Development, research and teaching activities

My work focusses on understanding and modelling pesticide fate in arable soils, and up-scaling at the landscape scale. I use recent research developments to provide practical solutions to evaluate the risks of pesticide release in the environments.

My work is quite multidisciplinary (pedology, agronomy, soil-physics, statistics, etc.) and requires an important 'technical' investment for handling efficiently the large amounts of data used and produced by the programs we run. Databases and programming techniques are quite central to my work.

I work for the Centre for Chemical Pesticides (CKB) (about 60-70% of my time), a SLU-hosted competence and expertise centre, supporting Swedish authorities and professional organisations* regarding the environmental impacts of pesticides (*: KemI, JV, NV, HaV, Water Authorities, municipalities, LRF and SV).

I develop a new modelling toolbox, MACRO-SE, for estimating the risks of pesticide losses at the regional-scale, in the 21 counties of Sweden. MACRO-SE 'toolbox' consists of several sub-parts:

1. the model itself (with MACRO as a workhorse);
2. county-scale agro-environmental geo-datasets (soil maps, crop statistics, etc.) needed to feed the model;
3. a collection of parametrisation routines (also called pedotransfer functions) and;
4. a low-tech IT infrastructure (computers, database-server) for distributing the calculations.

I also work on various research projects (about 25-35% of my time), as a support for modelling, data-management (programming, databases) and data-analysis (statistics). I am participating in a research project (PERFORM) with several French research institutions, on modelling the impact of innovative 'low input' farming practices on pesticide leaching risks (a project led by INRA EGC).

The remaining (5%) of my time I teach in two different courses, mostly computer-based modelling exercise in Soil Physics (water flow).

I am an open source enthusiast, and think research publications, research software and public data should be as much as possible cost-free and allowing copy, study, and changes without restrictions other than authors' attribution).