Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of Land, I am pleased to announce the two winners of the 2018 Travel Awards sponsored by Land:

The Travel Awards were granted to Dr. Giulia Sofia, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry, University of Padova, Padova, Italy and Mrs. Khadiza Begum, Ph.D. student in the Institute of Biological and Environmental Science, School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom.

Dr. Giulia Sofia’s research focusses on hydrogeomorphic feature extraction from high-resolution topography. Through such an approach, her most recent research aims to model and quantify interlocking relations between soil properties, the geometry of the drainage network and climatic inputs, to investigate how they determine the watershed response. She plans to expand this analysis to understand how network properties influence flood regimes at a larger scale.

Mrs. Khadiza Begum’s research area mainly focuses on greenhouse (GHG) mitigation potentials under improved management practices on Bangladesh rice crop land. The DayCent model was used to simulate covering 64 districts of Bangladesh, considering diverse soil types and climatic variability. Modelled results suggest that in an integrated management scenario consisting of reduced water, tillage with residue management, reduced fertilization offsets GHG emissions while maintaining yield. Further research is required to expand the model evaluation across robust measured datasets at a finer resolution.

The awards consist of 800 Swiss Francs each to support travel towards their attendance at an academic conference in 2018.

Prof. Dr. Andrew Millington
Editor-in-Chief of Land