Dr Daniel Simms

Areas of expertise

• Digital Agriculture
• Monitoring and Environmental Informatics
• Natural Capital

Background

I develop new approaches to observing and understanding land-use systems, combining advanced remote sensing with AI to reveal how human activity is reshaping the Earth’s surface and how these dynamics can be redirected to support climate adaptation, food security, and ecological resilience.

Working at the interface of AI, environmental science, and policy, my research integrates diverse and heterogeneous satellite data into coherent, decision-ready characterisations of land-use change. I combine representation learning and signal decomposition with physically grounded approaches to develop robust methods for incomplete, noisy observations, enabling reliable quantification of ecosystem function, recovery, and resilience across scales under environmental stress.

This work helps shift land-use science from fragmented observations toward integrated, data-driven understanding of human–environment interactions, uncovering patterns that directly inform policy and land-use decision-making.

I collaborate internationally across academia, government, and the third sector, contributing to and helping shape initiatives ranging from United Nations programmes and the Landscape Observatory to UK land-use and restoration policy, including the UK Government’s Land Use Framework.

Clients

• United Nations
• Natural Environment Research Council
• Ecom Agroindustrial Corp. Limited

Publications

• Articles in journals
• Conference papers