The biodiversity hiding in plain sight

Your research focuses on biodiversity and sustainability; are you optimistic about it?

I tend to look for solutions, opportunities, and the upside, so yes. We hear the world is full of doom and gloom and the news about biodiversity loss and climate change is grim, but we can also look for ways to reconnect with nature and seek out opportunities around us to support biodiversity and work with nature for practical solutions and social and cultural benefit.

What’s keeping you busy at the moment in research?

I lead a project called NovelEco, asking people across Europe about their attitudes to urban wild spaces. Many man-made environments, such as cities, can harbour nature — plants can grow in derelict lots or on old walls, and unused patches of land can grow wild and support plants, animals and micro-organisms. We are finding out people’s attitudes and ideas about those wild spaces. We have an online survey on our website (noveleco.eu) for anyone who is interested.

What kinds of questions are you asking in the project?

Lots of interesting things, including how people can react differently to plants depending on how we think about them —why are we so against weeds, they are just successful plants. And even if a plant is considered a weed if it looks pretty or has a nice colour in the flower, do we tend to accept it more?

We are asking citizens in Europe to log the biodiversity around them and tell us what they do and don’t like. And we are looking at how indigenous peoples in different parts of the world interact with plants in the spaces around them.

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What would you like to inspire through the work?

I’d like to help reconnect people with nature. I think one of the big issues in sustainability is this schism where people feel that nature is something separate. It’s not. We are part of nature, and we depend on it for our lives and livelihoods.

NovelEco is funded through a prestigious European Research Council grant — what’s your advice for achieving funding success?

Well, it was not an overnight success, it took eight years of applying for funding. But I think you just need to keep going. If your funding application is rejected, you commiserate but then pick yourself up and really look at the feedback and use that to do a better application next time.

Over the years I have also helped funding agencies by being a reviewer, and I think this also helps you to refine your own grant applications over time.

What other question would you like to research?

When I was a child on holiday with my family in Carraroe in Galway, a local farmer showed me how to build dry stone walls and I have been fascinated with them ever since. I’ve done some research on how hedgerows and dry stone walls together act as important boundaries for species in Ireland, and I’d love to develop this, to explore what grows in and around dry stone walls here.

We have so many of them, and they provide an important space for plants, but we don’t really have a good handle on what grows on them in different parts of the country.

And how do you take a break?

I love chatting with colleagues and reading textbooks, which are all related to work of course but I really enjoy it. I have a grandson and I love spending time with him, he sometimes comes into the office with me. I’m a big rugby fan too. Apart from that I spend my spare time trying to keep the house and bike from falling apart.