Environmental Systems Research Group
Welcome
The Environmental Systems Research Group (ESRG) is a vibrant interdisciplinary group which focuses on the sensitivity of environmental systems to natural and anthropogenic changes. We number about 25 people comprising full-time teaching and research staff, technicians, research assistants and postgraduate students. We produce high-quality research within our specialist areas of water resources and hydromorphology; coastal and estuarine systems and glaciology and environmental change. These specialisms share the following ethos:
- to make significant contributions to the development of theory, methods and practice through publications in top-quality peer-reviewed journals;
- to combine observation and measurement by fieldwork and remote sensing with conceptualisation and numerical modelling of environmental systems;
- to encourage scientific research which has clear relevance to the needs of society;
- to develop international collaboration in all our core areas of activity.
Field Research Sierra Helada
ESRG has an active postgraduate school including PhD students working in all of our core areas. We operate several funded MSc programmes including Sustainable Catchment Management, Environmental Remote Sensing, Remote Sensing with Computing.
Environmental Systems Research Group staff
Academic staff
- Dr Nicole Archer - Surface water-groundwater hydrology; natural flood management
- Dr Tom Ball - Global change; flooding; environmental law
- Dr Andrew Black - Hydrology and water resources
- Dr Mark Cutler - Remote Sensing; biogeography
- Dr Sue Dawson - Holocene sea-level change; tsunamis; diatom biostratigraphy
- Professor Terry Dawson - Systems and earth systems science; remote sensing, GIS and environmental modelling
- Professor Rob Duck - Coastal and estuarine processes; lacustrine systems
- Dr Martin Kirkbride - Glacial geomorphology; palaeoclimatic reconstruction
- Dr Alison Reeves - Estuarine processes; water chemistry
- Dr John Rowan - Fluvial geomorphology; lakes and environmental management
- Professor Chris Spray - Managing aquatic ecosystems; avian ecology
- Professor Alan Werritty (Emeritus) - Hydrology and fluvial geomorphology
Research/Honorary Research Fellows
- Dr Olivia Bragg - Mire systems and ecology; eco-hydrology of rivers and lakes
- Professor David Crichton - flood hazards and insurance
- Dr Hugh Ingram - mire ecology and hydrology
- Dr Derek McGlashan - coastal processes, coastal law; sea level change
Research Students
We currently have an exceptional group of Postgraduates working within the ESRG engaged on a range of challenging research projects involving multiple external collaborators and funding partners. Further information on current and recently completed projects can be found at the Current Students: Postgraduate page.
Research Technicians
- Craig Phillips - Environmental Diagnostics Laboratory Technician
- Alan Long - Field Technician
Energy Balance Italian Alps
Research Environment
210Pb Dating Facility
ESRG has well-founded laboratory and fieldwork capabilities funded by projects from external sources including agencies NERC, JIF, SRIF, Durham Bequest, SNIFFER and SAGES. The Environmental Diagnostics Laboratory houses specialist equipment water, soil and sediment analysis (e.g. 210Pb and 137Cs radiometric dating by low-energy Ortec gamma spectrometers and particle size analysis using a Coulter LS13-320 laser granulometer).
Long-term catchment instrumentation programmes are on-going in the Tweed (HELP Programme) and the NERC funded River Feshie where water balance and hydrological pathway investigations are ongoing with disharge measurements using ultrasonic and Acoustic Doppler Current Profiling, water sampling using ISCO samplers and a network of automatic weather stations and precipitation gauges.
Glaciological, estuarine and limnological research make use of specialist equipment including Leica dGPS, Heucke steam ice drill, automatic weather stations, Campbell data loggers, microsensors and a range of boats and coring rigs. Research in remote sensing is supported by NERC's remote sensing facilities (field spectroscopy and airborne hyperspectral and conventional imagery) and the NERC-funded Dundee Satellite Receiving Station. Additional facilities for postgraduates include the Geodata Laboratory with dedicated image processing software, GIS and specialist modelling and statistical packages.
High Flow ADC Deployment
ESRG current projects
2009 River Earn Floods
Flood Risk and Sustainable Flood Management
A number of projects have been undertaken by members of the ESRG into fluvial, pluvial and coastal flooding.
Alpine Glaciers and Climate Change
A series of projects in this area have been funded by NERC, the Royal Society, the British Council and most recently the EC FP7 Project ACQWA. Research aims include mapping of supraglacial debris extent and thickness using thermal remote sensing, glacier energy and mass balance modelling of 'clean' and debris-covered glaciers and forecasting meltwater flows from alpine basins using climate model outputs. ESRG researchers leading this work include Ben Brock, Mark Cutler, Martin Kirkbride and Tim Reid.
Field work in French Alps
Hydromorphology of Lakes and Rivers
Lake Habitat Survey Training
This area has attracted significant amounts of funding (JNCC, BSi, SNIFFER) for the development of the science-base and decision-support tools required to implement the European Water Framework Directive. Collaboration is on-going with UK and European environment and conservation agencies , including EA, NIEA, SEPA developing new methods for assessing the physical condition (structure and hydrological regime) of lakes and rivers - such as the Lake Habitat Survey (Rowan et al., 2006) and hydrological regime alteration and environmental flow analysis (Black et al., 2005; Bragg et al., 2005).
Related work includes soil erosion, sedimentation and sediment provenance investigations using uncertainty-inclusive sediment fingerprinting (Duck and Herbert, 2006; Reeves et al., 2008).
Environmental Regulation
There is an important cluster of work which examines the interactions between natural scientists and lawyers in the formulation of policy, management guidelines and environmental regulations (cf. Kirk et al., 2007). Areas of work include legal definitions of coastline and the implications this has for management and conservation, managing diffuse sources of pollution and new directions will look more critically at natural resource management and societal resilience, environmental protection and environmental crime.
New glacial history of the Cairngorm Mountains
Field mapping has revealed a more complex sequence of deglaciation than hitherto recognised, including ice-sheet readvance, ice-dammed lake formation and multiple moraine stages. A new relative dating method (Kirkbride, 2005) allows bouldery deposits dating from the Younger Dryas Stadial to be distinguished from older deposits. The suite of landforms observed has been related to the emergence of summit plateaux from a thinning allochthonous ice sheet.
Northern Corries - Ice History
Coastal and Estuarine Processes
Coring in North Ford, South Uist
The principle participants in this cluster include Reeves, Duck, McGlashan and Dawson. The research features a range of studies ranging from the application of acoustic methods of remote sensing and their application to coastal and estuarine sediment transport studies; investigating the sedimentology, hydrodynamics and environmental management of the Tay Estuary, Scotland; developing best practice for ICZM in Scotland inclusive of coastal geomorphological processes and UK legislative systems and work on tsunami hazards (see (Loh et al., 2008; McGlashan et al., 2009; Mörner et al., 2008).
Remote Sensing
Mark Cutler leads a strong international Postgraduate group complimenting his main research interests in tropical rainforest biogeography and carbon budgets (Foody et al., 2006). One of the strengths of the group is the diversity of collaborations utilising data products from NASA, JPL and the NOAA AVHHR data archive at the NERC Satellite Receiving Station based in the University of Dundee. The spectrum of projects currently active and recently completed include assessing the role of surface debris in controlling Alpine glacier melt, mapping land cover change in Libya, using remote sensing to characterise water quality trends in large European lakes and modelling landslide sensitivity in the Scottish Highlands.
MODIS Satellite image
of algal blooms
High Impact Recent Publications
Ball, T., Smith, K.A. and Moncrieff, J.B. 2007. Effect of stand age on greenhouse gas fluxes from a Sitka spruce chronosequence on a peaty gley soil. Global Change Biology, 13, 21-28.
Black, A.R., Rowan, J.S., Duck, R.W., Bragg, O.M. and Clelland, B.E. 2005. DHRAM: a method for classifying river flow regime alterations for the EU Water Framework Directive. Aquatic Conservation: Marine & Freshwater Ecosystems, 15, 427-446.
Bragg, O.M., Black, A.R., Duck, R.W. and Rowan, J.S. 2005. Approaching the physical-biological interface in rivers: a review of methods for ecological evaluation of flow regimes. Progress in Physical Geography, 29, 1-26.
Brock, B.W., Rivera, A., Casassa, G., Bown F. and Acuña, C. 2007. The surface energy balance of an active ice-covered volcano: Volcán Villarrica, southern Chile. Annals of Glaciology, 45, 104-114
Duck, R.W. and Herbert, R.A. 2006. High-resolution shallow seismic identification of gas escape features in the sediments of Loch Tay, Scotland: tectonic and microbiological associations. Sedimentolgoy, 53, 481-493.
Foody, G.M. and Cutler, M.E.J., 2006. Mapping the species richness and composition of tropical forests from remotely sensed data with neural networks. Ecological Modelling, 195, 37-42.
Kirk, E.A., Reeves, A.D. and Blackstock, K.L. 2007. Path Dependency and Environmental Regulation. Environment and Planning C, 25, 250-268.
Kirkbride, M.P. and Dugmore, A.J. 2006. Responses of mountain ice caps in central Iceland to Holocene climate change. Quaternary Science Reviews, 25, 1692-1707.
Loh, P.S., Miller, A.E.J., Reeves, A.D., Harvey, S.M., Overnell, J. 2008. Assessing the biodegradability of terrestrially-derived organic matter in Scottish sea loch sediments. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 12, 811-823.
McGlashan, D.J., Duck, R.W. and Reid, C.T. 2009. Legal implications of mobile shorelines in Great Britain. Area, 41, 149-156.
Milne, F.D., Werritty, A., Davies, M.C.R. and Brown, M.J. 2009. A recent debris flow event and implications for hazard management. Quarterly Journal of Geology and Hydrogeology, 42, 51-60.
Mörner, N. A., Laborel, J. and Dawson, S. 2008. Submarine "sandstorms" and tsunami events in the Indian Ocean. Journal of Coastal Research, 24, 1608-1611.
Reid, T., and Crout, N.A. 2008. A thermodynamic model of freshwater Antarctic lake ice. Ecological Modelling, 210, 231-241.
Rowan, J.S., Carwardine, J., Duck, R.W., Bragg, O.M., Black, A.R., Cutler, M.E.J., Soutar, I. and Boon, P.J. 2006. Development of a technique for Lake habitat survey (LHS) with applications for the European Union Water Framework Directive. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, 16, 637-657.
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