Andrew Folkard

I work primarily in aquatic environments where my main interest is in bio-physical interactions between hydrodynamics and ecosystem functioning, particularly aquatic plants and benthic fauna such as shellfish. I'm particularly interested in ecosystems that are in transition - either growing or decaying - which are usually spatially heterogeneous and fragmented, as these have particularly rich interactions with physical, landscape-changing processes and biogeochemical cycles. I have worked most on seagrasses, mangroves, vegetation in lakes and rivers and mussel beds, and on issues from global scale distribution patterns to individual plant scale processes. I have more recently developed work on the environmental impacts of aquatic renewable energy distributions, often using understanding derived from plant-flow interactions to inform this.