Research Assistant projects
Current RA work: Slavery from Space
I am currently working with the Rights Lab, funded by the WWF and UK space agency to use satellite data to predict slavery from space. This has been used in the past to predict brick kilns and has been strongly linked to environmental degradation.
Fire and Flood: NERC rapid project
Currently working on a NERC urgency funded project for Synergistic fire and floodplain solutions. Report writting, analysising Avian, macroinvertebrate, diatom and geospatial data whilst working with an international team of partners. An abstract from the project grant can be found on the NERC project page
Stage Zero river restoration goals
I am currently working on creating a website in order to collect and disseminate knowledge on river managment projects to obtain a Stage Zero river state. www.StageZeroRiverRestoration.com This has involved Stage Zero site visits with the Environment Agency (Lincoln). Discussion have been had with the key players in this paradigm both in the UK and the USA. Including the USGS, Wolf Water Resources consulting, the EA, USGS, NOAA and various watershed councils. This included creating and operating a mailing list of practitioners who could influence the website and contribute to the study site crowdsourcing map (shown below) which was created with ArcGIS Online, Survey123. This is continually being added to. It also involved organising and hosting webinars, the recordings of which can be found in the resources tab of the stagezeroriverrestoration site.
Alluvial Phase Space Diagrams
During 2020-2021 I worked on the Alluvial Phase Space project defining river channel change based on a conceptual geomorphic model. This research was originally carried out in a paper by Major et al. (2019) and based on the North Fork Toutle River. My task was to use Python to develop temporal and spatial graphs using the APS results on the North Fork Toutle and then extend the project to the Lower Mississippi River. The Lower Mississippi river results were used to test, visualise and help improve a channel change model being built.
Blue Green Cities
The Blue-Green Cities dissemination project involved improving Prof. Colin Thorne's wikipedia page in order to share knowledge on the Blue-Green cities project in the public domain where other researchers could comment and edit the results.
REF case studies
The first research assistant task I helped with was to research additional facts for REF reports in March 2020. The first impact case study was for University of Nottingham, Newcastle Blue-Green Cities project. This involved using Qgis, Environment Agency data sets and governmental statistcs to provide indications of the positives resulting from Blue Green cities projects. The second impact case study required finding supporting evidence for the impact of Prof. Colin Thorne's involvement in the Costa Rica vs Nicaragua International Court of Justise case. This involved reading through other ICJ cases to find those that support the impact of the case and similar issues that might have been brought to the ICJ with the environmental precedent set by this case.