Benjamin Butler
Benjamin is a Macaulay Development Trust Research Fellow in the Environmental and Biochemical Sciences research group at the James Hutton Institute. Here he applies data-driven approaches to analyse national scale soil X-ray powder diffraction datasets. These approaches include data mining, cluster analysis, and high throughput mineral quantification, which together seek to elucidate the role of soil mineralogy in defining the physical, chemical and biological properties of soil. In doing so, the research contributes to alignment of soil mineralogy with the 'digital' approaches that are already well established elsewhere in soil science (e.g. digital soil mapping and chemometrics of soil spectra), and will help inform appropriate measures for the sustainable use and management of soil.
Current research interests
- Soil property - mineralogy relationships
- Application of data mining to XRPD data
- Application of cluster analysis to XRPD data
- High throughput soil mineral quantification
- Soil and sea ice mineralogy
Past research
Mineral dynamics in sea ice: Benjamin's PhD research investigated the mineralogy and geochemistry of sea ice. This research used controlled laboratory experiments and synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction (Diamond Light Source) to elucidate the presence, persistence and significance of authigenic minerals in sea ice, as well as defining major physico-chemical properties of the sea ice system.
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