Professor Des Walling
Emeritus Professor
Des Walling arrived in Exeter as a student in 1963 and was both an undergraduate and postgraduate (PhD) in the Geography Department. He joined the staff as 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 involved a comparison of 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. This involved pioneering work on the use of fallout radionuclides to quantify erosion and deposition rates and the development of sediment source fingerprinting techniques to establish the relative contributions of different sediment sources. He continued to work on catchments and rivers in the UK, but also extended the global coverage of his work to include contrasting environments, including China, southeast Asia, Africa, Chile and Greenland. He has also investigated recent changes in the sediment loads of the world’s rivers in response to human impact and climate change. He supervised more than 60 PhD students working in these areas to successful completion.
He became 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 was the founding President of the World Association for Sedimentation and Erosion Research (2004-10). He was a long-term member of the International Sediment Initiative launched by the UESCO International Hydrological Programme (IHP) from 2004 to 2024 and participated in several Coordinated Research Projects jointly sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency and FAO to promote the use of fallout radionuclides in documenting soil erosion. He served as Chair of the British Geomorphological Research Group frm 1990-1)
He was awarded the Back Award of the Royal Geographical Society in 1985 and its Victoria Medal in 2000, the President’s Prize of the British Hydrological Society in 1995, the Vollenweider Award of Environment Canada in 2000, the Linton Award of the British Society for Geomorphology in 2007,the International Qian Ning Award of the World Association for Erosion and Sedimentation Research in 2007, the AGU Hydrologic Sciences Award in 2008, the Norman Hudson Memorial Award of the World Association for Soil and Water Conservation in 2015 and the G K Gilbert Award of the Geomorphology Speciality Group of the American Association of Geographers in 2023. In 2007 he was awarded the International Hydrology Prize, jointly awarded by the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, UNESCO and WMO, sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize for Hydrology.
He has published widely and is currently credited with >55000 citations and an h index of 124 by Google Scholar. In 2023 he was ranked 10th in the world for Geography scholars by ScholarGPS, based on productivity, impact and the quality of his publications. He was a founding Editor of Hydrological Processes first published in 1986 and remains an Editor of this Wiley journal.
He was awarded the degree of Doctoris Honoris Causa by Warsaw University of Lifesciences z(SGGW) in 2010 and an Honorary DSc by the University of Exeter in 2024.
