December 2013

End of year stock-take

It’s been a great year for the company with involvement in a wide range of projects, and clients from both traditional and unexpected quarters, at home and abroad. These have covered all the main services areas offered and generated exciting opportunities to put science into practice – the main strength of A J Moffat & Associates. Supporting science communication, as a sole, leading or joint author, Andy has had five peer reviewed scientific papers published, two book chapters and five articles or papers focusing on knowledge transfer – see latest publication list in About Us. These cover an extensive range of subjects areas, from the economic analysis of biomass cropping, earthworm ecology,and carbon accounting in UK forest soils, to forest monitoring reporting and its future direction, social drivers for wildfire, ways of understanding wildfire risk, native woodland adaptation and land reclamation research.

Whither reclamation research?

This is the title of an article just published in Mineral Planning, the journal specifically for the minerals industry (http://www.dcservices.co.uk/news/login/1222859/). In it, Andy Moffat argues that there is a danger of losing contact with the substantial body of research undertaken in the last quarter of the 20th century – simply because it predated the digital revolution and is now out of print. In addition, the level of research today is considerably less than it was, despite an obvious need to keep up with both technological change and significant changes in policy on the use of brownfield land. Andy suggests that the focus for new science should be in the integration of knowledge in order to develop trusted decision support tools for the reclamation sector.