Dr Lydia Cole

Dr Lydia Cole

Having completed her DPhil thesis in Spring 2013, Lydia worked for a year as a post doctoral researcher, continuing her work in the Department of Zoology, and doing projects with members of the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and Plant Sciences Department. She also taught undergraduate Biological Sciences in her role as Stipendiary Lecturer at St Hugh’s College, from October 2012 to 2013. Prior to her DPhil in 2008, she completed a MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at the School of Geography and the Environment. As part of her Masters’ research project, she investigated human-wildlife conflict around Kaziranga National Park in Assam, northeast India, assisted by a grant from the Tropical Agriculture Award Fund (TAAF). She obtained a BA in Natural Sciences, graduating from the Plant Sciences Department at the University of Cambridge in 2006, where she received a Senior Scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Since leaving Oxford, Lydia spent four and a half years with Rezatec working as their in-house ecologist, and responsible for field data collection exercises.  She worked on projects ranging from developing a web-based geospatial tool for monitoring the integrity of peatlands in the UK, Malaysia and Indonesia, to characterising England’s agricultural landscape.  Subsequent to this, she spent 10 months as a Knowledge Exchange Assistant and Landscape Analyst at the University of Liverpool, developing Condatis and trialing it in a tropical landscape setting.  She is now at the University of St Andrews, working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Ecology on a Leverhulme Trust funded project: “Valuing intact tropical peatlands – an interdisciplinary perspective“, with members of the Tropical Wetlands Consortium.

Selected Publications

Google scholar page

Lydia ES Cole, Katherine J Willis, Shonil A Bhagwat, The future of Southeast Asia's tropical peatlands: Local and global perspectives, Anthropocene, 34 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2021.100292

Seddon, Alistair WR, L. E. Cole, J. Morris, M. S. Fletcher, and K. J. Willis. "EcoRe3-Resistance, Recovery and Resilience of Long-term Ecological Systems." Past Global Change Magazine 24 (2016): 75.

Wijedasa, L. S. , Jauhiainen, J. , Könönen, M. , Lampela, M. , Vasander, H. , Leblanc, M. C. , Evers, S. , Smith, T. E. L. , Yule, C. M. , Varkkey, H. , Lupascu, M. , Parish, F. , Singleton, I. , Clements, G. R. , Aziz, S. A. , Harrison, M. E. , Cheyne, S. , Anshari, G. Z. , Meijaard, E. , Goldstein, J. E., Cole, L. E. S., & 117 others (2017) Denial of long-term issues with agriculture on tropical peatlands will have devastating consequences. Global Change Biology, 23(3): 977-982. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13516

Kelly, T. J., Lawson, I. T. & Cole, L. E. S. (2018) PeatEncyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, p. 1197-1200 4 p. (Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series)