Professor Phil Ineson Emeritus Professor

Research

Overview

The research group has particular interests in the role of soils in global change and in the application of stable isotope approaches to ecological research. Research is varied in scale, ranging from assessments of the carbon fluxes and inventories of terrestrial ecosystems, through to extracting nucleotide sequences from functional groups of soil bacteria. The research has pioneered techniques in the field tracing and measurement of carbon fluxes, and utilises state-of-the-art equipment based in both the laboratory and the field in order to identify and quantify major sources and sinks for the major ‘greenhouse’ gases.

Discoveries

We have pioneered stable isotope approaches to following the pathways and fate of carbon through plant-soil systems, identifying how these will change as the atmospheric CO2 concentration rise and also characterising the organisms involved in processing the carbon in the soil.

Projects

• Arctic-Biosphere-Atmosphere Coupling across multiple scales (ABACUS) (Funding body: NERC)
• Carbon cycling in forests: Priming of old soil organic matter through plant derived C input (Funding body: NERC)
• Ground-based carbon measurement programme: National Centre for Earth Observation (Funding body: NERC Centre of Excellence)
• Closed system carbon research in the Ecotron (Funding body: NERC)
• Bug to Big: Tracing methane fluxes from the molecular to landscape scale (Funding body: NERC UKPopNet and English Nature)
• Unravelling the effects of tropospheric ozone on below-ground processes driving methane and carbon dioxide fluxes (with Prof. Mike Ashmore) (Funding body: NERC)

Research group(s)