Richard has spent most of his academic career working on inter-disciplinary research. During the course of which he has aquired a basic working knowledge of a range skills in the quantitative description of the environment including a smattering of economics, ecology, pollution, hydrology, engineering, statistics (including such things as Dempster-Shafer Theory of evidence and text-mining), computer programming and a little bit more on mapping, especially land cover (including the semantics and ontologies of categories and the practicalities of mapping whole countries). Such diverse interests pose a problem when asked to define a specialism, but mostly frequently he describes himself as a statistian. Richard's main research preoccupations for the next few years are to find out if it is possible to lead a comfortable "zero-carbon" lifestyle in Sierra Leone and to test many of the text-book solutions to restoring degraded land in the humid tropics.
Dr Richard Wadsworth
