Professional summary

Research Interests

I am a quantitative ecologist based in the Land Use group in Lancaster. I use a variety of statistical techniques to evaluate state and change of ecological properties ranging from species distributions to soil acidity. My recent work includes developing statistical tools for spatio-temporally explicit data integration for species distribution models, building an R package for joint species distribution modelling and analysing the relationships between plant communities and soil properties from national field survey data. This analysis of plant and soil dynamics from national monitoring schemes includes analysis of plant response to soil pH and atmospheric deposition across the UK over forty years as part of the Countryside Survey and UK-SCAPE, as well as the soil microbial response to pasture farming systems as part of the SEEGSLIP project. I previously did my PhD in soil ecology at UKCEH Bangor and Bangor University where I looked at the relationships between soil structure, biodiversity and health. Most of this work was using data from the field survey within Glastir Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (GMEP) which surveyed sites across Wales for a wide variety of properties.

Qualifications

  • 2015 - 2020: PhD at Bangor University/UKCEH
  • 2011 - 2015: BA (Natural Sciences) University of Cambridge

Panels, committees and memberships

Early Career Researcher representative within the CEEDS leadership team.

Web tools and apps

I have built and maintain an R package for the fitting of joint species distribution models in Stan, available on Github at https://github.com/NERC-CEH/jsdmstan. Further documentation is available on the github page and within the package vignette.

I have also created a shiny app that shows how plant diversity and occurrence have changed over the 40 years of Countryside Survey: https://shiny-apps.ceh.ac.uk/common_plant_change/

Publications