Zoom into Soil: The Fragile Skin – Its diversity and health

In this webinar, John Hollis, Fellow of BSSS, and Dr Rebecca Hall, Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Teagasc (the Agriculture and Food Development Authority) discuss ‘The Fragile Skin – Its diversity and health’.

John Hollis is a Fellow of the British Society of Soil Science and previously worked as an independent consultant, specialising in soil and water resources and the environmental fate of agrochemicals. After 13 years field soil surveying experience, he moved to the Soil Survey of England and Wales’ headquarters to assume national responsibility for soil classification and correlation. John was the NSRI’s principal scientist responsible for co-developing the Hydrology of Soil Types (HOST) system linking soil physical properties to stream hydrological response to rainfall. He was also part of the group that developed the World Reference Base for Soil Resources. John is the co-author of ‘The Fragile Skin: Soil Landscapes of the UK’.

Rebecca Hall is a postdoc working on the Terra soil project in collaboration with Geological Survey Ireland. Her research has mainly focused on biogeochemical cycling of phosphorus in soil and grasslands and its impact on water quality. Her work has looked at soil phosphorus testing and nutrient dynamics in small scale experiments looking at fertiliser-soil-root interactions, to large scale catchment modelling of soil structural degradation and erosion. The Terra soil project is using the archive of Tellus soil samples for chemical and spectral analysis to produce additional parameters on available P. Rebecca undertook her MSc in Soil Science at the University of Aberdeen and has since achieved her PhD in Biological Sciences from Queen’s University Belfast.