Lecturer in Ecosystem Resilience

I am a Lecturer in Ecosystem Resilience within the University of Plymouth's School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Research Interests

My research delves into long-term environmental changes, focusing on how human activity has influenced landscapes over millennia in the context of modern environmental challenges, such as biodiversity change, wildfire and drought. My expertise lies in palaeoecological techniques, utilising data from peat and lake sediments to reconstruct Holocene environmental changes. I use interdisciplinary approaches to address modern environmental challenges that integrate long-term environmental perspectives. 

Principal Investigator: Jessie Woodbridge

Water security in the agricultural landscapes of Turkey: towards improving the resilience of communities and socio-ecological systems. This research aims to build socio-ecological and community resilience to water resource challenges through a capacity building pilot study based in the Konya Basin (Turkey) using an interdisciplinary approach combining natural and social science methods. Funded by: GCRF, British Academy and NERC Discipline Hopping Fellowship.

Improving socio-ecological resilience to wildfire in the UK via community engagement and integration of deep-time ecological data into landscape management, which is funded by the Royal Geographical Society and the Association for Environmental Archaeology.

As a Senior Researcher Fellow, I co-designed and carried out research into Biodiversity and land-use change in the British Isles, a collaborative research project between the University of Plymouth, Historic England and the University of Birmingham. The research aims to understand how human land-use practices have impacted upon past and present land-cover and biodiversity patterns across the British Isles and the consequences of this for modern conservation.  

I also co-designed and worked on the Changing the face of the Mediterranean: land cover and population since the advent of farming and Deforesting Europe projects at the University of Plymouth. This research aimed to reconstruct changes in European land-cover over long (i.e. multi-centennial) timescales using pollen data. 

I am currently a collaborator on the international interdisciplinary European Research Council funded COREX (Correlations to Explanations) project that aims to integrate archaeological and environmental DNA with long-term environmental knowledge to understand past human migration patterns and landscape change across northern Europe. I am also currently a member of the PaleOpen COST (Consolidation of Science and Technology) Action that aims to integrate and combine long-term environmental data globally to support the application of these data to environmental challenges via open science practices.

I am programme lead and admissions tutor for the MSc/MRes Sustainable Environmental Management and MSc Environmetnal Consultancy programmes. I also teach across undergraduate courses in BSc Environmental Science, Environmental Management and Sustainability and BSc Geography.

I enjoy teaching across a range of sub-disciplines in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Science because it allows me to share my passion for environmental change and sustainability while helping students develop the skills to think critically about the world around them. Seeing students grow in confidence and curiosity as they engage with complex environmental challenges is incredibly motivating.

My teaching spans:

Programme Lead: MSc / MRes: Sustainable Environmental Management and MSc Environmental Consultancy

BSc Hons: Environmental Science and Environmental Management and Sustainability

BSc Hons: Geography

Within these programmes I teach across various modules focusing on themes from long-term environmental change and big data analysis to flooding, drought, climate change and environmental sustainability.