As part of our Teagasc Thought Leaders series, Catriona Boyle spoke with Karen Daly recently about her research priorities for driving the adoption of sustainable agriculture systems and strengthening climate resilience.
Dr Karen Daly was recently appointed Head of the Environment, Soils and Land Use (ESLU) Research Department in Teagasc, based in Johnstown Castle, Co. Wexford.
A Trinity College Dublin graduate with a PhD in Environmental Science, Karen has over 24 years of experience leading research on soil health, water quality, and farm-scale mitigation measures.
Her research on soil, phosphorus, and water quality has directly influenced nutrient management policies and on-farm practices, ensuring science-based solutions for environmental sustainability.
As part of our Teagasc Thought Leaders series, we spoke with Karen recently about her research priorities for driving the adoption of sustainable agriculture systems and strengthening climate resilience.
Find out more in the video below.
Video produced by Declan McArdle and Charlie Smith
What are your top research priorities in environmental science over the next year and why?
As a research department our top priority is providing the solutions to support farmers and the agri-food industry to be environmentally sustainable. This means focussing on the relevant research topics – such as water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, and soil health. More recently, our research is about building resilience into our farm systems. Given more frequent extreme weather events and a prolonged wet season, not to mention periods of drought, we need to rethink how we farm in a changing climate. Our new National Agricultural Sustainability Research and Innovation Centre, or NASRIC, will be the new home for state-of-the-art research to support the sector.
What emerging environmental challenges require urgent scientific attention right now?
Right now, the sector is facing challenging environmental targets around climate and water quality and while we have developed solutions, we urgently need to increase adoption of these measures on the farm. Our flagship programmes such as the Signpost Programme and our network of carbon flux towers in NASCO provide demonstration of practical on-farm measures and provide long-term datasets to track change in environmental variables. Going forward, we need more solutions to protect and enhance biodiversity and soil health with the new directives such as the Soil Monitoring and Resilience Law, which will be coming soon to tackle these.
How can scientific research better support policy and industry in tackling climate change and biodiversity loss?
Research can inform policy and practice. So, when policy makers are working on new policies either at national or EU level, they always seek technical input from the scientific community – which is important, because we need our policies to be grounded in real-life practicalities for them to work, but they also need to be based on scientific evidence.
What role do innovative technologies (e.g., remote sensing, AI, carbon capture) play in shaping the future of environmental science?
Innovative technologies such as proximal and remote sensing, coupled with AI, enable us to work with large datasets and forecast change; and we are developing these applications for soil and water sensors. Capturing high and temporal resolution data will be important if we want to forecast the impact of changing weather patterns on farming in Ireland.
What cross-disciplinary collaborations do you see as essential for driving meaningful environmental action?
For environmental research to have real impact, we need to collaborate with experts in communication, research translation and behavioural science, to increase the adoption of sustainable practices and drive change and many of our research projects include collaborators from the social and behavioural sciences.
Follow Teagasc Daily for more articles from our Teagasc Thought Leaders series.
