Funded PhD Studentship: DTC GEO 23 - Erosional impacts of current and improved land management practices and guidelines in oil palm

Swansea University is a UK top 30 institution for research excellence (Research Excellence Framework 2014), and has been named Welsh University of the Year 2017 by The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide.

Swansea Science DTC is a community committed to undertaking world-class research that has a positive impact globally and we have a fully-funded PhD scholarship for 2017/2018 entry.

We are recognised as one of the foremost global centres for teaching and research in human and physical geography. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) Geography at Swansea was ranked joint 9th in the UK for research impact and 11th in the UK for research environment. Our research environment (how the Department supports research staff and students) and the impact of our research (its value to society) were both judged to be 100% world leading or internationally excellent.

Our internationally active research staff and large community of postgraduate researchers create a dynamic and inspirational environment in which to study. You will also benefit from our exceptional facilities, including: a powerful workstation for all Earth Observation postgraduates; ‘Blue Ice 2’ supercomputer, containing 600 cores and 1.2TB memory distributed over 50 nodes with 33TB data storage, used mainly for climate and glaciological modelling; specialist laboratory suites for stable isotope ratio analysis; tree ring analysis; extraction and identification of organic compounds; pollen extraction and analysis; rainfall simulation; tephra analysis; soil and sediment characterisation.

Description of Project:

Recent work shows that erosion on oil palm on moderate to steep terrain is seriously high and that downstream impacts on channel size, channel shape, sedimentation, and flooding frequency downstream are substantial - but knowledge on the relative importance of hypothesized sediment sources and the degree of effectiveness of mitigating measures (notably riparian forest strips) remain poor. This project aims to quantify erosion (using monitoring and sediment tracing and fingerprinting techniques) resulting from current and proposed improved land management practices and guidelines in oil palm in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. It will involve multi-scale monitoring over a two-year period of three hillslope-scale systems: a rainforest control slope and two oil palm slope systems – one with no riparian forest strip and normal oil palm land management, and one with riparian forest where (following a period with normal land management) experimental conservational measures are applied (e.g. cover crops, cross-drains, run-off diversions, recycled palm waste).