Visiting Professor gives research seminar

On Monday 8th June 2015 Professor Kate Rowntree gave a seminar on 'Politics, policy and projects - landscape greening in the Tsitsa catchment, South Africa.'  Professor Rowntree outlined a current research project investigating sustainable solutions to erosional problems in an area of the Eastern Cape near to the proposed Ntabelanga dam.

Professor Rowntree is based at the Department of Geography, Rhodes University, South Africa, and is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Geographical and Environmental Sciences at the University of Northampton.

Mitigating agricultural pollution - Mattie Biddulph (PhD Student)

Last week I embarked on my 25th and final fieldwork trip, 30 months after beginning my PhD. I have been saying that it will be my final outing for the last four, but it really was this time… probably.

 

My PhD is based around mitigation measures that can reduce agricultural pollution (sediment and contaminants). With 70% of the UK being agricultural land, this is a big issue to tackle. I have been working on two tributaries on the Hampshire Avon, on the borders of Dorset and Wiltshire. These upper reaches of the Hampshire Avon are part of a government-funded project, whereby three river catchments in England have been designated as ‘Demonstration Test Catchments’. Research is carried out in these catchments to find cheap, sustainable ways to reduce agricultural pollution of sediment and contaminants.

Such mitigation measures could be simply fencing along a riverbank or planting riparian vegetation. More specific, targeted measures can include: repairing degraded farm infrastructure, wetland creation, installation of settling systems, or changing farming practice. 

But are these measures actually working? Are they worth all the money and maintenance? I am collating the best methods that can test the effectiveness of these measures and monitor them over time. They need to be cheap, sustainable and replicable; in other words, they need to be easy to carry out and require minimal labour, so that these can be used on a larger scale for the long term. 

One method that I am using is to measure the amount of sediment stored on the riverbed, by carrying out “disturbance sampling”. To do this, a seal is created on the bed using a cylinder of known diameter and depth; any fine sediment in the top 5 cm of the bed is suspended by stirring it with a stick. The water is then collected and dried, and the weight of the remaining sediment will give you the amount of sediment stored on the bed per unit area. Looking at the changes to the riverbed over time, along with the properties of the sediment (geochemistry, particle size, organic matter etc.), will give an indication of the effectiveness of mitigation measures.

Disturbance sampling

One of my sites is on a dairy farm. When I started in December 2012, the main farm track was in extremely poor condition; huge amounts of sediment were being eroded, both from farm machinery, and the 270 strong herd of cattle that would trample along it to get to and from the fields each day. During and after rainfall, animal waste would also flow from the yard onto the track. This track then acted effectively as a terrestrial river, channelling runoff into the river, carrying with it huge amounts of sediment and contaminants. 

Farm track after a long period of rainfall, AKA, mud bath. 

Eight months into my research, the farm track was completely replaced, and a settling system was put in place to catch anything running off it. The settling system included a culvert, which was dug along the side of the track to collect runoff; this culvert was then connected to a pond, which in turn was connected to a ditch that eventually flows into the river. The aim of this was to allow as much sediment to settling on the bed of the pond and ditch as possible, before it reached the river. Almost two years of monitoring later, I will be able to analyse whether this mitigation option has had any positive effect on the quality of the river.

The farm track after resurfacing. The track has been cambered to 

direct  runoff into the vegetative culvert to the right of the track.

The ditch that runs between the settling pond and the river now
contains “v-notch weirs”, which are useful for trapping sediment

A clear difference in the colour of the water 

entering the river from the settling system.

To some of you this may seem very boring and of little consequence, which is fine, but to me it’s exciting, and I can’t wait to find out what’s been happening! This is just one of my sites, with a very specific mitigation measure, so feel free to ask me about the others if you want to know more (matilda.biddulph@northampton.ac.uk).

A PhD student’s tale by Jennine Evans: Part 2 – The first two milestones

I began my postgrad journey in May 2014 working on sediment accumulation into the River Rother (South Downs, UK), where I was given the best start to a PhD that I could ask for by getting straight into the field! I’m now just past my first major milestone, the Advanced Post Graduate (APG) registration process. The APG process requires that you complete an induction to the University and put forward a project proposal to the Research Degrees Board (RDB) to prove you have a workable project to the standard expected for a PhD. After a lot of hard work it would seem the RDB are confident that my project is worthy of a PhD, and I have been awarded APG status, phew! 

I’m roughly eight months into my PhD and the project is now well established. I’ve got a steady rhythm going with my fieldwork and lab work over a two month routine. I go out to collect samples from my sites along the River Rother once every two months and then process and analyse those samples before my next trip. This doesn’t always work out perfectly as of course I have other work to be getting on with, however we are beginning to get some interesting results which I am keen to present at conferences. As my PhD is joint funded by the South Downs National Park Authority, I am required to attend their conferences and events to publically discuss my project, findings and join in discussions with locals about problems they are facing and possible solutions to the sedimentation of the river. I have so far attended the Arun and Rother Rivers Trust (ARRT) workshop on soil erosion in December 2014 and I will attend the conference ‘Embracing the Future’ in July 2015.  This conference is for students studying land use in the South Downs. 

ARRT workshop field visit
(Photo from ARRT Trust) 

I have all this work going on whilst also working towards the milestones that need to be passed to achieve a PhD at the University.   My next big milestone will be the transfer from APG student to PhD. For the transfer you are required to have two chapters written up, deliver a presentation and take part in a mock viva. Although this seems way off into the future, I am trying to get a comfortable amount of this work done to ease the inevitable stress closer to the deadline! So wish me luck, I’m going to need it! 

So what do your lecturers do when they are not teaching classes?

Outside of the classroom, your lecturers are engaged in all sorts of activities – researching new teaching methods, managing courses and modules, supervising research students, recruiting new students and / or doing blue skies or applied research; or just writing papers and applications for new research grants. So what happens when you get some funding for research? Here, Ian Foster tells you about a recent research grant made to a consortium of Universities and research-led organisations funded by the UK Department of Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). The grant (in excess of £200,000) employs participants to work on a project officially called: SP1318; Scaling up the benefits of field scale protection measures to understand their impact at the landscape scale (April 2014 - 2016) (Figure 1). OK - not a very sexy title and it is a really difficult project to deliver upon so this brief introduction tells you what we are trying to do (and a bit about how) and where we have got to so far in this early stage of the project.

We have up until this post (28/11/14) had several meetings, Skype meetings and telecom conference meetings to work out what we are trying to achieve and how we will get there and have just completed our first workshop at the ADAS headquarters in Wolverhampton with a panel of experts on erosion in the UK. However, what surprised us all is that we know so little about the magnitude of the problem and the most efficient way(s) of solving it.

Figure 1  The Defra – funded project SP1318

Our funder is Defra but the consortium of researchers comes from Cranfield University, ADAS, Rothamsted Research, Anglia Ruskin University and, of course, the University of Northampton.

We are trying to establish the natural and management-based risk factors and build tools that tell us what background erosion rates should be and how we might reduce current rates to these levels. One problem we have is that there is ‘no one size fits all’ in terms of background rates in the UK so we must accept, for example, that background erosion rates in Cornwall may be very different from those in Yorkshire but that both are perfectly normal for the region. We are working with a range of databases to establish baseline soil erosion risk.

Whatever measures we (as a consortium) recommend for adoption must be suitable, applicable, compatible, implementable and, of course, be evidence based. That is a stupendously big ask. But that is what makes research so much fun and very challenging. You can judge how we have done 2 years from now as our report on project SP1318 will be made available to anyone who wants to read it on the Defra web site.

Prof Ian Foster