The Fellowship aims to develop microbial and molecular fingerprinting of land drainage systems as a tool to achieve sustainable intensification.
The project, which starts in October 2013 and runs for four years, will explore linkages between environmental sustainability and microbial activity and function under different land drainage management scenarios to identify molecular fingerprints that characterise the system function.
This will support the development of a microbiological-based methodology to design and optimise the performance of such drainage systems as "bioreactors" to reduce the environmental impact of nutrients released from intensive farming systems.
The research will characterise microbiological and geochemical processes occurring within various land drainage concepts at the field-scale in Ireland and aims to provide engineering design guidelines for the application of this novel remediation concept.