How do soils grow? Modelling soil development in the landscape. This project addresses the fundamental environmental issue of land degradation in Australia. The environment is both sensitive and diverse with uses from intensive agriculture, grazing, to large scale industrial. This project will build a model that will enable us to understand how soil forms and landscape evolves with time, to reconstruct the history of soil. The model will allow us to make the Australian populous aware of the frag ....How do soils grow? Modelling soil development in the landscape. This project addresses the fundamental environmental issue of land degradation in Australia. The environment is both sensitive and diverse with uses from intensive agriculture, grazing, to large scale industrial. This project will build a model that will enable us to understand how soil forms and landscape evolves with time, to reconstruct the history of soil. The model will allow us to make the Australian populous aware of the fragility of soil formation. This will lead to greater social awareness of our precarious position on the Australian landscape.Read moreRead less
Risk Assessment of Pesticide Contamination of Surface Water and Groundwater - Trigger Mechanisms for Fast Transport. Pesticide and herbicide transport to groundwater and surface water poses a risk to the environment and humans alike. A new event-based risk assessment approach of pesticide movement to surface water and groundwater will be developed. With the use of rainfall simulation partitioning between surface runoff and infiltration will be quantified in an agricultural catchment. Pesticide c ....Risk Assessment of Pesticide Contamination of Surface Water and Groundwater - Trigger Mechanisms for Fast Transport. Pesticide and herbicide transport to groundwater and surface water poses a risk to the environment and humans alike. A new event-based risk assessment approach of pesticide movement to surface water and groundwater will be developed. With the use of rainfall simulation partitioning between surface runoff and infiltration will be quantified in an agricultural catchment. Pesticide contamination events will be identified from climatic data such high intensity rainfalls and soil properties controlling runoff and preferential flow. Results will be used to develop management strategies to reduce offsite movement of pesticides.Read moreRead less
Soil inference system for bridging the environmental modelling gap. The Australian environment is confronted with issues of degradation and long-term sustainability. There is a need to predict landscape processes into the future using simulation models. The limited availability of appropriate information on the soil is a fundamental barrier to this crucial modelling. This project will develop an inference system to predict soil properties from the very limited information. The results will be us ....Soil inference system for bridging the environmental modelling gap. The Australian environment is confronted with issues of degradation and long-term sustainability. There is a need to predict landscape processes into the future using simulation models. The limited availability of appropriate information on the soil is a fundamental barrier to this crucial modelling. This project will develop an inference system to predict soil properties from the very limited information. The results will be used to describe soil quality, to monitor the effects of agricultural management, and principally to provide information needed by policy makers concerned with sustainable land use.Read moreRead less