Dr Jacqueline Hannam

Areas of expertise

• Digital Agriculture
• Monitoring and Environmental Informatics
• Natural Capital
• Soil
• Soil Resources
• Sustainable Land Systems

Background

Jack currently leads the Soil Informatics group and the LandIS team at Cranfield University, who are responsible for the national soil data for England and Wales https://www.cranfield.ac.uk/themes/environment-and-agrifood/landis.  She joined Cranfield University in 2004 as a Research Officer in Soil Systems. She previously worked at ETH Zurich and the University of Liverpool on international projects related to environmental magnetism. 

Jack’s research centres on soil data, digital soil mapping and soil health. Her work on digital soil mapping fuses novel machine learning approaches with expert and local knowledge to develop new predictions of soil properties at national scales. Work on predictive mapping of land capability (http://lle.gov.wales/map/alc2) has identified how climate change could affect the national capability of land for agriculture. The outputs have been used for decision making by the Welsh Government and Defra in national and local policies. She has developed field scale applications of regenerative agriculture, working closely with farmers and growers to use cover crops to improve soil health. She is interested in how different forms of soil data (e.g. spectroscopy or citizen-sourced data) can be used to inform local sustainable soil management and also feed into national monitoring schemes. 

She is President-Elect of the British Society of Soil Science (BSSS) and vice chair of the International Union of Soil Science (IUSS) Division 1: Soil in Space and Time. She is an Associate Editor for the journals Soil Use and Management and SOIL. She is on the scientific committee for the Land Use, Land Use Change to Forestry sector for the UK GHG emission inventory. She is a passionate science communicator and has been interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Sky News, BBC World and BBC Countryfile. She founded Soapbox Science in Milton Keynes in 2015, a public outreach platform promoting women in science. She is also a member of Cranfield University's Community and Public Engagement working group. 

She leads the soil systems module on the Agrifood MSc programme and has successfully supervised and examined numerous PhD and MSc students. She has developed and delivered advanced NERC training courses in soil systems for early career researchers and bespoke short courses for environmental science professionals.

Research opportunities

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas:  soil data and mapping; sensor technologies, digital soil mapping and modelling; conservation agriculture and soil health; participatory approaches to soil heath with diverse stakeholders; urban soil systems.

Current activities

Soil data and digital soil mapping: Current work includes developing Bayesian approaches for soil property estimation at national scales (LandIS). She is leading an EU project to develop regional-scale harmonised soil data for the Danube Basin (Joint Research Centre with ISRIC). With Cranfield colleagues she is developing an updated map of peat soils in Wales to provide new estimates of soil carbon stock and GHG emissions (Welsh Government). Land capability approaches are also being applied in an ESRC project to determine how soil functions are impacted by land use change resulting from food and nutrition scenarios emerging from the UK response to COVID-19 and Brexit (ES/V004433/1).

Soil health and regenerative agriculture: Continued work on cover crops will identify if they play a part in developing resilience to climate change (BBSRC FoodBioSystem PhD with University of Reading). She has also recently published an opinion piece on soil health and biological indicators.

Clients

NERC
ESRC
Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission
Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
Forestry Commission
Welsh Government
Dstl

Publications

• Articles in journals
• Conference papers
• Books