Tim Brewer

Areas of expertise

• Monitoring and Environmental Informatics
• Natural capital
• Soil
• Soil Resources
• Sustainable Land Systems

Background

Tim graduated with a geography degree and went on to study for a Masters in Land Resource Management. After six months voluntary work in Kenya, he returned to Cranfield to run the aerial photography laboratory. During this time extensive contributions were made to the Monitoring Landscape Change in the National Parks project. He gained his lectureship in 1994 and became Course Director for the MSc in Geographical Information Management in 2001 until 2012. He was Environment Programme Director from 2012-2018 and Assistant Director of Education for the School of Water, Energy and Environment from 2016-2018. Tim was appointed as Director of Education for the School of Water, Energy and Environment in 2018.
He has worked on research and consultancy projects in the UK and overseas, for example, Jordan, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Mexico, India.

Current activities

Tim's main research interest is land cover monitoring, a topic of increasing importance for natural resources management in the context of global change (climate change, population pressures and food production, security).

Examples of recent and current research projects include: Newton ESRC-ICSSR Urban Transformations in India - developing Storymaps as co-investigator; Defra  - scaling up the benefits of erosion mitigation at the landscape scale, and better understanding of the soil protection landscape as co-investigator; Newton Fund - Water Platform development with Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco, Mexico; Foreign and Commonwealth Office - monitoring and verification of cropping area in Afghanistan as co-investigator and work package leader; Food and Agriculture Organisation - development of a GPS based land use monitoring tool; Defra - Payment for Ecosystems Pilot Project within a complex urban environment as project manager. His main consulting interest is capacity building via CPD for geographic information management.

Recent capacity building examples include: Leading successful bid for and delivery of a CPD programme for the Abu Dhabi Water and Electircity Authority, UAE; leading delivery of CPD in remote sensing techniques to Afghan personnel within FCO contract.

Other areas of recent activity include: Water harvesting suitability analysis using GIS, developing customised GIS solutions, mapping upland semi natural vegetation by air photo interpretation within the UK, ground surveys in support of land cover classification, topographic mapping using analogue and softcopy photogrammetry, GPS survey, erosion survey and risk assessment, archaeological mapping by remote sensing and soil survey.

Clients

• Department for Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), UK Government
• Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK Government
• Natural England  
• United Arab Emirates Technical Training Programme, UAE Government

Publications

• Articles in journals
• Conference papers
• Books