Another funded PhD Studentship opportunity!
Human impacts on soil health in upland managed and rough grazing land: Exploring variability emerging from human-soil interactions at the Finzean Estate (Scotland).
This project will investigate the ongoing impacts of past human actions which physically reshaped the land’s surface on soil health. The project will use the upland grazing areas of the Finzean Estate in Deeside as a study area, working in partnership with the landowners and estate managers. To investigate spatial and temporal scales and the combined impacts of human activities past and present in this landscape type, the project will combine archaeological information, providing insights into broad patterns of past human activities over 1000s of years, with agricultural data, providing essential information on recent management, and with field-based data to characterise local topography, vegetation and soils. Its results will help to build new models of how landscapes and healthy soils are formed, informing innovative approaches to farmland management in response to contemporary environmental and climate crises.
The project is supervised by an interdisciplinary team of experts in soil science (Matt Aitkenhead and Malcolm Coull, James Hutton Institute), archaeological remote sensing (Rachel Opitz, University of Glasgow) and geotechnical engineering (Ehsan Jorat, Abertay University), in partnership with the Finzean Estate.
Application Deadline: 12 June 2023.
See all the details on the project and how to apply at:
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