Andrew Wade
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+44 (0) 118 378 7315
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Professor of Hydrology
- Research in hydrology and water pollution
- Postgraduate research supervision and undergraduate teaching
- Member of the NERC Freshwater Quality - Programme Advisory Group.
- Module convenor: GV1DEN – Data Environments, GV2WES – Water in Earth System
Areas of interest
- Mountain water resources and their relationship with downstream agriculture to promote sustainable use of water given climate and crop production change.
- Novel technologies for high-resolution flow and water quality monitoring to determine biogeochemical processes and pollutant fate.
- National and catchment scale water quality assessment and modelling, with an emphasis on ecosystems services, and a reduction of the impacts on freshwaters of agricultural production and effluent disposal.
- Determination of how the land-surface and Atmospheric Rivers interact to cause UK winter floods.
Postgraduate supervision
Current Students
- James Bishop: Quantifying the effectiveness of Natural Flood Management in lowland catchments. Main supervisor: Gareth Old, UK-CEH. Funded by NERC SCENARIO.
- Merry Crowson: Capitalising on the Big Data era: establishing a multi-source monitoring framework for England's natural capital assets and flows. Main supervisor: Nathalie Pettorelli, ZSL. Funded by NERC QMEE.
- Sharon Mandipe: Image velocimetry for measuring river surface flows. Main supervisor: Ponnambalam Rameshwaran, UK-CEH. Funded by NERC SCENARIO.
- Camilla Negri: Developing risk-based approaches to modelling phosphorus contamination in agricultural catchments. Main supervisor: Miriam Glendell, James Hutton Institute. Funded by Walsh Scholarship, Teagasc.
- Chris Pesso: High resolution mapping of pollutants using innovative uncrewed survey boats. Main supervisor: Ponnambalam Rameshwaran, UK-CEH. Funded by NERC SCENARIO.
Recently completed students
- Phillip Agredazywczuk: Nitrogen cycling in a calcareous fen peatland: stresses, controls and variability. Main supervisor: Steve Robinson. Funded by: South-East Water.
- Zarina Saidaliyeva: Characterising water sources and runoff partitioning in the mountains of Central Asia using stable isotopes. Main supervisor: Maria Shahgedanova. Funded by: University of Reading International Studentship.
Research centres and groups
Research projects
- Climate Resilience and Food Production in Peru - CROPP (Led by Prof. Joy Singarayer), Royal Academy of Engineering. Focus on determining the water used by agriculture, and availability, now and in the future in the Cordillera Blanca and Cordillera Negra.
- Food Systems Equality – FoodSEqual (Led by Prof. Carol Wagstaff), BBSRC led Transforming UK Food Systems – Strategic Priorities Fund. Focus on the development of a national-scale ecosystem-services model with emphasis on food production, water quality, carbon sequestration, pollination and (bird) biodiversity.
Background
- Andrew has worked on hydrology and water quality for over 25 years and led, or co-led, major projects investigating the muti-scale response of water quality, biodiversity and carbon sequestration to coupled macronutrient cycling, the development of novel water chemistry sensors, and the quantification of the impacts of projected land use and climate change on freshwater ecosystems, and has co-authored key reviews of the impacts of climate change on water quality and the links between hydrology and water quality.
- Recently completed projects include an assessment of the influence of cryosphere and land cover on the water quality of glacierized catchments in the Tien Shan and Pamir mountains, and the evaluation of biofertilizer use on rice yield and nitrogen losses in East China. Andrew has designed water quality monitoring networks in glacierised catchments, and completed multiple field seasons in Jordan, Peru, Iceland, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
- Andrew has co-supervised many students who have successfully completed a PhD and who have published recently on the topics including: the development of Bayesian Belief Networks for assessment of phosphorus losses, the novel use of big data for quantifying cultural ecosystem services, flood production through atmospheric river interactions with the land surface, and storm-track derivation using stable water isotopes.
- Andrew led the development of the Integrated Catchment Model of Phosphorus and supported the development of a next generation model, much reduced in complexity, SimplyP, and has contributed to the development of numerous other modelling approaches including: INCA-N, a Bayesian network of freshwater macroinvertebrate response to multiple stressors, and a conceptual understanding of dissolved organic matter in freshwaters, UniDOM.
- Andrew has contributed to rapid assessments of the water environment in England for Defra and the EA, the Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) work to assess climate change impacts on the UK water resource, and has been a reviewer, nominated by DECC and Defra, of IPCC and IPBES reports.
- Andrew obtained a BSc (1994) in Physics from the University of Leicester, a MSc in Engineering Hydrology (1995) from Newcastle University, and a PhD (1999) in Physical Geography from the University of Aberdeen. He worked at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute (now the James Hutton Institute) on understanding the controls on water quality in large UK river systems, then moved to the University of Reading in 1999 being promoted to Professor in 2011. Andrew has been Head of Department (2019 – 2022), School Director of Research (2012-2015) and School Director of Postgraduate Studies (2009-2012). He holds a Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy and has taught hydrology for over 20 years.
Earlier publications