Postgraduate Soil Science 2024-2025

Field based course that takes you across northeast Scotland exploring an ancient tropical rainforest, hill farming in action, survey techniques and soil formation.

Lectures focus on how soils form, how soils work, soil classification, soil as part of the environment, human impacts on soil, and the use of mapping and soil data to optimise the management of this fragile resource.

Your assessments are geared towards developing practical skills. This includes a presentation on a particular soil that requires research akin to detective work, quizzes on soil properties and classification and a critical essay on a selected topic.

This advanced soil science course provides additional teaching of physical, chemical and biological properties of soils in the context of food security and climate change. You will learn a variety of processes that affect soil productivity, accompanied by practical sessions that will teach relevant analytical methods. Plant interactions with soil, in the context of food security and land restoration, are major course topics.
There are two practical sessions with assignments, a debate and a final exam.

This highly interactive course explores the principles and practice of contaminated land assessment and remediation. It provides broad knowledge of underlying science, as well as practical skills related to the assessment of contamination sources, pathways and risks to human health. While the lectures introduce theoretical background and gradually build the expertise, the practical have been based on various assessment tools and develop practical knowledge and quantitative skills. The learning activities replicate tasks that one would encounter in environmental consultancy and provide valuable transferrable skills.