It’s an absolute joy and privilege to be here at The Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside. My main role will be to drive forward a nature recovery strategy to ensure our work generates the best outcomes for nature, and to support our fantastic teams to do what they do best – restore our precious peat, create new partnerships and projects to drive nature restoration, and protect after our fantastic reserves. 

I joined the Trust in June after four years at Defra, where I set up a scheme to create wetlands to protect designated sites from nutrient pollution, before working as Head of Strategy on the Land Use Framework, and then Head of Farming, Environment and Planning for the spending review.

Prior to that I had 10+ years in academia, completing a PhD in frog conservation where I spent about three months a year in the rainforests of Central and South America. I then conducted a postdoc in South Africa on amphibian chytrid fungus, again with plenty of field work in reserves and wilderness areas, including the incredible Drakensberg Mountains of Lesotho. I then returned to the UK as a Lecturer in Global Ecology and Conservation at the University of Salford, conducting research on a broad range of organisms from black rhino and wild ponies, to sponges, ash trees and soil!  

Since joining, it has been brilliant getting to know the Trust and all our wonderful nature reserves. Lunt Meadows feels strangely reminiscent of reserves in South Africa. Elephants roamed the north of England only 100,000 years ago or so, and they wouldn’t look too out of place in the plains of North Merseyside! 

I have also loved getting to know the exciting range of peat projects we have – from the lowland carbon farm in Winmarleigh, to the hugely ambitious Landscape Recovery Scheme in West Pennine Moors, to the innovative wetter farming trials to learn how to sow, grow and harvest diverse crops in reclaimed peat soils in a way that maximises carbon capture. These kind of large-scale restoration and diverse approaches to how we use our land are the types of innovation we need to drive nature restoration at scale. 

It’s also inspiring to see the broad range of partnerships we either lead or support. As an extraordinary example of partnerships, I was lucky to represent the Trust at the opening of our newly designated Holcroft, Risley and Chat Moss National Nature Reserve . The NNR represents 15 years of partnership working between multiple organisations including Lancashire Wildlife Trust, Natural England, Cheshire Wildlife Trust, Forestry England, Warrington Borough Council, Wigan Council and Woodland Trust Partnership working is the backbone to nature recovery, and without it we won’t achieve our cornerstone ambitions at the Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside: to protect 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030, and to support 1 in 4 people to take action for nature.