Dr Pia Benaud

About me: I am an environmental scientist interested in the restoration of degraded ecosystems, with a particular focus on peatlands. I quantify how restoration affects ecosystem structure and function, producing evidence on how interventions support nature recovery, resilience, and the delivery of ecosystem services such as flow regulation, water quality and carbon storage. I use this knowledge to help build support for landscape restoration and the use of Nature-based Solutions, ensuring that the scientific evidence I produce is relevant and accessible beyond academia.

I take an interdisciplinary approach to my research, combining field-based monitoring and laboratory analysis with proximal and remote sensing technologies. I use open source methods, particularly R programming, to perform data and geospatial analysis, applying statistical and machine learning techniques to deliver an understanding of environmental change across space and time. I actively engage with practitioners, regulators, and policymakers to design research questions, exchange knowledge, and identify opportunities to apply research findings to restoration practice and policy decisions.

I am currently conducting research in support of the South West Peatland Partnership's peatland restoration efforts. We combinine high temporal resolution field measurements of hydrology and carbon fluxes with remote and proximally sensing data, to build an understanding of trajectories of change following peatland restoration and help guide best practice. Alongside this role I am a Research Fellow in Peatland Monitoring Data at the University of Leeds. 

Broad research interests: ecosystem structure:function; peatlands; ecohydrology; water quality; carbon; nature recovery; habitat mapping; natural flood management; environmental change detection; landscape restoration; environmental policy; nature-based solutions; ecosystem services; remote sensing; soil erosion; drones; LiDAR