Contact details

Prof. Dr. ir. Stefaan De Neve
Research Group “Soil fertility and nutrient management”
Department of Environment
Faculty of Bioscience engineering
Ghent University (UGent)
Coupure Links 653, 9000 Gent (Belgium)

ORCID code: 0000-0002-7557-8355
Research gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stefaan-De-Neve-2
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefaan-de-neve-47a84527/?originalSubdomain=be
Research Group: https://www.ugent.be/bw/environment/en/research/sofer

Short biography

Stefaan De Neve is professor in Soil fertility and nutrient management at the Department of Environment, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, with more than 30 years of research experience. His core research topics are cycling of carbon and of the main nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus in (mainly agricultural) soils, greenhouse gas emissions from soils (notably N2O), soil quality, the role of soil microfauna in nitrogen and carbon cycling, and recently also the dynamics of microplastics in soils. Indeed, microplastics can be considered as a specific (human-made) type of organic material in soils, and similar concepts can be used to study the dynamics of soil microplastics.

The microplastics research in his group focuses on the dynamics of the smallest MP fraction, and includes the study of redistribution of MP during the natural process of soil aggregation, the leaching of small MP in field conditions, the transport of small MP by soil mesofauna, and the use of magnetic labelling to facilitate extraction of the smallest MP from soil. He is leading an interdisciplinary consortium in a large project funded by the Flemish Research foundation (FWO) entitled “Microplastics in soils: identification, dynamics and transfer risks to other ecosystem compartments”, and is currently (co-)supervising 4 PhD researchers working on microplastics in soils and labelling of microplastics.