Emeritus Professor Desmond Walling (DSc)

Tuesday 23 July 2024 3:00pm

One of the world’s most eminent Geography scholars, Des Walling arrived in Exeter as a student in 1963 and was both an undergraduate and postgraduate (PhD) in the Geography Department. He became an Assistant Lecturer in 1968, retiring as a Professor in 2010.

His doctoral research focussed on hydrology, then a new area of Physical Geography, and compared the hydrological behaviour of five small instrumented catchments in southeast Devon. Most of his subsequent work has concentrated on suspended sediment in streams and rivers (muddy water) and associated catchment sediment budgets. Continuing to work in the UK, he also extended the global coverage of his research into contrasting environments, including China, southeast Asia, Africa, Chile and Greenland. In addition, he has investigated recent changes in the sediment loads of the world’s rivers in response to human impact and climate change. He has supervised more than 60 PhD students to successful completion and has published widely, credited with more than 54000 citations by Google Scholar.

He has been heavily involved with international activity in his field and has served as President of the International Commission on Continental Erosion (1983-91), the International Association for Sediment Water Science (1993-96) and the World Association for Sedimentation and Erosion Research (2004-10). He has been awarded the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Linton Award of the British Society for Geomorphology, the International Hydrology Prize of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, UNESCO and WMO, and the AGU Hydrologic Sciences Award.