I am an environmental scientist with wide-ranging experience especially in the area of aquatic ecology. I been involved with biological monitoring of rivers for over 30 years, in the west of Ireland in particular, and I have clocked up over 10,000 individual assessments based on Q-Values for macroinvertebrates.

I managed the national river and lake monitoring programme for a number of years while working for the Environmental Protection Agency and was the regionial manager at the EPA's Castlebar Inspectorate for a number of years.

I was actively involved in the establishment of national standards for nutrients in rivers - heading up the research that underpins the Phosphorus Regulations of 1998; also SI 272 of 2009 that sets the standards for the Water Framework Directive in Ireland. The nutrient standards are underpinned by empirical statistical analyses of biology v chemistry interactions and extensive mathematical modelling of the impact of eutrophication on rivers undertaken in the 1980s.

I devised the Small Streams Risk Score (SSRS) in association with the former Western River Basin District. Over the 2017-2021 period I have given SSRS courses for some 120 local authority and consultancy staff - 20 courses at the Water Services National Training Group Centres at Castlebar, Roscrea, Stranorlar and Ballincollig. The most recent of these being four courses delivered at the Stranorlar and Roscrea training centres in April/May 2019 and one in October 2021 at the Stranorlar centre.

I was actively involved in a number of catchment management initiatives including Lough Conn and Lough Mask here in the west of Ireland. The Lough Conn work first highlighted the excess losses of phosphorus to water from Irish soils in the intensively farmed areas.

I carried out research in Remote Sensing of lake water quality, obtaining a Master's Degree in Experimental Physics in the late 1980s and was involved in a number of EU-funded research projects on marine remote sensing. These projects included a flight on a NASA aircraft over the North Atlantic and a flight over the Aegean in Greece detecting marine chlorophyll.

Living in County Mayo in the West of Ireland, I continue to provide expertise in the above areas - active monitoring, data analytics, production of research reports on particular topics of interest and environmental datasets. In 2015-2022 I have also been actively involved in modelling of estuarine waters including Cork Harbour, The Liffey Estuary and Dublin Bay, The Suir Estuary and Waterford Harbour.

I have been a member of the steering committees for a number of research projects funded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the 2019-2022 period I have been involved with a number of 'citizen science' projects aimed at getting local communities involved with their local water bodies - in Louth, Longford, Roscommon, Mayo & Monaghan