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Dr Josh Ahmed

Josh

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Pollution and Coastal Risk

Email: joshua.ahmed@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

Josh is a geomorphologist and environmental scientist specialising in understanding how earth surface processes disturb, distribute, and concentrate environmental pollutants, and how this behaviour may change in response to future climate change. His current research seeks to understand the risk posed by historic coastal landfill sites around the UK, particularly as they become more susceptible to erosion. The project is part of the UKRI and Defra funded RACC (Resilience of Anthropocene Coasts and Communities) program. 

Josh has worked on the quantification of river channel dynamics in the UK and Amazon Basin, using a combination of remote sensing and GIS techniques and field-based surveying. He has worked on field campaigns in the Bolivian Amazon Basin, Vietnamese Mekong Delta, and sites across England and Wales using uncrewed aerial vehicles, multiparameter probes, acoustic sensors, and remote camera networks to gain insights about river-floodplain process interactions. Josh established a field monitoring program across farms in East Yorkshire to assess the impact of cover crops in the retention of soil moisture and nutrients to enhance the land’s resilience to climate change. He extended this work by exploring how farmland runoff impacted water quality in drainage ditches, working closely with environmental chemists and the Environment Agency.   

 

Research

Research Interests:

  • Contaminant mobility in terrestrial, aquatic, and coastal environments 
  • Earth surface dynamics  
  • Environmental responses to climate change  
  • Ecological impacts of climate change and contaminant mobility 

Publications

  • Wolstenholme, J. M., Cooper, F., Thomas, R. E., Ahmed, J, Parsons, K. J., and Parsons, D. R. 2025, Automated identification of hedgerows and hedgerow gaps using deep learning. Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation. https://doi.org/10.1002/rse2.432   
  • Ahmed, J. 2024, Establishing the hydrological controls on water surface area variations in oxbow lakes. Hydrological Processes, 38 (12). https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.70013.  
  • Ahmed, J. Peakall, J., Balme, M. R., and Parsons, D. R. 2022, Rapid megaflood-triggered base-level rise on Mars. Geology, 51(1). https://doi.org/10.1130/G50277.1  
  • Ahmed, J. Constantine, J.A., and Dunne, T. 2019, The role of sediment supply in the adjustment of channel sinuosity across the Amazon Basin. Geology, 47(9). https://doi.org/10.1130/G46319.1   
  • Constantine, J. A., Dunne, T., Ahmed, J., Legleiter, C., and Lazarus, E. D. 2014. Sediment supply as a driver of river meandering and floodplain evolution in the Amazon Basin. Nature Geoscience 7 (12). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2282    
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