Ram Dalal AM

Professor Ram Dalal is a Professor in the School of Agriculture and Food Science at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. He has contributed significantly to create awareness in the farming, scientific and general community to the seriousness and insidious nature of soil degradation. As a consequence, restorative practices for sustainable land management were developed and promoted. The international nature of the program was demonstrated by the fact that it was part of the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Program. It is now nationally recognized by policy makers and politicians that land degradation and sustainable land management are the national and international priorities. These projects have made significant contribution towards these issues.

In the last 30 years Dr Dalal has worked towards sustainable land management systems, nitrogen management and soil carbon dynamics. He was the co-leader of soil carbon program in the CRC for Greenhouse Accounting (199-2006), leader of soil carbon changes following land clearing funded by the Australian Greenhouse Office (1998-2002), reviewer for the IPCC Good Practice Guidance (2006) for the land sector, and leader of the National Soil Carbon Program (2012-2015) and Soil Constraints Initiative - Management of Sodic, Magnesic or Dispersive Soils (2015). He has been a consultant and project research contributor to the International Atomic Energy Agency (2004-2009). Recently, he has led a number of projects on estimating soil carbon stock following land use change from native vegetation to croplands, grazing lands, and management of croplands and grazing lands and rangelands (2009-2015) funded by the Department of Environment and Heritage, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and Department of Agriculture, Commonwealth of Australia. In addition, he has also been involved in estimating nitrous oxide and methane emissions/ uptake from different ecosystems including agriculture, grassland, plantation forestry and estuarine/ mangrove systems (2000 – 2015). He led the National Soil Carbon Program from 2012 to 2015.