Dr Ron Corstanje

Senior Research Fellow in Pedometrics
Location: Building 37, Cranfield campus
E: roncorstanje@cranfield.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)1234 750111 x2765
Environmental Science and Technology

Current activities

Dr Ron Corstanje is a soil scientist and his interests range from understanding the intricacies of soil microbial and biogeochemical processes to working on soil and ecosystem dynamic processes present at a variety of scales and levels. As part of the Pedometrics group, Ron is active in the sampling, monitoring and spatial prediction of soil properties. Ron is also currently active in the integration of the field of ecological and/or environmental informatics with more process oriented modelling; the integration of information over ecosystem types and orders of complexity and to generate inferences from data structures to soil processes, spatial and temporal pattern analysis. Having considerable experience working for and within industry, Ron is also currently active in developing statistical methods that are practical for everyday industry use.

Clients

Natural Environment Research Council
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Irish Environmental Protection Agency
European Commission
Reckitt Benckiser.

Background

Dr Ron Corstanje grew up in Barcelona, Spain. Subsequently, he attended the Wageningen Agricultural University where he obtained his Ir (dutch title of engineer) in environmental sciences in 1997. While at Wageningen, Ron worked for a German Agency for Technical Cooperation in Jamaica on novel environmental technological approaches. After Wageningen, he briefly worked at Procter & Gamble, from there he joined the Wetland Biogeochemistry Laboratory at the University of Florida in 1998 and obtained his PhD in experimental and multivariate analysis of indicators of ecological change in 2003.

Ron has completed two postdocs, 2004–2005 at the GIS laboratory, University of Florida and more significantly, 2005–2008 in the Environmetrics group at the Centre for Mathematical and Computational Biology, Rothamsted Research. In September 2008 he joined the Pedometrics group at National Soil Resources Institute at Cranfield.

Selected publications

Savvides, A., R. Corstanje, S.J. Baxter, B.G. Rawlins and R.M. Lark. The relationship between diffuse spectral reflectance of the soil and its cation exchange capacity is scale-dependent. Geoderma, submitted
Corstanje, R., K.M. Portier, and K.R. Reddy. Discriminant analysis of biogeochemical indicators of nutrient enrichment in Florida wetlands. European Journal of Soil Science, in review.
Lark, R.M and R. Corstanje. Non-homogeneity of variance components from spatially nested sampling of the soil. European Journal of Soil Science, in press.
Corstanje, G.J.D. Kirk, R. M. Pawlett, R. Read, R., and R.M. Lark. Spatial variation of ammonia volatilization from soil and its scale dependent correlation with soil properties. European Journal of Soil Science 59:1260-1270 (2008).
Corstanje, R., G.J.D. Kirk and R.M. Lark. The behavior of soil process models of ammonia volatilization at contrasting spatial scales. European Journal of Soil Science 59:1271-1283 (2008).
White J.R., Gardner L.M., Sees M. and R. Corstanje. The Short-Term Effects of Prescribed Burning on Biomass Removal and the Release of Nitrogen and Phosphorus in a Treatment Wetland. Journal of Environmental Quality. 37:2386-2391 (2008).
Corstanje, R. and R.M. Lark. On effective linearity of soil process models. European Journal of Soil Science, 59:990-999 (2008).