Professor Will Blake

Will Blake is an interdisciplinary researcher at the University of Plymouth with expertise in environmental diagnostic tools to support sustainable land and water management decisions. As a natural scientist by training, he works closely with social scientists and design thinkers to deliver evidence into action research programmes.

Approaching sustainable environmental management through a nature-based solution lens, his current work focusses on catalysing community-led climate smart agriculture in degraded agropastoral land of East Africa, whole system approaches to reducing soil erosion and siltation of hydropower dams in Latin America and application of novel sensor technology to evaluate soil organic carbon and soil health in UK and overseas.

His ambition is to work farmers, with AI and space data experts, plus citizen science communities in UK and the global south, to develop and validate scalable predictive models of soil organic carbon that allow us to visualise climate-smart land management outcomes from community to national scale.