Profile

I live near Stamford in Lincolnshire with my wife (also a marine biologist) and two children. We’ve got five chickens that enjoy destroying our garden. I would love to live closer to the sea!

My favourite beach is Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, followed by Porth Trecastell in Anglesey.

My pronouns are he/him.

A lot of people don’t realise the Environment Agency do marine biology, but we have a fleet of large boats that circle the country taking measurements of the sea, surveying marine protected areas and monitoring plants and animals around the English coast.

Unfortunately over the last couple of centuries, we’ve lost huge areas of key habitats such as saltmarshes, seagrass beds and oyster reefs that keep our estuaries and coasts healthy teeming with life, and also help prevent climate change. My role at the EA is a technical lead of an initiative that works with many other organisations to try and change this, by actively restoring habitats – through replanting seagrass, breaching sea walls to restore saltmarshes or reseeding oyster beds. The Environment Agency do some saltmarsh restoration themselves, but in order to really drive it forward, we need to work with lots of other organisations.

Currently my day job is trying to provide information packages about coastal restoration for other people or organisations who want to do the restoration themselves. These packages might be data or maps, such as modelling areas of coast suitable for seagrass restoration, or guidance – we’ve recently published with the UK & Ireland Native Oyster Network a step-by-step guide for restoring native oyster reefs, and are currently writing more for seagrass and saltmarsh!

I’ve been in other roles at the EA – I was previously in a much more technical role, designing seabed monitoring in marine protected areas and working on a new program of subtidal seagrass monitoring. I loved being able to go out on survey boats and get glimpses of the seabed though our work!

Me sieving mud from sampled from the bottom of the sea on one of our survey vessels in the Farne Islands marine protected area. By identifying the species in the mud and counting them, we can get an idea of how healthy the seabed is.

Solent Guardian, one of the Environment Agency’s marine survey vessels.

Seagrass beds are one of our key habitats in our seas around England to try to restore – they’re great for fish and birds and help lock carbon to stop climate change! This is one from the Isle of Wight.