Emily Upcott

Emily's research involves applying spatial techniques to explore some of the challenges facing ecology, particularly Sustainable Agriculture. She contributes her expertise to a variety of projects: she is the GIS lead for a PACIFIC work package, evaluating modelled and measured approaches to estimating pesticide movement in catchment areas, and co-leads a work package task in AgZero+, understanding spatial cropping distributions and patterns. Emily regularly uses data products such as UKCEH Land Cover Maps and UKCEH Land Cover^® plus: Crops maps to investigate spatio-temporal effects of land use and land cover, and draws in additional relevant datasets derived from remote sensing imagery, field records and verified historical sources to address this within different contexts. She uses both ArcGIS and R spatial packages to interrogate, model and visualise spatial data. Additionally, Emily is highly skilled in field identification and methods, particularly grassland plants and habitats using quadrats, birds by sight and sound, moth trapping and pan trapping. 

Emily graduated with a BSc in Biology with Conservation and Biodiversity from the University of Sheffield in 2012, before spending much of the next two years interning and then working in conservation science at A Rocha Canada. This led her to study MSc Conservation Project Management at the University of Kent where she conducted her dissertation research with the RSPB in 2015, and then on to field-based conservation science and ecology jobs with the Forestry Commission, Worcestershire Biological Records Centre and RSPB. Emily joined UKCEH in 2018, completing three years as a Research Associate before continuing as a permanent Spatial Ecologist in 2021.