Research interests

I am fascinated by biodiversity, particularly the processes that shape ecological communities and the consequences of global environmental change. My research focuses on understanding how multiple stressors, including hydrological extremes, may affect biodiversity across spatial and temporal scales, and how these impacts will continue to unfold in the future.

I am particularly interested in three levels: (i) species distributions, (ii) community interactions and (iii) ecosystem functioning. Within this framework, I investigate the mechanisms that govern biodiversity responses to environmental variability and disturbance, with a strong emphasis on hydrological dynamics such as floods, droughts and flow variability. These hydrological extremes are increasingly important drivers of ecological change, shaping habitat availability, connectivity and species persistence in freshwater systems.

To address these questions, I use a multi-taxon approach using environmental DNA (eDNA), combined with traditional ecological methods. This allows me to capture biodiversity across trophic levels and construct interaction networks across the ecosystem. In doing so, I aim to understand how changes at one trophic level, driven by anthropogenic pressures and hydrological variability, propagates through ecosystems and ultimately influence ecosystem functioning.

I believe that addressing complex challenges such as biodiversity loss and climate change requires transdisciplinary approaches that integrate hydrology, ecology, and molecular tools. Collaboration across disciplines is essential to fully understand these coupled human–natural systems and to develop effective strategies for their conservation and management.

Environmental DNA:

By collecting eDNA samples we are able to discover biodiversity on an unprecedented scale:

1. Scalability - routine biomonitoring is key for timely and accurate understanding of an ecosystem. I am involved in a number of research projects developing species-specific methods (for invasive alien species) and whole community approaches (known as metabarcoding) for routine biomonitoring of macroinvertebrates (See Blackman et al. 2018; 2020a; 2020b; 2024)

2. Reassess - gathering “complete” biodiversity by reassessing eDNA samples for multiple taxonomic groups we gain a holistic view of the ecosystem previously unseen (Altermatt et al. 2020; Blackman et al. 2022).

3. Non-invasive conservation - Using eDNA allows us to collect biodiversity information allows us to conserve rare/protected species which would have been harmed with previous monitoring efforts (See Blackman et al. 2021).

Hydrological shifts:

Global weather patterns are changing. This disruption can cause unseasonal intense periods of rainfall and flooding alongside an increase in intermittent ephemeral waterbodies. In my research, I specifically want to address: how climate change-induced alterations to hydrology will influence river ecosystems. how this impacts biodiversity and the ecosystem as a whole. This will allow further exploration of species adaptation via their resistance and resilience capabilities. This area of research will establish how different trophic levels (e.g., microbes, macrophytes and macroinvertebrates) are able to either resist or their resilience to recover after suffering the disturbance. In a recent review, we proposed using genomic tools to explore these adaptations (available here), we will be able to identify key adaptations providing insight into community interactions and the functional traits of ecologically important taxa within these dynamics systems.

Macrophytes:

Aquatic plants are an important part of the aquatic ecosystem and form the base of the ecosystem, but are often overlooked. Aquatic plants oxygenate the water and provide cover, food and habitat for wildlife within the aquatic ecosystem. There is huge potential to understand how systems are adapting to change by focusing on the plants and how anthropogenic pressures are shaping how this group persists, specifically addressing: how variation in primary production, due to climate change, has a cascading effect on higher trophic levels.

Biomonitoring:

Having been a freshwater ecologist for the UK Environment Agency for many years, I am aware of the importance of effective biomonitoring schemes for different Biological Quality Elements (BQEs). Since developing methods using environmental and bulk DNA to examine groups such as macroinvertebrates and fish, I now aim to utilise the full potential of these molecular tools to aid the conservation of aquatic systems. Currently, I am leading a European wide project carrying out a series of ring test experiments to compare morphological identification and bulk DNA samples. This experiment stems from our work published here.