Dr Alice Johnston

Areas of expertise

• Agrifood Systems
• Carbon, Climate and Risk
• Computing, Simulation & Modelling
• Monitoring and Environmental Informatics
• Soil
• Soil Resources

Background

Alice Johnston is an ecologist and quantitative modeller specialising in the energy flows and biological mechanisms that underpin biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and climate feedbacks. Her research seeks to understand how organisms and ecosystems acquire, allocate, and transform energy, and how this regulates emergent behaviours across scales, from individuals to the biosphere.

Alice’s work spans fundamental ecological theory and applied sustainability challenges. She has examined how invertebrate populations respond to interacting stressors such as agricultural management, pesticides, and habitat fragmentation, and how ecosystem metabolism and greenhouse gas fluxes respond to global pressures including climate change, pollution and urbanisation.

Alice completed a BSc (Hons) in Environmental Science at Newcastle University, followed by a PhD at the University of Reading. Before joining Cranfield University as a Lecturer (now Senior Lecturer), she worked as an ecological modeller in industry and held a NERC Independent Research Fellowship.

Current activities

Dr Johnston’s research focuses on ecosystem energetics through an understanding of how energy flows through organisms, populations, and ecosystems, and how these flows are disrupted by multiple, interacting environmental stressors. She combines mechanistic models, global Earth observation datasets, and in-situ flux measurements to reveal the processes driving emergent patterns in biodiversity, ecosystem metabolism, and climate regulation.

Her work integrates across biological and spatial scales:

- Individuals: Mechanistic individual-based models (IBMs) exploring how physiology, behaviour and adaptation shape population responses to novel environmental change.

- Populations & Communities: Understanding how energy constraints and multi-stressor interactions (e.g. pesticides and climate extremes) drive population stability, community structure and ecosystem service delivery.

- Ecosystems: Leveraging satellite observations, global eddy-covariance networks and statistical/AI approaches to quantify how stressors such as artificial light at night, air pollution, and land-use change alter ecosystem energy exchange.

A core theme in her work is linking mechanistic realism with tractable, scalable modelling by identifying where complex biological detail is essential and where simpler principles can reliably predict ecosystem behaviour. Her research informs nature-positive land management, climate-smart agriculture and environmental policy, and contributes to the development of next-generation ecological forecasting tools.

Publications

• Articles in journals