Professor Penny Johnes at the ASE Annual Conference 2013

Frontier Science: 20th Century impacts on the global nitrogen cycle: Threats and opportunities for 21st Century

Date: Friday 4 January 2013

ASE Annual Conference

Time: 0930

Professor Penny Johnes, Principal Investigator is Professor of Freshwater Science at the University of Reading.

She is a biogeochemist with 25 years experience researching nitrogen (N)
and phosphorus (P) hydrochemistry dynamics in freshwater catchments. She
has acted as PI or Co-PI on over 50 major research programmes, funded by
NERC, Defra, Environment Agency, UK Water Utilities and other Environment
Research Funders, and has supervised a wide range of PhD students investigating nutrient transport and transformations in agricultural and seminatural catchment systems.

Penny’s current research include the Natural Environment Research Council funded Environmental Virtual Observatory Programme.This was funded to demonstrate how national capability in environmental monitoring and decision making could be more efficient, effective and transparent to the whole community. The project uses cloud computing to investigate possible structures for the virtual observatory to demonstrate how to make environmental monitoring and decision making more efficient, effective and transparent to the whole community.

Her other ongoing programme is the Defra funded Hampshire Avon Demonstration Test Catchments Programme (www.avondtc.org.uk). This has been established to find out if new farming practices, which aim to reduce diffuse pollution from agriculture, can also deliver sustainable food production and environmental benefits across whole river catchments. The programme aims to supports policy initiatives, such as the new Defra/EA ‘Catchment Based Approach’ to environmental management and the delivery of the Water Framework Directive, and policy delivery mechanisms, such as the Catchment Sensitive Farming (CSF) Programme.

Penny publishes widely in both the natural environmental and applied science fields, and her publications have received over 1500 citations in the Web of Science, over 2200 on Google Scholar, and she is widely quoted on a range of international news media and internet based environmental information websites.