Denise Hick

Profile

I am a PhD student in Earth Observation working with Prof. Guy Ziv and Prof. Pippa Chapman from the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. My research focuses on mapping Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) and carbon fluxes over European agricultural land using remote sensing.

It is estimated that the top 30 cm of soil store 700 Pg of carbon – almost equivalent to the quantity of carbon stored in the atmosphere (Kätterer et al., 2012). In the context of climate change, as well as increasing global population and food demand, agricultural land has been identified as a potential carbon sink (Paustian et al., 2019). Furthermore, increasing SOC levels have been shown to improve soil health, structure and fertility (ibid.).

As traditional measurement methods are expensive and time-consuming, there is a growing interest in monitoring agricultural SOC with remote sensing (Vaudour et al., 2022). I am currently working to improve methods to calculate bare soil spectral reflectance using Sentinel-2 and Google Earth Engine. The derived bare soil spectral information will be used together with recently released LUCAS 2018 SOC content in European cropland and various Machine Learning techniques, such as Random Forest Regression.

Funding: NERC SENSE CDT

Research interests

• Earth Observation
• Machine learning
• Soil spectroscopy
• Sustainable soil management

Qualifications

• • MSc Earth Observation and Geoinformation Management, University of Edinburgh
• • BSc Geography, University of Edinburgh