Bryony joined NERC SENSE CDT on 1st October 2020 and completed her PhD at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) as a University of Leeds registered student. Her research focused on the use of satellite altimetry to improve understanding of the dynamics of Antarctic grounding zones, supervised by Dr Oliver Marsh, Prof. Anna Hogg and Prof. Helen A. Fricker.
The Sir David Attenborough ship floating on an iceberg filled ocean. Photo credit: Drone picture taken by Joe Laurance
Bryony was awarded her PhD in July 2024 and—just three days after her viva—joined the RRS Sir David Attenborough on her maiden voyage to the Arctic. During the 6-week KANG-GLAC cruise to the fjords of south-east Greenland, Bryony was part of the physical oceanography team. Her responsibilities included running CTD casts to measure ocean properties in and around the fjords, and processing the continuous weather, oceanographic and seafloor data collected by the ship’s instruments. The primary goal of the cruise was to gather data to better understand the interactions between the flows of warm water into the fjords and rates of glacier melt, and the resulting impact on marine productivity, sedimentation and nutrient cycling.
Bryony and colleague stood on the ship with CTD being lowered into the ocean in the background. Photo credit: Bryony Freer.
Polar bear walking on sea ice floating in the ocean. Photo credit: Bryony Freer.
A highlight of the cruise (alongside seeing polar bears and orcas for the first time!) was Bryony’s coordination of a live ‘Meet the Scientist’ workshop. This interactive session, organized in collaboration with SatSchool and Dynamic Earth, reached over 4,000 pupils across Scotland, offering them a first hand glimpse into life as a polar scientist. The event also featured a video Bryony created to showcase the team’s activities during the research cruise, which you can watch here:
Video about Greenland at Bryony’s meet the scientist workshop.
In October 2024, Bryony took the next step in her career by moving to San Diego to start a Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. This two-year fellowship allows her to continue her pioneering research on Antarctic grounding zones, benefiiting from advanced training and application of artificial intelligence methods.
Bryony stood by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography sign.
Following the success of our writing retreats in early 2024, we recently arranged for a couple more for our students with great success. Our students had the opportunity to dedicate some time to focus on writing. The retreats included mindfulness and stretching sessions, walking/running/tennis activity sessions and optional evening yoga. Our students had an excellent time and even met some friendly llamas on a chilly Yorkshire morning.
It might come as a surprise, but even in the relatively mild climate of Scotland, snow manages to endure year-round in certain mountain locations. In fact, until recently, some highland corries would house perennial snow patches for many decades without seeing them melt. The fine balance between preferential snow deposition in winter and sheltering in summer makes predicting the distribution of these snow patches a rigorous test for the kind of physically based snow models used in climate projection and impacts studies. This is the basis of my PhD research.
This summer, my fieldwork took me to Coire Cas on Cairngorm Mountain, where I aimed to map the areal extent and measure the reflective properties of some persistent snow patches. My tool for the job was a DJI M210 drone equipped with a multispectral sensor matched to the Sentinel-2 satellite sensor. Conducting multispectral drone surveys requires two things notoriously scarce in the Scottish Highlands: low winds and clear skies. Moreover, this summer was dubbed ‘Scotland’s worst since 2015,’ limiting us to a single day of drone surveys. The scarcity of cloud-free days this season is visualised in figure 1, which showcases all the satellite images captured from the Sentinel-2 over Cairngorm Mountain this summer.
Despite the inclement weather, we did manage to retrieve some spectral measurements of the late-lying snow on the 24th June (figure 2 shows one of the short-lived sunny intervals on the day). These data will help improve the snow mapping algorithms which, in turn, feed into research and contribute to discussions concerning biodiversity, water resources, and risk management in cold and mountainous regions.
In addition to my fieldwork, this summer I made my first ‘pilgrimage’ to a remote North-East facing corrie on Braeriach mountain called Garbh Choire Mòr. This location is considered to be the snowiest place in the UK and houses the famous Sphinx snow patch (see figure 3). The Sphinx has made it to popular news platforms numerous times over the past few years, and this year marks an unprecedented fourth consecutive year of its disappearance. Figure 4 shows a timeline marking the years that the Sphinx has disappeared; the trend seen here mirrors the significant impacts of climate change on Scotland’s winter conditions. Current projections suggest a stark future with ‘little to no snow by the 2080’ — a disheartening forecast for chionophiles like myself.
We are very excited to announce that our Cohort 1 student Calum Hoad secured a position as a Senior Science Officer – Seagrass Habitat Mapping. From day 1 on 11th November, Calum has faced the challenge of juggling a professional career and a PhD head-on.
A few words from Calum on his experience so far working for Project Seagrass:
“I’m delighted to be starting a new role which utilises the skills I’ve developed throughout my PhD to aid our understanding of seagrass distribution, important in the context of both the biodiversity and climate crises. I’ll be starting my new role part-time while I finish my PhD work“
We know Calum will continue to thrive and we wish him all the very best, and can’t wait to hear more about his new adventure.
Max has completed a 3-month Postdoc role at BAS and is taking up an exciting new role as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the satellite and airborne geophysics group at Kiel University. He has also submitted a Marie Curie Global Fellowship proposal between BAS and the University of Tasmania. We eagerly await the outcome!
Max’s first and second PhD chapters were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. His third chapter was published in the Geophysical Journal International.
SENSE would like to take this opportunity to thank our funder the Natural Environment Research Council, our partner institution the British Antarctic Survey, Max’s supervisors both at BAS and the University of Edinburgh, the examiners Dr Graeme Eagles and Prof Robert Bingham, our SENSE wider community, and Max’s family and friends, for their invaluable support and input into Max’s PhD journey.
From all of us at SENSE – congratulations! Wishing you all the very best in your future career in academia.
Charlotte has produced the first continent-wide mapping study of plant life across Antarctica. The satellite survey will be the baseline for monitoring vegetation in Antarcticas’ response to climate change. The mapping of previously uncharted regions will inform future conservation efforts.
Charlotte measuring the location of moss on Robert Island, maritime Antarctica (photo: René Quinan/INACH).
Charlotte Walshaw, PhD researcher from the School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, who led the study, said: “Our continent-scale map provides key information on vegetation presence in areas that are rarely visited by people. This will have profound implications for our understanding of where vegetation is located across the continent, and what factors influence this distribution.”
Vegetation in Antarctica is dominated by lichen and mosses. Image from Livingston Island, maritime Antarctica (photo: Felix Grewe).
The research, published in Nature Geoscience, was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and UK Space Agency. Field campaigns were supported by the British Antarctic Survey, Instituto Antarctic Chileno and Antarctica New Zealand.
We want to thank you to those who attended the SENSE celebration event last month and we are delighted to announce our first SENSE annual prize winners for Cohort 1. This year’s prizes were sponsored by the UK Space Agency and presented by Beth Greenaway (Head of EO & Climate) at the celebration event. Whilst we wish we could recognise all are amazing students’ achievements the SENSE prizes were created to recognise students how have gone above and beyond in different areas of their PhD. Thank you to those who provided nominations, it was difficult for the panel to select the winners.
The paper describes the first validation of high-resolution satellite derived methane emissions from an active a gas leak in the UK. Emily drove the scientific collaboration and led the publication. She also established and led the collaboration with the UK Met Office, the Canadian Commercial Satellite company GHGsat, Royal Hollaway, RICARDO and the University of Bristol.
The paper was selected as a highlight paper by the journal due to its innovative nature and significant results. Emily’s work gained a lot of exposure through the media, conferences and other presentations including the paper already being viewed nearly 2,000 times, far more than other papers of its age in AMT.
Best Outreach: Calum Hoad
Calum is awarded this prize for his multitude of engaging outreach projects carrying his knowledge, expertise and enthusiasm to a wider audience.
Calum is a co-founder of SatSchool, who you have already heard present today. Calum played a key role in securing funding for the project. He has held the roles of secretary, chair and going into schools personally reaching ~300 high-school students so far.
In addition, Calum has independently undertaken activities including Meet the Scientist event, being on panels about research in schools, a developer of tour from space used at science festivals and available on the SENSE website.
Calum also mentors undergraduate students to develop their own activities and gain confidence through the GeoSciences Outreach and Engagement course.
Best External Engagement: Bryony Freer
Bryony Freer is awarded this prize because of her commitment to knowledge exchange.
Bryony has taken an active role in promoting Antarctic issues, climate change and remote sensing science to a broad range of audiences. Her activities include giving talks and engaging with questions at high-profile public events (including Ice Worlds at the Royal Maritime Museum and the Be Curious Research Festival), interacting with policy makers and the public (COP 26) and with school children.
Bryony also undertook an extremely successful placement with ISARDSAT where she visited their Barcelona offices. She also spent time at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography conducting her research and disseminating her findings including visiting NASA. Bryony has since developed these connections and work to win a prestigious Schmidt Science Fellowship hosted at Scripps in the US which she will be undertaking after completing her PhD with SENSE.
We look forward to seeing the nominations for next year and once again congratulate this years winners and all our SENSE students for all their amazing achievements!
When publishing journal papers as a SENSE CDT student, usual NERC rules apply: open-access in some capacity is required. Publishing of code and datasets is strongly encouraged, but not required.
When you publish a paper, make sure you acknowledge the NERC grant number:
“Funding for this research was provided by NERC through a SENSE CDT studentship (NE/T00939X/1).”
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PhD Project title: Mapping photosynthetic life across Antarctica using optical satellite and UAV imagery
Supervisory team: Claudia Colesie (University of Edinburgh), Andrew Gray (Norwegian Institute for Nature Research), Peter Convey (British Antarctic Survey) and Kevin Newsham (British Antarctic Survey)
Charlotte on the Sir David Attenborough (i.e. Boaty McBoatFace) travelling down the Antarctic Peninsula. Antarctic coastline with icebergs floating in the sea behind.
What is your background?
I have an integrated masters degree in Environmental Science (MEnv, Bsc) from the University of Leeds. One of these years was spent studying abroad at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. The degree program was incredibly broad and included studies of the biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere and atmosphere. This varied knowledge base set me up well for a PhD in Earth Observation, which itself is an extremely interdisciplinary field. For my masters project I used BIOME4 model reconstructions in addition to model projections to assess the analogous nature of the mid-Pliocene Warm Period for forecasting future vegetation changes in the Arctic.
Tell us about your project and the area of environmental science are you most excited about?
Well currently the area of environmental science that excites me the most is vegetation in the polar regions! To survive in Antarctica, the vegetation has to be incredibly resilient and well-adapted to withstand extreme freezing and desiccating conditions, as well as extended periods of darkness each year. Mosses, lichens, algae and cyanobacteria in Antarctica really are the extremophiles of the vegetation world!
For my research, I use multispectral satellite and UAV imagery to map vegetation at different spatial scales across Antarctica. I also use field and lab-based spectroradiometer data to analyze spectral reflectance signatures of different Antarctic moss and lichen species and assess their variability with environmental conditions. For the first part of my PhD, I produced a map of terrestrial vegetation across the entire Antarctic continent using spectral reflectance indices applied to Sentinel-2 imagery. This map will mark the baseline for which to compare future changes against. During this time, I also produced a spectral library of various Antarctic moss and lichen species.
During my PhD I have been fortunate enough to have qualified as a drone pilot (GVC) and to have had two summer field seasons down in Antarctica. The first campaign took place over three months on Robert Island (South Shetland Islands), with logistics supported by the British Antarctic Survey/INACH and the project funded by a NERC snow algae grant. The second field campaign took place over two months in the McMurdo Dry Valleys (based at Scott Base). Logistics were supported by Antarctica New Zealand and I was supporting a project funded by the Antarctic Science Platform. During both these field campaigns I conducted field spectroscopy, multispectral UAV flights, satellite ground validation, vegetation gas exchange and field sampling.
Charlotte Preparing for a multispectral drone flight with the Mavic 3M in Pyramid Trough, Antarctica. Quadcopter drone in the foreground on rocky terrain with Charlotte controlling it in the background.
Since returning from fieldwork I have been using spectroscopy data that I collected on Robert Island to link NDVI to the photosynthetic activity of Antarctic moss. The aim is to assess the potential of satellite and UAV imagery to remotely monitor moss photosynthesis in Antarctica. Lastly, I will be classifying vegetation in orthomosaics that I generated from high resolution (sub-cm) multispectral UAV flights on Robert Island, to assess the capability of such imagery to map moss and lichen down to species or genus level. The goal is to improve our understanding of UAV sensor capabilities for mapping Antarctic vegetation at fine spatial scales, which ultimately will help us to move towards a more standardized way of mapping vegetation across Antarctica with UAVs.
Charlotte presenting research at Xlll SCAR biology Symposium in Christchurch, New Zealand 2023. Charlotte stood infront of a slide on grouping Antarctica’s major vegetation types.
Was using satellite data at the core of your PhD project important to you?
I had an open mind when I was looking for PhD opportunities within environmental science. However, being able to work with satellite data over Antarctica is particularly exciting because although I have been lucky enough to have visited myself, the remote work provides a great means of studying the most remote continent on Earth from the comfort of my own office in Edinburgh! The scale of satellite data has also enabled me to work on mapping Antarctic vegetation at the continental scale, which is quite a mind-blowing concept when you consider how big Antarctica really is!
Charlotte being awarded the best early career research talk prize at the SCAR Biology Symposium in Christchurch, New Zealand 2023.
Why did you decide to enter the space sector?
I have been interested in the space sector from a very young age and always wanted to learn more about how remote sensing worked. This interest was also fueled by completing a work experience placement at RAL space in Oxfordshire with a satellite operations manager. So when this PhD opportunity came up combining my interests in vegetation and satellite data in Antarctica I was sold. I had never considered that combination before!
Setting up the Trimble DGPS base station for our UAV flights next to Canada Glacier, Taylor Valley, Antarctica.
What does equity, diversity and inclusion mean to you?
Within the research institution, I think having equal access to training opportunities that are relevant to your work are really important. I also believe that being included in a research community within your department is very beneficial. Within the School of Geosciences, I have been included in the biosphere group which holds weekly meetings with research talks and fresh fruit!
What are your hopes for future PhD students?
That all future PhD students can be part of active and supportive research groups which meet regularly and provide a sense of community for the student. I am lucky to be part of the cryptogamiacs research group (link below), which holds bi-weekly meetings to discuss relevant science as well as hosting social outings too.
Any tips for those interested in applying for PhDs?
Look for a topic which really interests you, it doesn’t necessarily need to be directly related to the topic you are currently working on – I hadn’t worked much with remote sensing data before I started the PhD! Also talk to potential supervisors as having a great and supportive supervisory team makes a massive difference to the PhD experience.
