Diffuse pollution, land cover change and marine impacts

Project overview

Agricultural diffuse pollution has been shown to impact freshwater and marine environments and ecosystems. The main constituents of this pollution are sediments, nutrients and microbial pollutions from farming. There are established theoretical frameworks for understanding these exports based around the ‘source-mobilisation-pathway-impact’ and ‘critical source area’ concepts (Heathwaite et al. 2005 and Haygarth et al. 2005).  These frameworks have been encoded with software tools, such as SCIMAP (Reaney et al. 2011) and PSYCHIC.

To date, the majority of the applications of these tools have focused on freshwaters rather than the impacts on the marine environment. Another limitation of the current applications of the concepts is that the mobilising rainfall and land cover maps are often considered to be stationary and fixed in time. This MRes will look at how the use of multiple rainfall and land cover maps enables a more robust assessment of the diffuse pollution source areas. This part of the project will involve the generation of a range of land cover maps from remote sensing projects, such as ESA’s Sentinel 2 or Planet Labs’ PlanetScope, and rainfall maps from NASA’s GPM.  The impacts on marine environments will be assessed for a tropical island, such as Fiji, that has an active agricultural sector, sufficient slopes to drive diffuse pollution and an economy that relies on Ecosystem Services from its marine environment, such as fishing and tourism.

This MRes project will provide strong skills in GIS and remote sensing in the context of environmental management. This will be a desk-based study.

If you are interested in this project, please contact the lead supervisor:

Dr. Sim Reaney (sim.reaney@durham.ac.uk)

Web: https://simreaney.github.io

Key References

Reaney, S.M., et al., 2011. Risk-based modelling of diffuse land use impacts from rural landscapes upon salmonid fry abundance. Ecol. Modell. 222, 1016–1029.

Heathwaite, A.L., et al., 2005. Modelling and managing critical source areas of diffuse pollution from agricultural land using flow connectivity simulation. J. Hydrol. 304, 446–461.