Two new interdisciplinary projects funded under Strategic Priority scheme
The Earth Institute is delighted to announce the two new strategic priority projects for 2024 supported by our Strategic Priority Support Mechanism (SPSM). The SPSM encourages interdisciplinary activity across the Earth Institute, UCD, and beyond, across environmental, climate and sustainability research and related disciplines.
Earth Institute Director, Professor Eoin O’Neill said, “The Strategic Priority scheme is one of the main ways the Institute supports emerging research areas. We have now funded eighteen projects since the scheme started in 2018. The proposed projects on the marine environment and trees outside the forest address two critical research and policy topics and coalesce existing interests across the institute. We are very excited about working with this year’s awardees and to see these projects develop”.
The successful projects for 2024 are:
Marine and Seabed Research Group (UCD MarSea)
The seabed and marine environment are central to key challenges around climate change and the energy transition. Under the UCD Marine and Seabed Research Group (UCD MarSea), we aim to establish a welcoming forum and working group that will explore the complex interaction between geological, oceanographic, environmental and biological factors that control the evolution of the seafloor. In addition, it will examine the implications these interactions can have on the sustainable use of the seafloor in terms of infrastructure development and marine spatial planning, including marine protected areas. In doing so it will coalesce existing expertise in the Earth Institute to deliver impactful interdisciplinary research, critical to societal needs.
Led by Mark Coughlan (Earth Sciences) with Jennifer Keenahan and Shauna Creane (Civil Engineering), James Herterich (Mathematics and Statistics)
Trees outside the Forest (Trees)
Trees are the largest-growing longest-living things on our planet. They make us happy. They’re beautiful. They’re essential to our quality of life. They’re multi-tasking climate champions. They cool and clean the air, store carbon, create healthy habitats and host wildlife. They’re social and sensate, they communicate with each other. There’s much we don’t know about them. This project hopes to bring together a transdisciplinary community in debate and thinking about the tree resource, roles, values and futures of Ireland’s trees and questions of how we steward them. We seek to identify gaps in knowledge, and in policy, to support development of an emerging area of research, and to raise awareness of the need for better planning of trees, policy for trees and research into trees in urban situations (the urban forest) and rural ones (trees, hedgerows and informal woodlands).
Led by Sophia Meeres (Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy) with Brian Tobin (Agriculture and Food Science), Gerald Mills and Tine Ningal (Geography) and Ciaran Bennett (UCD Estates)
