Research projects in the Department
This is a global list of the 248 research projects currently being undertaken by members of the Department, listed by research cluster and then by theme.
The list below may also include a small number of archived projects. In due course, these will be listed separately.
Spaces of Economy & Society cluster
Geographical Foundations of Economic Performance
- Associational Governance
- Centre for Geographical Economic Research
- Entrepreneurship Environments
- Evolutionary Economics and Economic Geography
- HEI Entrepreneurial Architectures
- History of Chambers of Commerce
- How regions react to recessions: resilience, recovery, and long-run impacts
- Local and regional economic development in Britain
- LocoMotive
- Regional cultural economy, innovation and learning
- SME external relations and external supports
- The Competitive Performance of Regions and Cities
- The Economic Geography of Money and Finance
- The Geography of Public Finance and Government Decentralisation
Landscapes of Work and Labour
Geographies of Social Welfare
- Exploring the links between the geographies of crime and health
- Geographical epidemiology: air quality and public health
- Geographies of domestic violence
- Methodologies for the analysis of spatial data
- The geography of crime and disorder: offences, offenders and victimization
Society, Environment and Development cluster
Circumpolar History and Public Policy
- Circumpolar Governance
- Field practices and environmental science in the Canadian Arctic, 1950-2000
- Gender and Nationalism in Indigenous Political Movements: A Comparative Study of Nunavut, Canada and Tuva, Russian Federation
- Institutions and Public Policy in the Field Sciences
- Maritime Geographies of Science
- Traplines and Tar Sands: An Ethnographic Analysis of Intersecting Economies in a Subarctic Indigenous Community
Polar Social Science and Humanities Group
- Developing Indigenous research methodologies in the arctic (IRM-A): examining the impacts of settlement on socialization and youth experience in Siberia and Alaska
- Healing interactions between shamans and clients (Kyzyl, Republic of Tuva)
- Negotiating pathways to adulthood: social change and indigenous culture in four Arctic communities
- The nativeness of settlers: constructions of belonging in Soviet and contemporary Chukotka
Society & Environment
- Addressing Biodiversity Loss: Lessons from Climate Change
- Appraisal, Policy Learning and Sustainability: Towards a New Agenda
- Climate change and lawn growth
- Cultural constructions of nature
- Environmental management and nature conservation in agriculture catchments
- Knowledge and Power: Exploring the Science/Society Interface in the Urban Environment Context
- Social Laboratories: Engaging with public dimensions of nanobiotechnology
- The role and influence of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
Political Ecology
- Agricultural intensification in pre-colonial Melanesia
- Agroforestry and sustainability in the humid tropics
- Beyond Win-Win: Interrogating Ecosystem Services Dynamics
- Building Capacity to Alleviate Human-Elephant Conflict in North Kenya
- Can Hunting and Conservation of Endemic Annamite Ungulates be Reconciled?
- Conservation and Livelihoods
- Conservation Values
- Gaming and Biodiversity Conservation
- Histories of environmental concern
- Incorporating stakeholder perceptions in participatory forest management in India
- Institutions, agency and incentives in environment and development
- Institutions, Collective Action and Cooperation
- Institutions, natural resources and ecosystem services
- Interdisciplinary Approaches to Conservation
- Land Reform, Land Tenure and Poverty
- Land Use Change and African-Palaearctic Migrant Birds
- Large Scale Conservation in Britain
- Microcredit in the UK: survey
- Negotiating Tradeoffs: Making Informed Choices about Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation
- Policy and governance in natural resource management
- Policy Implications of Common Property Resource Knowledge in India, Zimbabwe and Tanzania
- The conservation and restoration of nature
- The political ecology of conservation
Society & Development
- Changing Identification and Alliances in the Horn of Africa
- Culture and development: Geographies, actors and paradigms
- Development and Postcolonial governance
- Development Harnessing 'Tradition' - Uneasy Partnerships
- From Recipients to Donors: Emerging Powers and the Changing Development Landscape
- Geographies of national identities: space and social difference
- Geographies of Worker Empowerment in the New Economy: Labour Market Intermediaries in the Call Centre Industry (India and UK)
- Landscape, Culture and Development: Konso, Ethiopia
- Localising International Law: Examining the Public Outreach Strategies of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovin
- Political economy of development in India
- Political transnationalism and development networks for indigenous people in Andean Ecuador and Bolivia
- Sustainable butterfly farming and collecting in Papua New Guinea
- The non-DAC states and the role of public perspectives in shaping the future of development cooperation
- Understanding how research is put into use
Geographies of Gender
- Gender and Education in Antigua and Barbuda
- Gender and Education within East Africa and the Caribbean
- Gendered Geographies of Regional Economies: Work-Life (Im)Balance and Socioeconomic Competitiveness
- Gendering the New Economy
- The gender gap in education
- Youth Culture and the Social Construction of Gender
Environmental Processes cluster
Cambridge Volcanology Group
- A collection of JScripts for retrieval of gas column amounts using DOAS methodology
- Book: Eruptions that shook the world
- Climate and dust
- Climatic, palaeoenvironmental and human impacts of super-volcanic eruptions
- Fourier transform spectroscopy of the gas plume of Masaya volcano, Nicaragua
- Hazards from airborne silicate microparticles
- Heterogeneous ice nucleation in atmospheric clouds
- Impacts of Mt. Erebus volcano (Antarctica) on the atmospheric environment
- Large Volume Explosive Eruption database
- Linking cloud microphysics and volcanic sedimentation
- Mechanisms and implications of the 2011 eruption of Nabro volcano, Eritrea
- Physico-chemical properties of tropospheric volcanic emissions
- Retrieval of aerosol properties from MICROTOPS II sunphotometer data
- Volcanic degassing
- Volcanological and geophysical research on Paektu volcano, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
Cambridge Coastal Research Unit
- A hierarchical approach to the examination of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem service flows across coastal margins (CBESS)
- A large-scale flume experiment to determine wave dissipation and transformation over coastal vegetation under extreme hydrodynamic loading (a HYDRALAB IV project)
- Coastal Settlements at Risk
- Establishing a global database of surface elevation change and accretion rates in coastal wetlands
- European approaches to managed re-alignment
- Flooding and Environmental Challenges for Venice and its Lagoon: State of Knowledge 2003
- Mapping corals reef habitats in the Amirantes and southern Seychelles
- North Sea storm surges
- Quantifying the saltmarsh vegetation canopy
- The changing flora, fauna and sedimentation of the West Norfolk coast
- The relationships between vegetation characteristics and the sea defence value of saltmarsh ecosystems
- The sea-defence function of micro-tidal temperate coastal wetlands
- Understanding estuarine hydrodynamics for decision making in data poor coastal environments
- Understanding large-scale coastal morphology: a study of Winterton Ness, UK
- Wave dynamics over saltmarsh surfaces
Atmospheric Processes
- Aerosols and Climate
- Air quality in airport approaches: impact of emissions from aircraft in ground run and flight
- Climate outlooks and Agent Based Simulation of Adaptation in Africa (CLOUD)
- Effects of Volcanoes in the Atmosphere
- Long-term weathering studies on St. Paul's Cathedral, London
- Stratospheric-Topospheric Coupling
Landscape ecology
- Biogeochemistry and Climate Change Research Training Network (GREENCYCLES)
- Dendroecology of Fagus sylvatica in Northern Greece
- Detecting signatures of natural selection in the human genome with geographically explicit models
- Geology, ecology, hydrology & management of Chalk springs
- GREENCYCLESII: Anticipating climate change and biospheric feedbacks within the Earth system to 2200
- Holocene environmental change in southern Portugal
- Monitoring Mediterranean ecosystem changes
- The Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP)
- The use of airborne LiDAR to characterise Mediterranean forest communities
- Tools for writing models: Software for the future
Hydrology, Water and Landscape
- Discrete simulation systems for environmental modelling
- Effect of Climate and Land Use Change on River Hydrology of Thailand
- FLOBAR1 - Floodplain Biodiversity and Restoration
- FLOBAR2 - Floodplain Biodiversity and Restoration: Integrated natural science and socio-economic approaches to catchment management
- Integrating Agent-Based Models of Subsistence Farming with Individual-Based Models of Trees and Dynamic Models of Water Distribution
- River Basin Governance Research and Network (RiBaGo)
- The Cambridge Arsenic Project
Historical and Cultural Geography cluster
The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure
- Agrarian and demographic change in south-west Wales c. 1550-1750
- Agrarian Change in an Industrializing County: Staffordshire, 1650-1750
- An empirical base for understanding the early phase of the epidemiological transition: Short-term and spatial variations in infectious disease mortality in England 1600-1837
- An occupational analysis of the worsted industry in England, c.1700-1851
- Birth attendants and birth outcomes in the Victorian and Edwardian eras
- Bridging the gap: new evidence for mortality and life expectancy spanning late medieval and early modern England
- Determining the Demography of Victorian Scotland through Record Linkage
- Dividing the day: Gender, work and time-use in 18th and 19th century Britain
- Doctors, deaths, diagnoses and data: a comparative study of the medical certification of cause of death in nineteenth century Scotland
- Economy, Gender, and Social Capital in the German Demographic Transition
- English Peasants and the Provision of Civil Justice 1275-1400
- English welfare practices and their demographic correlates c. 1600-1834)
- Housing, mobility and the measurement of child health from the 1911 Irish census
- Illegitimacy and the poor law in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England
- In search of work. Labour migration and economic performance in England and the Netherlands, 1600-1900
- Infant mortality by social status in Georgian London
- Long-run cause of death series for national populations
- Longevity changes and their determinants in England and her European neighbours c.1600-1900
- Measuring infant health in late-Georgian Northern England
- Mortality and epidemiological change in Manchester, 1750-1850
- Mortality and life expectancy: King’s College, Cambridge c. 1441 – c. 1540
- Private Law and Medieval Village Society: Personal Actions in Manor Courts, c.1250-c.1350
- Reconstructing fertility and child mortality in Tanzania 1883-1961
- Studying the Stayers – an investigation of the immobile population of Long Melford, Suffolk 1550-1861
- The contribution of the National Health Service to gains in quality adjusted life expectancy: lessons from the past and implications for the future
- The Demography of Early Modern London circa 1550 to 1750
- The historical geography of illegitimacy in Carinthia, Austria, from 1880 to 1950
- The Land Tax in England and Wales 1798 and landownership and tenancy distribution
- The nature of parochial registration in England, 1538-1837
- The occupational context of family formation in England, c.1600-1850
- The occupational structure of Britain 1379-1911
- The Occupational Structure of Nineteenth Century Britain
- The origins and significance of Catalan industrialisation, c.1680-1829
- The statistical state: knowledge, numbers and population in Britain, c. 1780-1837
- The transformation of the urban epidemiological regime, 1750-1850
- The urban back garden in England in the nineteenth century
- The Wake Visitation and social and religious structures in the East and South Midlands c.1710
Contemporary Demography and Health
- Centre for Longitudinal Study Information and User Support (CeLSIUS)
- Demographic change, intergenerational exchanges and the family, household, kin and social networks of older people
- Family life courses and later life health and mortality
- Pathways: Identifying and measuring causal pathways from social to health disadvantage
- Trends and differentials in later life health and mortality
Historical and Cultural Geography
- Colonial Medical Practice in Nineteenth Century Ceylon
- Colonialism and Cultural Change in Mid-Nineteenth Century Highland Ceylon
- Culture and Politics in Suburban New York
- Geographical processes and disease emergence
- Historical Geographies of the Regulation of Prostitution in Britain and the British Empire
- Historical geography of Sámi hunting society in northern Sweden
- Historical geography of war and disease
- Imperial Subjects: Geography, Geopolitics and Halford Mackinder
- Social Relations between Humans and Other Animals in Victorian Britain
- Technologies of Biopower and Discipline in Nineteenth Century Ceylon Prisons
- The depopulation of Melanesia: an assessment of epidemiological versus psychological factors, and the work of W.H.R. Rivers
- The Geographical Imaginary of Irish Identities: Nation, Diapsora and Cosmopolis
- The Geography of Bare Life
- World Geography of poliomyelitis
Glaciology and Quaternary Science cluster
Glaciology and Climate Change
- Assessing the role of subglacial hydrology on the flow of West Antarctic ice streams: a numerical modelling approach
- Changing Thermal Regime of Polythermal Glaciers
- CryoSat-2
- Evaluating the potential of high-resolution airborne remote sensing for glaciology
- Extreme Experiments: A comprehensive plan to validate Cryosat in the Arctic and Antarctic
- Geometry and Mass Balance Changes of Langjökull, Iceland
- Glacial Sedimentary Processes in Iceland
- High-resolution distributed modelling of the surface energy balance of valley glaciers
- Hydrological controls on the formation of basal ice layers beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet
- Identification of Subglacial Paleolakes in Arctic Canada: geophysical surveys in the Great Slave Lake
- INTEGRAL
- Investigating basal conditions and flow dynamics on Vestfonna Ice Cap, Svalbard
- Modelling and observing subglacial processes beneath Antarctic ice streams
- Modelling Mass Balance of Svalbard Glaciers
- Modelling the influence of glacier hydrology on the dynamics of large ice sheets
- Spaceborne measurements of Arctic glaciers and implications for sea-level change
- Supraglacial, Englacial and Subglacial Hydrology of Glaciers and Ice Sheets
- The Greenland Ice Sheet: How fast is it changing, and why?
- Thermodynamics of basal freeze-on beneath glaciers and ice sheet
- Understanding contemporary changes in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
Glacimarine Environments Group
- Geophysical and Geological Investigations of Sedimentation and Ice-Ocean Variability on Arctic Continental Margins
- Glacial-interglacial changes in the lost drainage basin of the West Antarctic
- Ice-Rafted Debris on the Antarctic Continental Margin and the Dynamics of the Antarctic Ice Sheet
- Marine geological processes and sediments beneath floating ice shelves in Greenland and Antarctica: investigations using the Autosub AUV
Polar Landscape & Remote Sensing Group
- Air pollution and ground disturbance in the Russian Arctic
- BALANCE: Global Change Vulnerabilities in the Barents Region: Linking Arctic Natural Resources, Climate Change and Economies.
- Development of a phenological correction algorithm for remote sensing of industrial impact on high-latitude vegetation. Case study: Noril'sk, Northern Siberia
- Environmental Risk Assessment in the Arctic
- Geometry and scale-dependence of an Arctic glacier
- Northern Hemisphere snow cover
- Peasant Response to Development and Reform in Iceland 1700-1870
- The Tundra-taiga interface
- Vulnerability of European reindeer husbandry to global change
Quaternary Palaeoenvironments Group
- Drainage development, thermokarst activity and periglacial landscape change in Southern England
- Palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic evolution of the Baltic Sea basin during the Last Interglacial (Eemian, Mikulino)
- Preliminary observations on the stratigraphy of the Son river sediments: the YTT, seasonality and post-eruptive river response
- The Pleistocene Stratigraphy and Palaeoenvironments of the Cambridge District