Martin is 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.His current interests are centred on developing methods to capture the value (both in monetary and non-monetary terms) of catchments, ecosystems and natural environments.
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 his current lectureship at the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds he held a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen. Between 2006 and 2011, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield. Initially he 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, his focus shifted to the EPSRC-funded Sustainable Urban Environments project “UrbanRivers and Sustainable Living Agendas”. Both represented quite a shift from his 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.