Dr T C Hales
No more applications being accepted
Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
About the Project
Project Background
Rapid deforestation associated with the expansion of oil palm agriculture is associated with negative environmental impacts such as increased sediment loads in river systems1, increase anoxia and chemical pollution of freshwater and saltwater systems2. Increased sediment loading negatively affects coral reefs and other downstream coastal systems by clouding the reef systems3. This “source to sink” problem requires an integrated understanding of the mechanisms of sediment generation, transport, and deposition across tropical catchments. The key challenge here is understanding and tracing how excess sediment generated by oil palm agriculture is transport the the fluvial and shallow coastal system. This PhD utilises a unique field site on the east coast of Borneo, where number of short catchments, with a gradients in the amount of deforestation and topographic conditions, discharge sediment into coral reef and mangrove systems. Using this unique field site, this PhD will model sediment generation and discharge for the catchments using a python-based landscape evolution model and couple this with a shoreline sediment transport model. The student will collect records of sedimentation in salt marshes along the coast, comparing this to sedimentation records on coral reefs.
Project Aims and Methods
The project is designed to tackle the problem of source-to-sink sediment transport using a wide range of methods and techniques. As this work represents and interdisciplinary collaboration, the PhD student will have a lot of autonomy to design the project and incorporate their own ideas. The project will have three major aims:
Investigate the competing roles of topography and oil palm expansion on sediment generation: Here you will using analysis of Landsat imagery to map the expansion of oil palm agriculture through the region over time. Supporting this you will develop models of sediment transport using LandLab4.
Investigate how salt marshes act to trap sediment within the coastal system: Here local depocentres, primarily salt marshes act to trap sediment. You will investigate how salt march extent has changed across the region using remotely sensed data. This will be coupled with sediment coring and stratigraphic analysis of field samples from key salt marshes in the region.
Investigate the pathways of sediment through the shallow coastal system and how these affect coral reef sedimentation. Here we will couple records of sedimentation with a coastal modelling to understand how and where sediment generated terrestrially is deposited within the coral reef system.
Candidate requirements
Students should have a background in geography, geomorphology, or the geosciences. Expertise or experience with numerical analysis or remote sensing analysis, while not essential, would also be advantageous.
Collaborative partner
The student will conduct several visits per year to the Natural History Museum, interacting with their co-supervisors and curators. They will have access to critical expertise on the giant clams and reef evolution along with facilities for species identification and description. The student will also engage with the public through outreach events at the NHM.
Training
The student will be embedded in a strong training environment. Upon arrival, the student will perform a skills audit, then sit with supervisors to determine the best training needs. The student will be based at Cardiff University, where they will have access to considerable expertise and equipment in mapping land use change and modelling sediment transport. The student would also be expected to perform field analysis (depending on the COVID-19 status) in the area. Students will also spend time at the Natural History Museum, where they will have access to state-of-the-art records of coral reef sedimentation. Students will have access to an excellent provision in professional skills development delivered by our University Graduate College, which has been shortlisted for a Times Higher award. Also students will have access to a range of specific training through the NERC GW4+ DTP.
Funding Notes
The studentship is open to UK and Irish nationals. International and EU students are also eligible to apply but should note that they may have to pay the difference between the home UKRI fee (https://www.ukri.org/skills/funding-for-research-training/) and the institutional International student fee (https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/tuition-fees).
Students will receive a stipend for 3.5 years of approximately £15,500p.a, a Research and Training and Support Grant (RTSG) of £11,000 and an individual training budget of £3,250.
References
Applicants should apply to the Doctor of Philosophy in Earth Sciences with a start date of October 2021.
In the research proposal section of your application, please specify the project title and supervisors of this project and copy the project description in the text box provided. In the funding section, please select 'I will be applying for a scholarship/grant' and specify that you are applying for advertised funding from NERC GW4 DTP.
References
1.Carlson, K. M. et al. Influence of watershed-climate interactions on stream temperature, sediment yield, and metabolism along a land use intensity gradient in Indonesian Borneo. J. Geophys. Res. Biogeosciences 119, 2013JG002516 (2014).
2.Harun, S., Baker, A., Bradley, C. & Pinay, G. Characterisation of dissolved organic matter in the Lower Kinabatangan River ,. (2014). doi:10.2166/nh.2014.196
3.Jakobsen, F., Hartstein, N., Frachisse, J. & Golingi, T. Sabah shoreline management plan (Borneo, Malaysia): Ecosystems and pollution. Ocean Coast. Manag. 50, 84–102 (2007).
4.Hobley, D. E. J. et al. Creative computing with Landlab: an open-source toolkit for building, coupling, and exploring two-dimensional numerical models of Earth-surface dynamics. . Earth Surf. Dyn. 5, 21–46 (2017).
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