[Stoves] Julien Winter: a soil scientist in name but not in practice.

[Paul Anderson]

Stovers and biochar folk,

Below is an introduction to Julien Winter.

Doc  /  Dr TLUD  /  Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu
Skype: paultlud      Phone: +1-309-452-7072
Website:  www.drtlud.com

*_A Brief Self-Introduction of Julien Winter _*7 May 2014Cobourg, ON, Canada

Foremost, I am a consultant soil scientist specializing in soil organic 
matter conservation (Ph.D.), though I also have a background in plant 
physiology (M.Sc.) and plant ecology.  People working in soil organic 
matter are often involved with biochar technology, and so am 
I.  Once-upon-a-time, my family raised beef cattle.

Although my specialty is soils, I often find that other topics trump my 
agenda.  Recently, I went to Nova Scota to look at how grazing dairy 
cattle changes the diversity of soil biota, and soil carbon and 
nitrogen cycling.  However, I found that the first thing that was 
needed was a way of documenting plant populations and plant 
biodiversity.  That is not as easy as one might think, because measuring 
plant populations is dependent on their density, and that changes 
through space and time.   So, instead of working in soils, I work on 
measuring and modeling plant populations.

A year ago, I was invited to Bangladesh to look at their rural agrarian 
culture, and advise on possible roles for biochar.  That is good soils 
topic, because it involves organic waste management, and creating 
a long-term increases in soil organic matter; much needed for their 
soils.  However, that topic has been trumped as well.  The difficulty 
was not how to use the biochar, but how to get it.  With the high 
population density in Bangladesh, there is no spare biomass in the 
landscape.  In fact, there is a shortage.  So, if we are going to make 
biochar, it has to be as a byproduct of some current usage, or 
processing of waste biomass.  At the household level, making biochar in 
micro-gasifier cookstoves has promise, but this technology needs to be 
developed locally.  I have been put in contact with good researchers at 
the Bangladesh Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. However, 
as a consequence, I have ended up putting in vastly more time on 
combustion science than soil science.  We are developing a network of 
specialists called the Bangladesh Biochar Initiative, and as the 
momentum builds, my role should diminish.  This has been the most useful 
and interesting thing I have ever done: culturally fascinating and 
extremely multidisciplinary.

That is a brief description of me: a soil scientist in name, but a plant 
ecologist and combustion scientist in practice.

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