Dave Miller is a GIS Specialist with 15+ years' experience in interdisciplinary research in support of a wide variety of research objectives for Scottish Government, EU, and other funding bodies (for example, SRUC, BNSC-FC). As part of the LADSS [1] team within the Information and Computational Sciences Group, his background in advanced GIS Analysis principally applied to national spatial datasets has led him to support a large number of research projects, latterly focussing on the Scottish Government agricultural datasets (including IACS, JAC, DS) both in support of policy development and for landscape change analysis. He has participated in the teaching of a GIS and Remote Sensing module to undergraduate students from two degree courses at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC).
Dave's principal role is as a GIS Specialist embedded within a multi-disciplinary team focusing on sustainable land use systems, climate change and agricultural policy issues. This has recently included spatial analysis of options for post-2015 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform and assessing the impacts of moving from historic entitlements to area-based payments using data from the Scottish Government Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) database and the Macaulay System of Land Classification for Agriculture (LCA) in collaboration with colleagues in Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS), Scottish Government.
He is currently involved in the Strategic Research Programme 2016-2021 under Theme 2.4 (Rural Industries)
He has also been involved in a number of projects under two centres of expertise: the ClimateXChange Centre of Expertise [2] and the Centre of Expertise for Water (CREW) [3].
He has also participated in the design and teaching of an undergraduate module in GIS and Remote Sensing to students in Countryside Management and Sustainable Environmental Management at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), Craibstone.
In past years he has also participated in contract work for the European Commission on sustainability issues which has included the EU FP7 funded SMILE project [4] and the EU/Interreg IVB funded Aquarius project [5].
His past experience of DGPS survey techniques has previously led him to work on a range of other projects including soil survey, plant mapping, and tree-height survey for funding bodies including the British National Space Centre and the Forestry Commission.
He has also applied spatial modelling and geostatistical techniques to a number of diverse applications ranging from the mapping of soil properties to proxy methods for calculating solar radiation and has been involved in supporting the development of agro-meteorological indicators for the UKCIP19 climate change scenarios. An update to this work is currently underway in Work Package 2.4 of the Strategic Research Programme.
Links:
[1] http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/LADSS/
[2] http://www.climatexchange.org.uk/
[3] http://www.crew.ac.uk/
[4] http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/smile/
[5] http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/aquarius/