mountain soil resilience to land-use and climate extremes

Can our upland landscapes provide clean drinking water, store carbon, maintain biodiversity, act as a platform for leisure activities and provide a rural economy around grazing all whilst coping with the increasing pressures of climate change? Our mountainous regions are clearly under many, sometimes conflicting, demands, and this has led to a substantial degradation in […]

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Living in the dark: Impact of winter warming on ecosystem stability in the terrestrial high Arctic

The high Arctic is warming at an alarming rate, disrupting soil carbon, nutrient and hydrological cycles. This is resulting in increased soil microbial activity with subsequent increases in nutrient availability and hence plant productivity and nutrient losses to the wider environment. Losses of the greenhouse gases, nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide result in a […]

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Landslide Modelling in the Laboratory

This project will explore granular slides observed in nature as landslides and (dry snow) avalanches and in industrial processing and storage applications (chutes, hoppers, blenders, rotating drums, heap formation). The landslide database of the British Geological Survey BGS documents 17,000 landslides across Great Britain alone which resulted in several fatalities and socio-economic losses and thousands […]

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