The Soils of Aotearoa New Zealand / World Soils Book Series (PDF)

Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences. Megan's research interests have been wide ranging including irrigation of effluent to land, pedology, and applied soil physics. She has been involved in Antarctic Research for over 30 years, including undertaking 19 Antarctic fieldtrips, many as field leader. Megan currently serves on the ITPS (Intergovernmental Technical Panel for Soils) where she represents New Zealand, Australia, and the Southwest Pacific. Megan has served on the Council, and is currently President, of the New Zealand Society of Soil Science. She has also served two terms on the Waikato Conservation Board and two terms on the Board of the QEII National Trust. Megan is a recipient of the NZSSS Norman Taylor Memorial Lecture Award and a Fellow of the NZSSS. Megan, with her husband Errol, has a small sheep farm on the slopes of Mt Pirongia where she gains hands-on experience in endeavouring to sustainably manage a small piece of New Zealand's soil resource.

David J. Lowe, although born in Waipukurau, the son of a veterinarian, grew up in Tauranga from the age of one. He undertook his BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, being an early graduate in the new integrative discipline of Earth sciences developed by foundation staff John McCraw, Michael Selby, and Harry Gibbs. During his formative student years David transformed carbon-bearing samples into benzene in the fledgling radiocarbon dating laboratory at Waikato University (1975-76), undertook soil description work for Soil Bureau DSIR (Hamilton) in the Matamata County survey (1977-78), and sledged and mapped in the Britannia Range in Antarctica (1978-79). David's masterate thesis was in pedology, the study of soils in the landscape, and his PhD was in tephrochronology, the characterisation or 'fingerprinting' of volcanic-ash layers - tephras - and their use in dating geological, climatic, and archaeological events. He has combined pedology and tephrochronology ('tephra' providing the nexus) in his teaching and wide-ranging research interests at Waikato University for ~40 years. David's research topics include the origins and unique properties of tephra-derived soils and paleosols, dating tephras and evaluating volcanic eruption histories and hazards, explaining why altered-tephra deposits may collapse as landslides, climatic change over millennia, and the timing of Polynesian settlement of New Zealand. His team was the first to develop a method to extract and purify DNA from ancient buried paleosols on tephras, and he is currently leading research using liquefied ash-layers in lakes to evaluate prehistoric earthquake history in the Hamilton lowlands. David, current Team Leader of Earth sciences in the School of Science, served for several years as Chair of Earth and Ocean Sciences, and has co-led tephra studies globally as an officer of the International Focus Group on Tephrochronology and Volcanism for 16 years, including four as President. He represented New Zealand on the International Council, International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA), for 12 years. David is a recipient of the NZSSS Norman Taylor Memorial Lecture Award and the Mackay Hammer Award of the Geoscience Society of New Zealand. He is a Fellow of NZSSS, INQUA, and the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Aparangi.