The Macaulay Institute has been awarded a grant of £314,000 by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to fund a three year research project that could significantly improve the ability of the police and the courts to trace and convict criminals using soil forensic evidence.

This project, which will bring together conventional, improved and new soil analytical techniques for forensic use on UK soils, aims to develop robust corroborative soil intelligence tools to enhance the provision of reliable evidence in criminal investigations. It also aims to design and test a method selector to help investigators choose the most appropriate soil characteristics to use, dependent upon sample size, condition and pre-treatment.

The Macaulay’s partners in this research project are the National Soil Resources Institute (NSRI) at Cranfield University , the Agricultural and Environmental Science Division of Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD), and Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland (BioSS). The Macaulay holds the soils database for Scotland whilst NSRI and DARD hold national databases of soils in England and Wales , and Northern Ireland respectively. The National Crime and Operations Faculty (NCOF) will act as a key advisor to the project, ensuring the research is relevant to the forensics community.

Project Leader, Dr Lorna Dawson, Senior Researcher in Soil Science at The Macaulay, said: “The main objective of this project is to increase the range of situations where the normal constituents of soil can be analysed for criminal investigations. This will be achieved through the combined use of improved fingerprinting methods, effective use of the databases and through ensuring that a robust statistical approach is adopted throughout the whole project.”

“Updated conventional soil analysis methods currently used in forensics, such as colour, texture, microscopic observations and mineralogy, will be integrated with state-of-the-art techniques employed in soil science research, including organic analysis(GC-MS), high resolution powder X-ray diffraction and DNA methods.

“Techniques that are applicable to trace samples (QemSCAN, palynology and molecular approaches) will be correlated to soil attributes measurable on larger sized samples and to those variables held in databases in Scotland, England and Wales, and Northern Ireland. Comparison of data from a forensic sample with soil and associated data held in several databases will provide important intelligence clues, such as narrowing the geographical location of sample origin and associated vegetation. The ability to match samples with a defined probability will be greatly improved.”

The Macaulay Institute is the premier land use research institute in the UK. Two hundred and seventy staff are based at the Macaulay Institute at Craigiebuckler in Aberdeen. The Macaulay Institute is an international leader in soil research and on the use of rural land resources for the benefit of people and the environment and is involved in research across the globe; from Scotland to Chile and China. More about the Macaulay Institute can be found at www.macaulay.ac.uk

(Ends)

For further information contact:
Karen Sage
Tricker PR
Office 01224 654087
Mobile 07795 522012
Email ksage@trickerpr.com

EPSRC

The Engineering and Physical Research Council (EPSRC) is the main UK government agency for funding research and training in engineering and the physical sciences, investing around £500 million a year in a broad range of subjects – from mathematics to materials science, and from information technology to structural engineering.

It operates to meet the needs of industry and society by working in partnership with universities to invest in people and scientific discovery and innovation. The work of the EPSRC is complementary to other research investors including other research councils, government agencies, industry and the European Union. It actively engages in and encourages partnerships and collaborations across disciplines, boundaries and the world.