Dr Martyn Kelly is the managing partner of Bowburn Consultancy.
He holds a degree in Environmental Science from Westfield College, University of London and a PhD from the University of Durham, where he worked with Brian Whitton on the effect of heavy metals on aquatic bryophytes. After postdoctoral work on vegetation history in the Mediterranean, he spent two years as a Senior Lecturer at the Univeristy of Jos, Nigeria, before returning to Durham to take up a National Rivers Authority (NRA) Research Fellowship in 1991.
The outcome of this Fellowship was the Trophic Diatom Index (TDI), which was adopted by the NRA as one of its tools for evaluating the state of rivers as part of its implementation of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive. In 1995 he left the University of Durham to set up Bowburn Consultancy, offering advice and training to the NRA (which became the Environment Agency later in the same year) and other organisations.
The next significant change came with the adoption of the EU’s Water Framework Directive in 2000 which led to a re-evaluation of methods for assessing ecosystem health. As a result of this, Bowburn Consultancy formed consortia to develop the TDI into a technique suitable for WFD assessments. The result of this project was a new tool, called DARLEQ, Diatoms for Assessing River and Lake Ecosystem Quality, which was adopted by regulators in UK and Ireland as part of their standard monitoring and assessment toolkits. This work, in turn, led into a co-ordinating role in the EU’s intercalibration exercises, which aimed to ensure that methods developed throughout Europe gave broadly similar outcomes. Alongside this, Bowburn Consultancy was also involved in the development of standards for phosphorus in UK rivers.
Martyn has continued to teach, contributing to undergraduate courses and an MSc in Environmental Management and Pollution Control at the University of Durham and, more recently, as a Visiting Lecturer at Newcastle University, running a course on Aquatic Pollution for second year Geographers.
In 2004 Martyn Kelly was made a Fellow of the Institute (now Chartered Institute) of Ecology and Environmental Management.
He also holds a degree in Fine Art from the Univeristy of Sunderland and his work, hybridising scientific and artistic interests, can be found at www.martynkelly.co.uk as well as on a blog, microscopes and monsters