Hello, this is Rob Nunny. Thanks for looking me up. This simple webpage will tell you a little bit about what I do, my views on certain work issues, and maybe why we should talk.

Contact Rob

 

BACKGROUND

My professional interests lie in the area of oceanography, aquatic sedimentology and marine habitat.  I trade as Ambios Environmental Consultants (EC) Ltd , a company set up in 1993, and before that I operated (since 1979) as Sea Sediments. My passion is the coastal environment, the interaction between the land and the sea, coastal populations and marine ecosystems. I am, above all else, a practical person. My work mission is to use my knowledge and practicality to bring clarity, sanity and insight to coastal management.  You can download my short CV (.pdf) here.

NETWORK

I find myself connected to a stimulating network of friends, clients, regulators, NGOs and volunteers all with interests that intertwine with my own... valuing nature above all else but recognising our need to intrude into her realms from time to time for some balanced benefit to mankind. My philosophy is to undertake commercial work, charging commensurately and ensuring that best practical environmental options are followed by my clients, and also to work charitably, making no or little charge, to encourage grass-roots community development sympathetic with conservation principles, worldwide. The latter activities I undertake through Ambios Ltd (a not-for-profit company of which I am a founder director) and the igoMANGO Trust, a charity that encourages good volunteering principles in the environmental context (have a look at www.igomango.com).

RISK MANAGEMENT

As essentially a one-man-band with a niche expertise, my clients appreciate the straightforward, well-informed scientifically-based advice I can give. I have never identified a need for Professional Indemnity Insurance, which some of my corporate clients have found inconvenient to deal with, but they have always found ways around it as it the only basis on which I am prepared to collaborate. I understand the need for PI insurance cover when depending on the skills and integrity of employees, however I work as an individual, with forty years of practice behind me.  Practice doesn’t always guarantee perfection, I know, but my clients are always informed of the potential repercussions of taking my advice, and need to make their own decisions about managing the risks involved.

FIELD INVESTIGATIONS

I believe in informed decision making. Field data cannot be replaced as the basic input to any assessment of natural processes. I will not pronounce upon an environmental issue without having seen that environment and ensuring adequate data are available for my analyses. To this end, when necessary, I will walk mudflats or go to sea to acquire my own high quality data. I have a wide experience of:

• Acoustic methods (echo-sounding, side-scan, AGDS, sub-bottom profiling). 
• Grabbing and coring (I posses Smith McIntyre and van-Veen grabs and a Kasten corer)
• In situ instantaneous and long-term process monitoring (currents, shear stress,  salinity/temperature/turbidity, DO)

LABORATORY ANALYSES

Working with sediment samples is a form of forensic science. In the right hands a handful of mud can tell a lot about benthic habitat conditions and historical events. I run my own sediments laboratory, which supports my own investigations and also offers a service to the wider ocean community (clients include CEFAS, Natural England and SNH). We offer:

• Heavy mineral separation/identification (natural tracers)
• Basic mineral properties (visual identification of mineralogy/organic detritus, density determinations).
• Sediment structure (peels of core faces)
• Particle size analysis (PSA) based on wet and dry sieving and sedimentation methods
• Specialist PSA to provide accurate description of gravel sediments (analysis of entire Hamon grab samples)
• Identical subsample generation (<63um) for organic matter (CN) and contaminant analyses.

Our PSA analysis is competitively priced (£45 per sample) and includes Gradistat analysis and camera images of key sediment fractions under the microscope.

MODELLING

Mathematical hydrodynamic models offer a useful approach to visualising spatial variation in natural conditions, and uniquely provide the opportunity to scenario aspects of future changed conditions, in particular enabling an understanding of the key parameters that change will be sensitive to. To this end I will consider model results as one part of my analyses of natural conditions, running my own or commissioning a suitable model type. However I will never consider mathematical model output in isolation, I always insist that a good conceptual model of the natural system under consideration is essential to provide a credibility check. I am also reluctant to seriously consider mathematically-based predictions of complex simulations of sediment transport. The factors controlling these processes are simply too complex to be reliably simulated by the present generation of models. I find over-reliance upon such output by inexperienced practitioners a depressing aspect of today’s environmental regulatory system.

Projects

Here is an overview of some of my current projects.

• Monitoring Sediment Transport Processes, mouth of the Congo River, Angola
  My client here is the Angola Liquid Natural Gas consortium. This group, involving the major oil companies of the world, is building a pipeline network to bring ashore all the gas that is currently being flared to waste around the enormous offshore Angola oilfield. A processing plant (which may ultimately be the largest in the world) is being built on reclaimed land on the southern shore of the Congo, adjacent to the town of Soyo. This plant/port is connected to the main river by a new deep channel, giving access for the huge LNG tankers that will transport the product around the world. The complex and powerful sediment transport processes active in the locality are an ever-present backdrop to the commercial activities. I am part of a team studying these processes. The picture shows an Autonomous Vertical Profiler that I recommended be constructed as part of the long-term monitoring project. It will be moored in the strong Congo flow and profile conditions in the water column, down to the bed, automatically reporting on bed erosion conditions.  The AVP is being built by Boskalis in the Netherlands.

 

• Passive Use of Sound by Sea Turtles
  This interest stems from my involvement with turtle conservation in Central America. Turtles generally nest on windward coasts, exposed to wave action. It is striking that the female turtles tend to nest over the high water period and seem to prefer rainy/windy/storm-wave conditions. All these factors encourage survival...  but how do the animals find wave-beaten shores, know when its high tide or when its windy or lashing with rain?  I suspect they, as part of their suite of sensory abilities, passively use sound generated by natural energies. They spend their development period (1-2 months) in a egg buried at or just above the high water mark, during which period they have the chance to become sensitised to beach sounds. They have a hearing ability tuned to the frequency spectrum of impacting water.  I believe they can tell high tide from low tide from differentiating between waves breaking on a steep upper beach of flat lower beach. Little research has been done on this aspect of turtle ecology, I collect evidence for this theory whenever I get a chance.

 

• Improving Methods of Describing Marine Biotopes. [Quoting part of the Discussion section from a paper on Lundy Subtidal Sedimentary Biotopes to be published in the 2011 edition of the Lundy Field Society Journal].
  “The novel aspects of this study have been 1) experimenting with field methods to increase cost-efficiency of data gathering, 2) reliance on detailed sediment properties as indicators of key benthic habitat conditions and 3) using GIS methods to bring together biological and physical data sets (matching communities to habitat).  The key steps exemplifying the approaches used in this study can be summarised as follows.
  
  
  1. It is important to initially make an effective study of readily available data to both guide survey design and input to the final database. In terms of physical habitat, recent (post this survey) government investment in freely available datasets has made this approach very effective in UK waters, providing spatially continuous data (often modelled but calibrated to field information) for parameters such as bathymetry, wave energy and tidal currents (Nunny, 2010).
  2. Undertake necessary field and laboratory work to both identify infauna and characterise seabed conditions. Field surveys can effectively be run together, and can use innovative techniques to less precisely but much more cost effectively acquire data.
  3. Independently analyse the habitat and biological data, the former on a spatially continuous and the latter on a clustered-point basis.
  4. Examine the interaction between the two data sets using a GIS grid model, iteratively adjusting the fit to allow key parameters and relationships to emerge.
  5. Once base relationships have emerged the spatially-consistent attributes of the infaunal assemblages can be readily described and applied to clearly defined seabed areas, using GIS interrogation and mapping methods.
  6.  Although the biotope descriptions that emerge often do not precisely conform to the growing national database, this is a healthy sign and producing locally valid biotope descriptions is internationally recognised best practice (ICES, 2008).
  7. Final biotope descriptions can be ‘tweaked’ to best-fit the JNCC classification wherever possible, or if not the possible existence of a new biotope should be flagged.
  8. Clear identification of how well observed biotopes ‘fit’ established categories (such as is presented in this paper) is important, as it will encourage ongoing revision and clarification of common biotope definitions.”

 

• The Restoration of Sharpham Marsh
  Change is a fundamental property of existence. Surviving or succumbing to change is an evolutionary process. As a race we are just beginning to realise the profundity of those two statements. At the sea’s edge we have reclaimed land and built cities. Long-term variability in sea-level (whether influenced by man or not) is now querying the common sense of our ancestors. Allowing the sea back onto the land can be a solution in many problem areas. Unfortunately just letting water in may not be the optimum way back. When we built walls at the sea’s edge we also excluded energy (waves, currents) as well as water. Simply permitting overtopping or opening a hole in the dyke may not restore the biologically rich and diverse habitat that pre-existed. Areas dominated by reed monoculture and acting as traps for floating rubbish may result: the maritime equivalent of abandoned-inner-city-scape. Gross expenditure of money and carbon in heavy engineering works to do a full restoration is also less than ideal. As Sharpham Marsh, on the River Dart, under the watchful eye of the owners (a Trust extolling the value of mindful connection with nature) we are exploring ways of ‘soft’ engineering the return of reclaimed land to biodiverse intertidal habitat.