Professional summary

Dr Edward Tipping is an environmental chemist with research interests including metals and their toxic effects, the properties of natural organic matter, and macronutrient cycling.

Before his retirement in 2017, he led the Long Term - Large Scale Macronutrients Project, and contributed to modelling carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in soils and water across the UK. This work included simulation of the effects of atmospheric deposition on plant, soil and water C, N and P pools, and the consequences for plant net primary productivity and species richness.

He led projects to investigate the optical properties of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in surface waters, and the subsequent derivation of a three-pool model that allows DOM to be estimated from optical absorbance alone.

He led work to simulate the toxicity of metals and acidity towards aquatic and soil organisms, and this resulted in a new model that can predict the dependency of toxicity on solution chemistry, while including metal mixture effects. Since retiring and becoming a CEH Fellow, he has developed this research further, focusing on long-term field observations made on zooplankton in contaminated lakes at Sudbury Ontario, in collaboration with Canadian colleagues.

Selected publications