I am a Research Fellow in the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences and an activity lead at the UK’s National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO). My research focuses on understanding how ecosystems function, their impact on land-atmosphere exchanges of carbon and water, and their sensitivity to changes in climate and disturbance (e.g. fire and land use). I achieve this through combining simulation models of varied complexity and observations spanning in-situ measurement at field level through to global scale Earth Observation (EO).

Terrestrial ecosystems play a major role in the global carbon cycle, underpinning ecosystem services including climate regulation.

My research focuses on understanding how terrestrial ecosystem function across site to global scales. My primary research tool is model-data fusion (MDF), by which a diverse array of observation, made across scales, are combined with process-models of terrestrial ecosystems. In combination, these tools allow for the (i) diagnosing where and when we are most uncertain in our understanding of the terrestrial C-cycle, (ii) quantify the information content of ecologically relevant observations, (iii) identify strategies to improve our confidence and (iv) evaluate alternate hypotheses embedded in models by confronting them with observations.

A key software tool for my research is the CARbon DAta-MOdel fraMework (CARDAMOM) and the DALEC suite of intermediate complexity models CARDAMOM is a Bayesian model-data fusion (MDF) approach which utilised an Adaptive Proposal-Markov Chain Monte Carlo (AP-MCMC) allowing us to calibrate DALEC independently for every location across the globe. The DALEC suite of models simulate the terrestrial C-cycle at a range of process-representation complexities.