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Policies implemented in order to control Foot and Mouth Disease, such as large-scale culling of healthy animals, were often controversial. Other infections have the potential to cause similar problems. For example, African swine fever, a contagious disease of pigs, has been spreading in Eastern Europe, and has recently been identified in Belgium. Outbreaks of livestock disease can lead to significant economic, welfare and social costs. The control policies required to reduce disease spread can have impacts of their own, meaning they can often be contentious. Many infectious diseases pose a
"The Water Test Network represents a unique partnership of organisations which is fully focused on supporting small to medium businesses to accelerate their innovations to market" Water specialists from the James Hutton Institute and Scottish Water are at the forefront of the Water Test Network, an international drive to unlock innovation potential in the global water industry, which also involves experts in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and France. Fourteen locations across North West Europe form the network of operational-scale facilities which allow innovative new technology to be
“To allow for improvement, it is important that future policies update monitoring programmes to reflect current ideas about nature and its interconnections with society; reconsider balance of effort on different topics and allow flexibility to fill any gaps; improve transparency of data and data uses, and enable participation throughout the adaptive management cycle” Monitoring and evaluation are key elements in the adaptive management of our ecosystems, the process of learning from new experiences and insights to improve how we manage the environment. A research consortium led by the James
My long-standing interest in less-invasive techniques to study ruminant nutrition has developed into a range of projects looking at biomarkers in accessible samples - including milk, urine, faeces and breath. The work is highly relevant to two major technological developments in animal science (i) the need for cheap and high-throughput phenotyping to exploit new genomic information; and (ii) rapid advances in the use of monitoring and sensing equipment on-farm (precision livestock farming). More information about my research can be found here.
My overall research interest is to unravel the host animal genomic architecture affecting complex performance traits in livestock. At present my main research interest is to reveal the influence of the gut microbiome on methane emissions, feed conversion efficiency, meat quality, animal health and behavioural traits, and how the host animal shapes the microbiome associated with those traits. In this research, whole-metagenome-sequencing is used to determine microbial community profiles as well as microbial gene abundances in order to understand the complex genetic and functional interactions
Beef production is very important for Scotland's economy (economic output of £851 million in 2017) and for providing the high quality and iconic, ‘Scotch Beef’ brand. Feed for livestock represents 70-80% of the variable costs of beef production and an improvement of feed conversion efficiency is needed to keep the beef industry economically viable. Furthermore, a reduction in carbon footprint has to be achieved in order to minimize environmental impact. This prize-winning research showed that both improvement in feed conversion efficiency and mitigation of methane emissions is achievable