Dr Jacqueline Hannam

Senior Research Fellow in Pedology

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 has recently completed a part-time secondment in the Welsh Government Soil Policy team.

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 BBC Countryfile, BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Sky News and BBC World. 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.

 

Contact details

Dr Jacqueline Hannam
Senior Lecturer in Pedology
Cranfield Environment Centre
Cranfield University
Bullock Building (B53)
Cranfield campus
Cranfield
MK43 0AL
(01234) 754586
j.a.hannam@cranfield.ac.uk
LandIS web page
Cranfield web page