Environmental Biology

Research in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences covers three main research themes ; earth and planetary science, environment and society, and life on earth.

Environmental biology research seeks to understand how biological systems, comprising plants, animals and microorganisms, evolve, function and interact. We wish to understand how organisms respond and adapt to environmental changes that may be the result of natural perturbations or increasingly due to anthropogenic impacts that result in local stresses but also in global climate change.

Our research operates at the widest possible range of scales from the level of the genome through to ecosystems and the global environment, and using a wide range of computational, laboratory and field-based techniques from biomolecular approaches to population biology.

Research areas include conservation biology, biodiversity, animal behaviour, ecosystem interactions, evolutionary mechanisms, anthropogenic impacts to the environment, water pollution and bioremediation, ecotoxicology, palaeobiology, population genetics, plant and soil ecology, food security and sustainable agriculture.

Visit our research projects page to browse our range of currently available projects.