Profile

I think my love of geography and geology started when I was pretty young. I remember going on holidays with my family and was always collecting stones and loved fossil hunting. I watched the original Jurassic Park Movie (1993 when I was 11!) and was in awe at the size and the ferocious nature of dinosaurs. I think at secondary stage school age, I lost my way a bit but thankfully, I had a great geography teacher that helped to keep it interesting. I gained Chartered Geographer status in 2023 with a specialism in Geographical Information Systems (GIS)

A bit more about me now is that I love gaming, walking my two dogs, watching Netflix (loving the K-Dramas at the minute) and riding my bike. I have a Nintendo switch that I take pretty much everywhere, I play Animal Crossing, Zelda, Disney Dream light Valley, I think you could say I am a cosy gamer.

I think I am a big kid at heart, I love cute stuff, have lots of piercings (Septum, medusa, 4 different ear piercings) and lots of tattoos. My kids think I am embarrassing but I think I am pretty cool, haha

I am currently riding the wave of biodiversity net gain (BNG) and the world of spatial data in ecology🌱, working for a company called Environment Bank. BNG is now a legal requirement (you have to do it!) when new things are built, the people building them have to make sure that the natural habitats are left in a measurably better state than before🌻. We create habitat banks, to restore and protect biodiversity. As a Geospatial Analyst I use my skills to aid in digital data capture, visualisation and data management in GIS.

Before this, I worked at the British Geological Survey for 18 years,  as a geoscientist (kind of a geologist but with a bit more geography) with a particular expertise in digital field mapping and 3D geological modelling. I am also very interested in the geological time period called the Quaternary, this is when the last ice age was🥶.

I currently work at home 🏡(living the dream!) so a typical day is often me getting my children off to school, getting a cup of tea and logging in to my laptop to see what is on the cards for that day.

Depending on what is going on at the time, I spend quite a lot of time using GIS software, mainly some software called ESRI ArcGIS Pro and also an open source GIS software called QGIS (check it out, it can be downloaded for free). Creating maps for planned habitat banks. Mapping out areas of meadows, woodlands, ponds and trees🌳.

When I was a geologist, I got to spend most of my time outside mapping and looking at rocks, digging holes and getting rained on! but I now like being warm indoors. In my current role, I sometimes get to go out and visit our habitat banks to collect data, so it is now great to get the best of both worlds.