School of Earth and Environment

Martin Dallimer Dr Martin Dallimer

Associate Professor in Environmental Change

Telephone number: +44(0) 113 34 33036
Email address: M.Dallimer@leeds.ac.uk
Room: 10.105
Twitter: @MartinDallimer

Biography

I am interested in applying and integrating research techniques from across different disciplines to better understand the sustainable management of natural environments, biodiversity and ecosystems in a human-dominated world.

Current interests are centred on developing methods to capture the value (both in monetary and non-monetary terms) of catchments, ecosystems and natural environments.

My work to date has focussed on (i) using economic valuation techniques to determine whether people's preferences for biodiversity and ecosystem service provision varies across international boundaries; (ii) urban ecosystems and human-wildlife interactions (e.g. the role that biodiversity plays as a source of well-being in urban green spaces; using stated preference techniques to value urban biodiversity); (iii) land-use change/management (e.g. small islands, urbanisation, upland agro-ecosystems); and (iv) the management of mobile species, such as migratory pests in Africa, or birds of conservation concern in the UK.

Prior to starting my current lectureship at the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds I held a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen. Between 2006 and 2011, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield. Initially I worked on the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) project “A Landscape-Scale Analysis of the Sustainability of the Hill Farming Economy on Upland Landscapes and Biodiversity”. From 2009, my focus shifted to the EPSRC-funded Sustainable Urban Environments project “UrbanRivers and Sustainable Living Agendas”. Both represented quite a shift from my NERC-CASE funded PhD “Understanding Migration Patterns of the Red-Billed Quelea in Southern Africa”, which centred on using molecular ecology and behavioural techniques and was based at the University of Edinburgh between 1997 and 2001.

Projects

Advancing knowledge on the costs, benefits, trade-offs of sustainable land management in Western and Northern Kenya. Funded by GIZ, the German government development agency, this project will apply the Economics of Land Degradation "6+1" methodology to assessing the costs and benefits of sustainable land management practices for smallholder farmers.

ADVENT: Addressing the value of energy and nature together. As part of the UKERC funded consortium we are investigating the public preference barriers to increased uptake of renewable and unconventional energy sources in the UK landscape.

Balancing the impact of city infrastructure engineering on natural systems using robots. My role in this EPSRC Grand Challenge research programme is to explore how changes in pollution (noise, air, light) might impact biodiversity and urban ecosystem function.

My Marie Curie Fellowship (2011-2013) TREUEVALUE - TRans-national EUropean Ecosystem VALUEs of grasslands was based at the Department of Food and Resource Economics (IFRO) and the Center for Macroecology, Climate and Evolution (CMEC) at the University of Copenhagen.

I have re-started my interest in the suite of migratory pests in Africa through some currently small-scale work on the red-billed quelea. We have bigger things planned!

I have an ongoing research interest in biodiversity conservation on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. Currently I am a supervisor on an FCT-Portugal post-doctoral fellowship to Ricardo Lima who is working on a project aiming to disentangle the impact of multiple forms of anthropogenic disturbance on the islands’ biodiversity.

Finally, I have been running a project in Zimbabwe, where we are examining how recent changes in farming practice and land ownership have impacted upon avian communities and natural resources. This work has been supported by a Rufford Foundation Small Grant and local land owners.

Research Interests

Capturing the benefits that peopel gain from the natural world, using monetary and non-monetary assessments of value

Urbanisation & urban ecosystems

Human-wildlife interactions

The use of stated preference techniques for valuing biodiversity & ecosystem services

Non-monetary approaches to quantifying preferences for, and well-being gains from, biodiversity & the natural world

Agriculture, land management & land use change

Animal movement & migration

Publications