Me and My PhD

So.... I’m 26 (just), I live in Leicester, I idolise Kirstie Allsopp, I love bees and I want to make some sort of environmental difference or impact or change...what that actually means i don’t really know!!

My PhD is based at Cranfield university and funded by BESS, a NERC research programme. Within BESS there are four consortia and I am working alongside two of them, Urban BESS and Wessex BESS. My project title is ‘Matching Scales : The impact of natural scales on the planning, decision and policy environment’. I am focusing on the scale at which ecosystems function, the scale at which they are managed, and the scale at which policy is created.

I’ve been interested in ecosystem services since the first year of my BSc in Geography, with a particular passion for bees and pollination. My undergraduate dissertation focused on the decline of bees in the UK. My MSc dissertation looked at the link between policy, and conservation success in the UK. My PhD is an in depth, more specialised look at some of these ideas.

So far within my project I have been looking at the scale at which ecosystem services function within the Urban BESS research area of Luton, Bedford and Milton Keynes. This means I’m reading a lot of papers and looking at some land use maps.

Hoovering insects, vigorously.

So, I don’t feel that I have got very far as yet but I have also been helping out with parts of the Urban BESS Projects. I have been hoovering insects, sewing seeds, weeding weeds, measuring trees and other exciting outside things...i love outside! Doing these activities has been useful for meeting and mingling with people within the BESS community and also with the people who I will be approaching later on in my PhD to give me their thoughts and opinions on the effect of scale within the policy environment.