In the context of major global environmental challenges such as food security, climate change, fresh water scarcity and biodiversity loss, the protection and the sustainable management of soil resources in Africa are of paramount importance. To raise the awareness of the general public, stakeholders, policy makers and the science community to the importance of soil in Africa, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission has produced the Soil Atlas of Africa. To that end, a new harmonised soil map at the continental scale has been produced. The steps of the construction of the new area-class map are presented, the basic information being derived from the Harmonized World Soil Database (HWSD). We show how the original data were updated and modified according to the World Reference Base for Soil Resources classification system. The corrections concerned boundary issues, areas with no information, soil patterns, river and drainage networks, and dynamic features such as sand dunes, water bodies and coastlines. In comparison to the initial map derived from HWSD, the new map represents a correction of 13% of the soil data for the continent. The map is available for downloading.

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The COVID-19 lockdown has instigated significant changes in household behaviours across a variety of categories including water consumption, which in the south and east regions of England is at an all-time high. We analysed water consumption data from 11,528 households over 20 weeks from January 2020, revealing clusters of households with distinctive temporal patterns. We present a data-driven household water consumer segmentation characterising households’ unique consumption patterns and we demonstrate how the understanding of the impact of these patterns of behaviour on network demand during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown can improve the accuracy of demand forecasting. Our results highlight those groupings with the highest and lowest impact on water demand across the network, revealing a significant quantifiable change in water consumption patterns during the COVID-19 lockdown period. The implications of the study to urban water demand forecasting strategies are discussed, along with proposed future research directions.

The damage tolerance of Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) to Barely Visible Impact Damage (BVID) is a critical design limiter for composite structures. This study investigated the key driving mechanisms and damage evolution of the compressive failure of laminated composites containing BVID using compression after impact and indentation (CAI) tests. Experiments were carried out on two similar quasi-isotropic laminates: [452/902/02/-452]2S and [45/90/0/-45]4S. Matrix cracking and delaminations were introduced by either low-velocity impact or quasi-static indentation tests prior to the CAI tests. The fullfield displacement during CAI as well as the moment of rupture were captured by 3D Digital Image Correlation (DIC). The effect of ply-blocking and influence of factors, such as impact energy, delamination area and surface indentation, on compressive failure was studied. Previously validated high-fidelity finite element (FE) numerical models for the indentation and impact events were then used to investigate the damage evolution during CAI failure.