Senior Ecologist, Ecosystem Services

About Oyster Heaven

Oyster Heaven restores marine ecosystems by helping to rebuild oyster reefs at scale. Our 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.

About the role

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.

What will you do?

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 waterbodies, 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, NatureScot, 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 removal and habitat gain that are transparent, auditable and able to survive third-party verification.

You then make that work usable: regulator briefings, client-facing quantifications and funding applications, alongside peer-reviewed publication and conference presentation. You give our commercial colleagues the scientific substance behind their proposals and you are willing to defend it with the counterparty. Once the nutrient and compensation case stands, you take the same route for the other services restored reef delivers, starting with food provisioning and coastal protection. The role involves travel across the UK and to the Netherlands, and fieldwork including small-boat and intertidal work.

About you

You hold a PhD in marine ecology, biogeochemistry, oceanography, environmental science or a closely related field, and you have led research programmes independently rather than only executing them. Equivalent standing from consultancy, an agency, an NGO or industry is as welcome as an academic route. You have designed, commissioned and managed contracted research or monitoring, including writing technical specifications and holding contractors to quality. You know UK environmental regulation and policy as it applies to marine and coastal development, habitat compensation and nutrient management, including how the four national regimes diverge, or you bring a transferable regulatory context and a credible plan to get up to speed quickly. You have a peer-reviewed publication record, you can explain technical work to non-specialists, and you can hold a position under challenge. You are comfortable with autonomy in a small organisation where the scope of a problem is set by whoever picks it up.

The methods we need you to have used yourself

• Benthic chamber incubations. Deploying and interpreting benthic chambers or core incubations, in situ and in the laboratory.

• Isotope work. Stable isotope approaches to nutrient cycling, for example isotope pairing for denitrification, ¹⁵N tracer additions or natural abundance δ¹⁵N work.

• Nutrient fluxes in marine systems. Nitrogen and phosphorus fluxes across the sediment-water interface and within the water column, including coupled nitrification and denitrification, biodeposition, assimilation and burial in tissue and shell, remineralisation, and the drivers behind them.

• The measurement toolkit. Nutrient autoanalysis, membrane inlet mass spectrometry, gas chromatography, oxygen and pH optodes and in situ sensors, with the calibration, QA/QC and uncertainty accounting that make a number defensible, and the judgement to know when in situ measurement is essential.

• Hydrodynamic and water quality modelling. Enough command of these models to interrogate a modeller’s assumptions, specify what a model has to deliver, judge whether its outputs support a mitigation claim and explain them to a regulator. Familiarity with the model families used in UK estuarine and coastal assessment is expected.

Strong pluses: quantifying denitrification rates by N₂/Ar via MIMS or by isotope pairing; bivalve ecology, shellfish restoration or shellfish aquaculture; a network among UK statutory bodies, water companies or catchment partnerships; natural capital accounting or credit and code-based verification schemes; R or Python; grant capture; a UK right to work, driving licence and boat or offshore safety certification.  

What we offer

Ownership of the workstream that determines whether large-scale marine restoration becomes commercially and legally viable in the UK, with a direct line from your science to hectares of reef in the water. A senior position with real autonomy in a small, technically serious team, collaboration with leading research institutes across Europe, and a clear trajectory: nitrogen first, then the wider service portfolio, with scope to grow the function and the team as it broadens.