About Me

I am currently a Post Doc within the Experimental Interaction Ecology lab (led by Nico Eisenhauer) at iDiv , Leipzig.

My main research interest is conducting large-scale synthesis analyses, in particular looking at how biodiversity is responding human impacts, such as land use change or climate change. Currently, I am collating data on soil biodiversity (predominantly earthworms), as many synthesis studies focus on, or are bias towards, above-ground biodiversity. Thus, little is known aboout the drivers behind soil biodiversity patterns and how they may respond to different pressures.

Earthworms are ideal to focus on as they are a relatively well-studied (as they are relatively easy to identify to species level compared to some other soil organisms) and have direct links to ecosystem services based on their functional role. As part of the sWorm working group, we investigated patterns of global earthworm diversity, abundance and biomass, and the environmental drivers behind those patterns. However, it is still unclear how earthworm diversity is responding to human impacts, what changes might occur under future climate and land use change scenarios, and what these changes mean for the ecosystem functions that are provided by earthworms that humans rely on.

I am also leading a BES funded project (with Lea Beaumelle), using meta-analyses to investigate the impacts of multiple global change drivers on soil biodiversity. We are focussing on six global change drivers; climate change, land use intensification, habitat fragmentation, pollution, nutrient enrichment and invasive species. The project proposal was published in RIO.

I completed my Master's and PhD at Imperial College London, although based at the Natural History Museum, London. Supervised by Andy Purvis and working within the PREDICTS project. The main focus of my PhD was investigating the effects of land use change and habitat fragmentation on biodiversity. This involved collating data from researches across the globe, and combining it with freely available remotely-sensed data, such as MODIS.

I was a developer and maintainer of the R package MODISTools, with Sean Tuck. This was an open source project, and was recently taken on by ROpenSci, MODISTools