PhD Project – Qaisar Ali
PhD Project Outline: Natural Flood Management Strategies and Agricultural Production – a meta-modelling approach
Flooding events are occurring more frequently than ever before. This demands possible measures to be adopted including natural flood management practices. Moreover, conventional farming practices in the UK are not only eroding soils but also depleting soil fertility and hampering crop productivity. In fact, farm land use offers huge potential in achieving multiple benefits and their trade-offs like sustainable farm production and flood risk mitigates. Strategic management of agricultural production needs to be focused on sustainability whilst offering techniques to alleviate climate change impacts such as flood risk mitigation.
I will focus on NFM strategies that involve farming practices or land use. I will consider feasible application or implementation of these strategies in terms of achieving economic farm yield for farmers who need to maintain the profitability of their farm businesses. However, it is expected that some successful NFM strategies may offer win-win solutions towards reasonable economic yield and flood management. This can potentially be impactful for natural flood risk mitigates at the same time. For example, intercropping can offer direct impact while tillage practices as indirect impact towards farm potential yield based of land use farming practices in the catchment.
Biography: I joined the University of Reading in September 2019 to work on my PhD on ‘Natural Flood Management Strategies and agricultural production – a meta-modelling approach’ supervised by Dr. Lindsay Todman and Dr. Martin Lukac. This PhD is funded by the University of Reading, the Landwise Project and Douglas Bomford Trust. I completed B.Sc. (Hons.) Agricultural Entomology in 2001 and M.Sc. (Hons.) Agricultural Entomology in 2003 at Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Pakistan with my research project on management of spotted bollworm (Earias spp.) on cotton using different sowing dates, resistant cultivars and insecticides. My findings provided successful approach in the management of Earias spp. on cotton. I have published three research papers in the past. I also have M.B.A. degree with range of transferable skills and experience from industry.
Publications and presentations