Areas of interest
Anne's major interest is the exchange of heat, water vapour, CO2 and momentum between soil, vegetation and atmosphere as well as soil physical processes, including the flows of water, heat and gases.
In most of her projects, detailed micrometeorological, soil physical, plant physiological and remote sensing data are combined with land surface models and/or soil models for a range of applications.
Examples of current and past research interests comprise:
Postgraduate supervision
Unfortunately, currently Anne is not able to consider enquiries from potential PhD students (apart from applicants to CROCUS DLA or AFESP studentships calls), unless you have (i) a draft PhD proposal prepared (in the broad area of soil-vegetation-atmosphere interactions') and (ii) funding in place. You would have strong expertise in at least two of the following science areas: soil physics, land surface processes, hydrometeorology, micrometeorology, remote sensing.
Background
Anne completed a combined BSc/MSc in Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (1990; MSc Thesis in Soil Physics, Micrometeorology and Hydrology) and a PhD (1995) in Micrometeorology at Wageningen University (The Netherlands).
She then held an EC-funded postdoctoral position at the Institute of Hydrology (Wallingford, UK, now UKCEH-Wallingford), working on physiologically-based models of vegetation dynamics for improved description of land surface-atmosphere interactions in climate models.
She joined the Department as Lecturer in Environmental Physics in 1999 and became a full professor in 2013. She has over 35 years of experience with land surface modelling, as well as with soil physical, hydrometeorological and plant-physiological measurement methods. Her main research interests relate to land-atmosphere interactions and feedbacks, specifically the role of soil-and vegetation processes in this.
Experimental field-sites included a rainfed vineyard in Central Spain (EFEDA), a savannah in Niger (HAPEX-Sahel), an olive grove in Southern Spain, agricultural fields in the UK (Sonning campaign, GROMIT project, PASQUAL, LANDWISE) and Ghana (BRAVE), a floodplain meadow (FUSE Project) in the UK and a Caatinga dry tropical forest site in NE Brazil.
Her research is predominantly funded by NERC (and more recently by Innovate-UK). Over the years, she has built up a large portfolio of research grants mostly relating to applied and theoretical environmental science, broadly in the context of water-, food- and energy security, and related impacts of weather extremes (flooding, droughts).
She has been an executive board member of the International Soil Modelling Consortium since 2017 and been a member and co-chair of the GEWEX GLASS panel, where she also co-led the GEWEX Soil and Water (SoilWat) initiative (2018-2026).
She was an Associate Editor (2018- 2019) for the Elsevier journal Agriculture and Forest Meteorology and is currently Associate Editor (2016-) for the SSSA Vadose Zone journal.
Verhoef A., Allen, S.J., (2000). A SVAT scheme describing energy and CO2 fluxes for multi-component vegetation: calibration and test for a Sahelian savannah. Ecological Modelling 127 245-267.
Wallace, J.S. and Verhoef, A. (2000). Interactions in mixed-plant communities: light, water and carbon dioxide. In: Leaf development and canopy growth. Editors: B. Marshall And J. Roberts. Sheffield Biological Science Series, Sheffield Academic Press, pp 204-250.
Verhoef A., Allen, S.J. and Lloyd, C.R. (1999). Seasonal variation of surface energy balance over two Sahelian surfaces. International Journal of Climatology 19 1267-1277.
Verhoef, A., and Allen, S.J. (1998). The relative importance of surface and aerodynamic resistances in a multi-source energy-CO2 model. Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 23 459-463.
Jacobs, A.F.G., and Verhoef, A. (1997). Soil evaporation from sparse natural vegetation estimated from Sherwood numbers. Journal of Hydrology 188-189 443-452.
Moncrieff, J.B. Monteny, B. Verhoef, A., Friborg, Th., Elbers, J., Kabat, P., de Bruin, H., Soegaard, H., Jarvis, P.G., and Taupin, J.D. (1997). Spatial and temporal variations in net carbon flux during HAPEX-Sahel. Journal of Hydrology 188-189 563-588.
Verhoef, A., De Bruin, H.A.R. and Van den Hurk, B.J.J.M. (1997). Some practical notes on the parameter kB-1 for sparse canopies. Journal of Applied Meteorology 36 560-572.
Verhoef, A., McNaughton, K.G., and Jacobs, A.F.G. (1997). A parameterization of momentum roughness length and displacement height for a wide range of canopy densities. Hydrology and Earth Systems Sciences 1 81-91.
Verhoef A. (1997). The effect of temperature differences between porometer head and leaf surface on stomatal conductance measurements. Plant, Cell & Environment 20 641-646.
