I grew up on a dairy farm in Wales and developed early obsessions with carnivorous plants and computer programming, which lead to a BA in Biology and an MSc in Biological Computation. I worked as a field botanist in the UK and Mexico, before a PhD on nitrogen cycling in agroforestry. Postdocs on quarry restoration for biodiversity and on resource allocation in small African farms helped broaden things further, and I began to develop a focus on the design of simulation models for agro-ecological systems.

I am responsible for an overall CEH objective to "develop model frameworks to predict future impact of environmental drivers and their interactions at local, regional and global scales including the quantification of uncertainty". My current work focuses on predicting changes in ecosystems resulting from nitrogen pollution, using species niche models and dynamic models of soil and vegetation. I manage available nitrogen measurements in the UK Countryside Survey. I provide advice to UK Government bodies on limiting air pollution damage to ecosystems, within policy processes such as the UNECE – CLRTAP convention.