Congratulations to SENSE student Lucy Wells who is part of a group at the University of Edinburgh who has received funding for an industrial collaborative project with Pentland Land Managers.
The PLMA is a group of farmers and land mangers representing over 80% of the Pentlands regional park area, working across farms to share knowledge and resources to fight climate change and biodiversity loss on a landscape scale while keeping the Pentlands accessible to the public. Six of the PLMA’s farms are working together to create a combined land management scheme, with an initial focus on carbon sequestration, water quality, and natural flood management.
Lucy will be working on the first part of the project which will be using sentinel-2 data preprocessed by the EPCC (Edinburgh Performance Computing Centre) and machine learning techniques to make a first baseline of land use in the Pentlands, with Dr Torben Sell in the School of Mathematics. The second part of the project will then use this to explore how land use changes affect flood management.
This funding came out the School of Geosciences participations in the AIMday Digital Frontiers, organised by Edinburgh Innovations. AIMday® (Academic Industry Meeting day) is based on workshops where challenges submitted by participating companies around a central theme are discussed with academics from relevant university disciplines. Read more about the AIMday Concept. We are very grateful to Stuart Simmons Head of Business Development & Innovation, in the School of GeoSciences for helping Lucy with this opportunity.
Lucy is a 4th year SENSE student at the the University of Edinburgh who is supervised by Professor Casey Ryan. Lucy’s PhD project is ‘The response of savannas and dry forests to global change: disentangling the effects of climate change, land use and changing CO2 using radar remote sensing and fieldwork’.