Projects

Research projects in causal phenomics, crop modelling, sensing and environmental intelligence.

Our projects connect a clearly defined biological or environmental problem to an appropriate measurement strategy, defensible analysis and a practical decision. Public summaries are intentionally concise where work is unpublished.

Femi Adekoya

Remote sensing for early cassava disease detection and yield prediction

Leaf spectroscopy, UAV multispectral sensing, radiative-transfer models and temporal machine learning are being integrated to distinguish emerging disease effects from other sources of crop variation. Dynamic crop modelling then connects those observations to production forecasts and actionable surveillance.

Callum Barnsley

Photogrammetric alignment choices and digital-twin fidelity

Programmatically controlled photogrammetry is used to turn processing choices, early diagnostics and geometric quality measures into an experimental dataset. Machine learning investigates whether costly reconstruction failures can be predicted before full point-cloud and mesh generation, with immersive environments used as a demanding fidelity test.

Joseph Mhango

Trainable mechanistic potato growth modelling

A crop-growth graph retains explicit light capture, radiation conversion, biomass formation and partitioning while neural parameter-generators adapt the mechanisms to local observations. Scientific auditing uses independent physiological anchors, structural tests and counterfactual response analysis alongside prediction.

Joseph Mhango

Frozen phenotypic reference spaces for crop ranking

Longitudinal phenotypes are used to construct a target-independent reference geometry that is frozen before new observations are introduced. The programme tests cross-environment persistence, placement of unseen genotypes, multiple trait annotations and relocation through alternative sensors without refitting the biological map.

Joseph Mhango

Knowledge-guided modelling of soil available water capacity

A hybrid ensemble combines empirical coefficient priors with nonlinear neural refinement and compositional treatment of soil fractions. Observed and synthetic datasets are used to separate predictive accuracy from genuine recovery of credible soil-property relationships.

Joseph Mhango

Precision destoning with ground-penetrating radar

Controlled radar acquisition, depth-resolved signal processing and mechanistic feature engineering are used to characterise how subsurface stone burden transforms the electromagnetic wavefield. Machine learning converts those signals into uncertainty-aware operational evidence for spatially selective intervention.

Joseph Mhango

Rural and coastal flood resilience

National flood assessments are harmonised with small-area evidence on social conditions, accessibility, warning and protection. Spatial statistical models distinguish river, coastal and surface-water processes while accounting for the geographical dependence that undermines naive rural-urban comparisons.

Joseph Mhango

Shropshire acoustic sensor network analysis

Greenbox combines autonomous solar-powered recorders, mobile connectivity, cloud infrastructure, AI-assisted species detection and reproducible ecological analytics. Event collapsing, threshold sensitivity, historical context and expert review safeguards turn continuous high-throughput sensing into cautious evidence about community structure, phenology and conservation interest.