User:Dave Favis-Mortlock
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Hi -- for more about me see:
my page at Queen's University Belfast
my personal pages.
Dr David Favis-Mortlock (b. 1953) is an English geomorphologist and fiddle player.
Born David Mortlock, he grew up in Barking, Essex, later moving to Basildon New Town. Whilst a teenager, he discovered folk rock one lunchtime in 1969 when someone played a Fairport Convention album on an old-style Dansette record player. On a borrowed fiddle, he slowly learned to make bad imitations of fiddle player Dave Swarbrick, to the chagrin of his fellow students at Lancaster University, where he was studying environmental sciences.
Moving to Banbury in response to an advertisement in Melody Maker, in 1978 he formed a folk group named after the nearby Rollright Stones, together with morris dancer Bryan Sheppard (now a member of The Hookey Band). At one stage, the Rollrights included fellow fiddler Chris Leslie on bass guitar. The group supported Fairport Convention and recorded with Fairport's Dave Pegg.
Following a move to Brighton, in 1985 he co-founded folk rock band Tricks Upon Travellers. He changed his name to Favis-Mortlock following the death of his mother Joan Favis, and gained his PhD (on soil erosion modelling) at Brighton Polytechnic (now the University of Brighton) in 1994. Subsequently, he began working with former PhD supervisor John Boardman at the University of Oxford's Environmental Change Unit (now the Environmental Change Institute).
Publications include the first quantitative study of the impact of climate change on soil erosion by water (Boardman et al., 1990), and a novel modelling study of soil erosion in prehistory together with archaeologist Martin Bell (Favis-Mortlock et al., 1997). In 1996 he began work on a self-organising systems model for rill initiation and development, RillGrow (Favis-Mortlock et al., 2000). Now a lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is responsible for the Soil Erosion Website, and now plays mostly jazz violin.
[edit] References
Boardman, J., Evans, R., Favis-Mortlock, D.T. and Harris, T.M., 1990. Climate change and soil erosion on agricultural land in England and Wales. Land Degradation and Rehabilitation, 2(2): 95-106.
Favis-Mortlock, D.T., Boardman, J. and Bell, M., 1997. Modelling long-term anthropogenic erosion of a loess cover: South Downs, UK. The Holocene, 7(1): 79-89.
Favis-Mortlock, D.T., Boardman, J., Parsons, A.J. and Lascelles, B., 2000. Emergence and erosion: a model for rill initiation and development. Hydrological Processes, 14(11-12): 2173-2205.
