Cranfield University

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• soil systems

Specialist areas:

• Soil Carbon and Organic Matter
• Nutrients and Pollutants
• Soil Architecture
• The Biological Engine of the Earth

Soils are extraordinarily complex systems, and by virtue of the wide range of functions they carry out are critical to the functioning of the Earth system. They underpin all terrestrial ecosystems and are literally fundamental to human civilisations past, present and future.

Soils show extreme spatial heterogeneity across many orders of magnitude of scale and encompass biological, chemical and physical dynamics over timescales which range from seconds to millennia. They are remarkable entities teeming with a huge variety of life, and function as result of the interplay between the myriad of constituents.

The Soil Systems Theme focuses upon studying the mechanisms behind the range of soil-mediated processes, and how these operate to deliver the range of ecosystem goods and services that are required of them. It aims to understand how the physical, chemical and biological constituents of soils are arranged in space and time, their dynamics, and how such phenomena underpin soil function. We aim to elucidate these processes and related soil properties well enough to be able to characterise them quantitatively, and develop mathematical models that verifiably predict system responses.

Such knowledge leads to an improved understanding of how to more effectively manage soils at a system level, and in a more sustainable manner, and  this feeds into the many associated themes within NSRI.

Visiting staff:
Dr Jon Arah; Professor Phil Haygarth; Professor Andy Whitmore; Dr Phil Wallace

Current research students:
Frederic Bourdin; Grivin Chipula; Sam Grice; David Kane; Paul Massey; Emma Moynihan; Simon Parsons; Guy Thallon; James Ulyett; Kirsty Watson