OpenLearn Profile

Nadia Richman

Nadia Richman

School of Environment, Earth and Ecosystem Sciences

Professional biography

Nadia is a conservation scientist whose research interests broadly centres around monitoring methods. She is based part-time at The Open University, helping to develop the citizen science platform Treezilla, and also within the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) research group at the University College London (UCL) where she explores the utility of citizen science for addressing environmental data gaps.

Nadia loves research that involves working within large interdisciplinary groups and particularly projects with a strong emphasis on public policy outputs. Within her career she's worked as a research fellow within the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology; coordinated large-scale, multi-partner projects such as the European H2020-funded Doing It Together Science (DITOS) project based at UCL (a project involving 11 European partners that aimed to increase European engagement with citizen science), and the Sampled Red List Index project at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) (a project focused on broadening the taxonomic coverage of The IUCN Red List in order to better represent biodiversity); and, as a consultant for the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

Research interests

Nadia's PhD research was an exploration of methods for monitoring the poorly-known Ganges River dolphin in Bangladesh, with a specific focus on local informant data. She has since developed the theme of participatory monitoring method research and am now supporting the development of the citizen science platform Treezilla (the world’s largest database of tree survey data). As part of this project, she was helping to develop key learning tools for citizen scientists, as well as aiding the development of a common standard for urban tree data collection. 

Her UCL-based research, has involved a study of the environmental data gaps in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and the potential for citizen science to both address some of these data gaps as well as supporting the social legacy of the park. Nadia is also helping to develop training material for phase two of the NERC Engaging Environments programme (NERC Community for Engaging Environments). She is also the Co-Investigator on the UKRI-funded ‘Identifying synergies between citizen science and Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) in the Cairngorms National Park’ project which is a pilot study exploring the potential for citizen science to support rewilding research.