Senior Ecologist, Ecosystem Services

As Senior Ecologist, Ecosystem Services, you build the scientific case that gets restored oyster reef recognised across the UK as a valid nutrient mitigation and habitat compensation measure. Denitrification is where the evidence has to be strongest, and where you start. You are a working scientist who is equally comfortable in front of a regulator.

Full-time
· UK-based, with regular travel to our Rotterdam office

Oyster Heaven restores marine ecosystems by helping to rebuild oyster reefs  patented Mother Reef makes nature restoration affordable, effective, and globally scalable. We work with companies, scientists, governments, educational institutions, and local fishing communities. Restored reef filters water, cycles nitrogen, provides nursery function for fish and shellfish and stabilises sediment. Those functions have measurable value to regulators, water companies, developers and coastal communities, but only if the evidence behind them holds up under scrutiny.

This role sits where the science meets the law. Two outcomes define success: that oyster habitat restoration is accepted by UK authorities as a valid nutrient mitigation measure, and as a valid habitat compensation measure. Getting there means assembling the underlying science, much of it on denitrification and nutrient removal, across internal monitoring, contracted studies and academic partnerships, and translating it into the language regulators, statutory advisors and policy makers use.

The remit is UK-wide:
England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each have their own statutory advisors, regulators and instruments, and a case that works in only one of them is not the case we need. You own the work end to end, designing and running your own studies, commissioning what you do not run yourself, and being the person in the room when the evidence is questioned.

Nitrogen is where we start, because that is where regulatory and commercial demand is sharpest.

You establish what evidence each framework demands, where ours falls short, and you run the programme that closes the gap. Some frameworks reach across the UK:
Habitats Regulations Assessment and compensatory measures, marine licensing, Water Framework Directive objectives for transitional and coastal water bodies, and the emerging marine natural capital codes. Others are nation-specific, and knowing which is which is part of the job: nutrient neutrality and Marine Net Gain in England, phosphorus targets for riverine SACs in Wales, and the water industry investment routes, WINEP, the National Environment Programme and the SEPA and Scottish Water route.

You build the working relationships with the bodies that determine whether restoration counts:
Natural England, Natural Resources Wales, Nature Scot, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency within DAERA, the Environment Agency, SEPA, the Marine Management Organisation, the Scottish Government’s Marine Directorate, JNCC and Defra. You engage the water companies, catchment partnerships, planning authorities and developers looking for mitigation and compensation solutions, represent us in working groups and consultations, and write the briefings and position papers.

The science is yours to own, with denitrification at the centre of it. You act as industry supervisor on our PhD project with NIOZ on denitrification, shaping the research questions so they serve both fundamental and applied ends. You take scientific ownership of the nutrient-relevant parts of our monitoring programmes across our restoration sites: design, QA, data management, interpretation and reporting.

You stand up an applied measurement capability that produces defensible site-level nutrient removal figures on commercially useful timescales. And you track the international literature on oyster and nitrogen interactions in restoration as well as aquaculture, including the North American nutrient credit precedents, and translate it into implications for our strategy.

You run field and laboratory work yourself where that is fastest: benthic chamber incubations, sediment and water sampling, nutrient and gas flux measurement, and the analysis that follows. Where the work sits better elsewhere, you scope, tender, contract and manage it, holding contractors to quality and integrating what comes back into one coherent evidence base. You build the academic collaborations that give us specialist analytical capability, and you develop methods for quantifying nutrient…