Email Address: [email protected]
Marcus is fascinated by the human-nature interface and specialises in social-ecological systems thinking. His many research interests include: land use and land-use change, resilience thinking and societal transitioning, collaborative management and planning, urban and rural governance. Notable examples of his research include the contentious policy issues of: biomass/bioenergy land use policies and implications, afforestation policies and acidification processes, field boundaries and agri-environmental change, resource use and after-use policies, rewilding, GM crops and biodiversity, marine and coastal governance, (cultural) ecosystem services, and well-being. In recent years Marcus has written extensively on contested issues such as novel ecosystems and nature-based solutions. Novel ecosystems are unmanaged wild areas that cannot be restored to their original ecological status, especially novel ecosystems in urban areas. Though relatively new, novel ecosystem theory challenges our fundamental relationships with ‘new’ nature, but there has never been any engagement with communities on the implications of the novel ecosystems around them. Marcus has joined ADAPT having been awarded European Research Council Consolidator grant for NovelEco. NovelEco is a citizen science project that will measure for the first time the societal attitudes to urban wild spaces by asking citizens to study them. It will engage citizens in co-creating an online instrument to enable ecological data collection within urban novel ecosystems. During data collection the citizen scientists will also record their attitudes to novel ecosystems and reveal whether engagement with them alters their values and perhaps even their environmental behaviour. Comparing these data with the wider community this project will be the first to quantify the social and ecological values of novel ecosystems. In ADAPT, Marcus hopes that it will be possible to devise AI mechanisms for measuring environmental behavioural change.
