Dr. Fiona M Seaton

Fiona is a quantitative ecologist based in the Land Use group in Lancaster. She uses a variety of statistical techniques to evaluate state and change of ecological properties ranging from species distributions to soil acidity. Her recent work includes developing statistical tools for spatio-temporally explicit data integration for species distribution models, building an R package for joint species distribution modelling and analysing the relationships between plant communities and soil properties from national field survey data.

This analysis of plant and soil dynamics from national monitoring schemes includes evaluating the response of woodland flora to ash dieback and other drivers of woodland change across the last 50 years as part of the Bunce woodland survey, analysis of plant response to soil pH and atmospheric deposition across the UK over forty years as part of the Countryside Survey and UK-SCAPE, and the soil microbial response to pasture farming systems as part of the SEEGSLIP project.

Fiona obtained her PhD in soil ecology at UKCEH Bangor and Bangor University where she looked at the relationships between soil structure, biodiversity and health. Most of this work was using data from the field survey within Glastir Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (GMEP) which surveyed sites across Wales for a wide variety of properties.