I am interested in the scientific underpinning of practical and policy solutions to problems in wildlife conservation. Although my background is in the behavioural ecology of mammals, my research currently spans taxa ranging from mammals to moths, and is inter-disciplinary (including teams involving environmental economics and the social sciences). Much of my research is stimulated by conflict between people and wildlife, whether it be through predation, infectious disease or invasive species.
Department/Institute: Biology
I am an ecological economist specialising in biodiversity finance, nature-positive organisations, infrastructure sustainability, sustainable finance, biodiversity offsetting and ecological economics. My academic research features regularly in popular media including the Guardian, BBC Countryfile, the Times, Sky News, the Financial Times and the ENDS report. I currently hold three ongoing expert advisory roles for the UK government: on Natural England’s Biodiversity Net Gain Monitoring and Evaluation expert advisory group; the UK Treasury’s Biodiversity Economics working group; and I am an expert advisor to the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits. I was an expert contributor to the 2022 UK Environmental Audit Committee report on Biodiversity and Ecosystems, the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology POSTBrief on ‘Biodiversity Net Gain’, and POSTnotes on biodiversity offsetting and just sustainability transitions. I also work as a freelance consultant, including hosting seminars and advising multilateral development institutions and companies on biodiversity net gain, biodiversity offset policy, nature-positive strategy and biodiversity safeguards. I lecture on Masters programmes at the University of Oxford, Surrey, and Imperial as well as Oxford University executive education and school access programmes, and co-supervise 5 PhD and Masters researchers. I’m co-host of the European Society for Ecological Economics podcast “Economics for Rebels”. I was named as one of the 100 most influential environmental professionals in the UK by newspaper the ENDS Report in 2022, and won the UKRI Natural Environment Research Council’s early career policy impact award in 2023.
My Postdoc is funded by EU Horizon 2020 project “SUPERB”, focusing on understanding and evaluating the mechanisms for financing the restoration of ecosystems across Europe. I also assist the biodiversity and scenario modelling work packages for the Agile Sprint project: Operationalising Treasury Green Book Guidance on biodiversity.
I specialize in human-wildlife conflict, in particular analysis, mediation, policy and training. My applied work concentrates mostly on community engagement and stakeholder dialogue, while my research focusses on quantitative and qualitative social research on livelihoods and the socio-cultural aspects of living near wildlife. I also work on policy and capacity building for conservation conflict mediation, particularly at national and intergovernmental levels.
I am an entomologist, community ecologist and conservation biologist studying the processes that maintain, structure and threaten biodiversity in a range of terrestrial ecosystems. Areas of current research areas include approaches to reconcile human land-use with biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the UK and in the tropics; the structure and dynamics of insect food webs and their responses to perturbations; the role of plant pathogens and insect herbivores in structuring and maintaining the high diversity of rainforest plants; and the impact of climate change on interspecific interactions and associated ecosystem functions and services. For further information, please visit the Community Ecology research group web pages.
My research is focused on the use of fossils and modern datasets, models and innovative technologies to determine the diversity, distribution and abundance of plants and animals across global landscapes in space and time. This evidence-base is then used to understand biodiversity baselines, the resilience of biological communities to external shocks, the relationship between biodiversity and human health, and the distribution of natural capital assets across global landscapes that are important for human well-being.
I am a plant ecologist and I’m mainly interested in how and why plant species are so different to each other. Why did these differences evolve and what are the consequences for ecosystems? For example, plants produce seeds of many different sizes: the coco de Mer (a palm tree native to the Seychelles) can kill you if a seed happens to fall off while you’re standing underneath the tree! In contrast, orchids seeds are so small and poorly provisioned that they can’t even germinate without the help of mycorrhizal fungi. Why this diversity exists and how it persists are the key questions that drive my research.
The overall objective of my research is to identify optimal management of environmental resources to maximise conservation and human welfare outcomes. In particular, my science is focused on improving our understanding of the dynamics of social-ecological systems, particularly marine systems. My research combines demographic and bio-economic modelling, non-market valuation and optimisation approaches. My topical interests include human-wildlife conflict, assessing marine use and non-use values, and spatial marine management.
I have a particular interest in developing and applying methods for understanding and predicting human behaviour in the context of local resource use in developing countries, and improving the effectiveness of incentive-based mechanisms such as payment for ecosystems services and biodiversity offsetting, in the marine and terrestrial realms.
My overall research interest lies in exploring, at the landscape scale, which components of biodiversity are the most crucial to protect and restore – given that ecosystems are dynamic, uncertain and subject to change. To do so, I work with simulation models and algorithms, large secondary (and occasionally primary) data sets, and spatial analysis of data including satellite imagery.
I have a particular interest in investigating the impacts of the private sector upon global biodiversity, and investigating mechanisms through which business can manage impacts and fund conservation and restoration activities.