Victoria J Burton

I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum, London. My main research interest is in how soil and leaf-litter invertebrate communities respond to human impacts, particularly in forest and urban ecosystems. I am interested in data synthesis and in the use of citizen and community science approaches in environmental research. 

My PhD at Imperial College London and the Museum finished in 2020 and focused on the effect of land use change on soil biodiversity. My work combined new data collection, data from a citizen science project – Earthworm Watch – which I developed, and analysis of existing data re-purposed from literature as part of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial System) project. 

My role in Excalibur is to develop a provisional model of how soil biodiversity responds to different management methods and how this is affected by environmental conditions such as soil type and geography. 

This will feed into a decision-support system (DSS) to help growers make more biodiversity-friendly management choices. My models include data synthesised from previous studies by collaborators and from systematic literature searches, in addition to open-source data on environmental variables. These models will then be challenged and validated with data from the Excalibur field trials.