Room: F8A, Thoday Building

Email: m.rayment@bangor.ac.uk

Tel: +44 (0) 1248 383634

Silviculture, Agroforestry, Food Security

I am the director of a suite of Forestry@Bangor MSc programmes: MSc Agroforestry & Food Security, MSc Environmental Forestry, and MSc SUTROFOR (SUstainable TROpical FORestry).

I teach across a range of subjects from the fundamentals of forestry – silviculture and inventory – to environmental biophysics, and believe that a university lecturer is in the service of the students, no the other way around.

Research Areas:

• Forestry
• Environmental and Soil Science
• Crops and Livestock

Course Director: 

• MSc Agroforestry & Food Security
• MSc Agroforestry & Food Security (by Distance Learning)
• MSc Environmental Forestry
• MSc SUTROFOR (Sustainable Tropical Forestry)

Module Organiser:

• DXX-2016 Forestry Field Course
• DDL-4202 Silviculture
• DXX-4532 Forestry Study Tour
• DXX-4538 AFFS Study Tour

Module Contributor:

• DXX-1003 Forestry in the 21st Century
• DXX-1006 Making Snowdonia
• DXX-2004 Silviculture and Inventory
• DXX-3701 Honours Project
• DDL-4004 Agroforestry Systems and Practice
• DDL-4207 Global Food Security
• DDL-4545 Tropical Forestry Study Tour
• DXX-4519 Location Specific Knowledge
• DXX-4501 Erasmus Mundus Summer School
• DXX-4101 MEnvSci / MFor Dissertation
• DXX-4999 MSc Dissertation
• DDL-4999 Distance Learning Dissertation

PhD Student Supervision

Sam Hollick, Optimising landscape shelterbelts to sustainably increase farm livestock productivity and build resilience to extreme events. KESS-PhD.

Ashley Hardaker, Beyond single purpose land use – rebalancing ecosystem service delivery in the Welsh uplands. KESS-PhD.

Genevieve Agaba, Designing context appropriate agroforestry options for low capacity households in Eastern Uganda and Central Kenya. ICRAF.

Alex Vierod, Ecological Tipping Points in Mangrove Ecosystems. NERC ENVISION

Rijan Tamraker, The influence of forest structure on carbon and water fluxes during climate anomalies. [Completed]

Ibrahim Abdullahi, The impact of climate change on the management and regeneration of parkland trees in the Savannah zones of Northern Nigeria. TET Fund. [Completed]

Dominic Wodehouse, Towards successful community mangrove management and rehabilitation. [Completed]

Yufeng He, Real-world solutions for improving estimates of land-atmosphere exchanges in heterogeneous landscapes. CSC China [Completed]

Michael Nworji, Physical and bioeconomic analysis of ecosystem services from a silvopasture system. TET Fund [Completed]

I am always happy to discuss PhD opportunities related to any of the topics mentioned above or that follow on from previous PhD student projects.

Biography

I obtained my PhD in 1998 at Edinburgh University. My thesis addressed the carbon fluxes in a Boreal forest ecosystem, aiming to understand how the environmental controls of individual fluxes, such as photosynthesis and soil decomposition, function to control the carbon balance of the ecosystem as a whole. Fieldwork took place along a transect from the southern edge of the Boreal forest in Saskatchewan, Canada, to the northern edge in Manitoba. 

Following this, I moved to warmer climates to study the same sort of thing, this time in a montado/dehesa ecosystem the Portuguese Alentejo. Here, we identified the controlling effect of rainfall and water availability in decoupling carbon fluxes from the typical drivers of light and temperature. After that, another postdoc saw me looking at the net carbon balance of conifer forest managed on a rotational cycle in northern England, which demonstrated clearly that some clear-fell production systems result in huge losses of carbon from soils; losses which take decades to recover.

After that, I took a few years out of academia, raising a family and doing some school teaching and consultancy work, before joining Bangor University in 2008.

Qualifications 

1998                PhD Forestry, Edinburgh University, UK

1992                MSc Crop Production, Essex University, UK

1991                BSc Horticulture, Bath University, UK