Dr Sarah Knight
ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow

Profile

Biography

Sarah is an interdisciplinary researcher specialising in nature-society relationships and geospatial approaches. She is interested in employing quantitative, qualitative and participatory methods to study GIS, green and blue spaces, health & well-being inequalities & ecology. Sarah is currently an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, investigating the links between socioeconomic and environmental inequalities and nature connectedness and leads the ESRC-funded Green & Gender-just Cities project.

Prior to this, Sarah worked with Professor Piran White on a Green Social Prescribing evaluation project, and with Dr Jasper Kenter and SEI-Y on the PERICLES project, managing the online mapping platform to crowd-source coastal and maritime cultural heritage data.  
 
Sarah completed an ESRC White Rose funded PhD in 2020 on measuring the relationship between the natural environment and subjective well-being.  This involved using regression methods to explore the determinants of human well-being from green/bluespace, air pollution, and biodiversity datasets at small-scale UK geographies. She is also a Data Impact Fellow with the UK Data Service.  Prior to joining the department, she worked in the environmental conservation sector for nearly 10 years in organisations such as UNEP-WCMC, FERA and ZSL.

Career

Publications

Full publications list

Knight, S. J., McClean, C. J., & White, P. C. L. (2022). The importance of ecological quality of public green and blue spaces for subjective well-being. Landscape and Urban Planning (in press).

Howley, P., and Knight, S. (2021). Staying down with the Joneses: The place specific nature of the relationship between unemployment and mental well-being.  Work, Employment and Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170211003483

Harfoot, M.B., Tittensor, D.P., Knight, S., Arnell, A.P., Blyth, S., Brooks, S., Butchart, S.H., Hutton, J., Jones, M.I., Kapos, V., Scharlemann, J.P., and Burgess, N. (2018). Present and future biodiversity risks from fossil fuel exploitation. Conservation Letters, 11(4), e12448.  https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12448

Knight, S., Collins, L., Conyers, S., Crowe, A., Eyre, D., Parrott, D., Roy, S., Somerwill, K., Williams, J. and Boatman, N. (2014). Increasing landscape connectivity: evaluating the risks that this will encourage invasive non-native species. Natural England Commissioned Report NECR146.

Pearson, R. G., Phillips, S. J., Loranty, M. M., Beck, P. S. A., Damoulas, T., Knight, S. J., and Goetz, S. J. (2013). Shifts in Arctic vegetation and associated feedbacks under climate change.  Nature Climate Change, 3, 673-677. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1858

Carroll, M. J., Anderson, B. J., Brereton, T. M., Knight, S. J., Kudrna, O. and Thomas, C. D (2009). Climate change and translocations: The potential to re-establish two regionally-extinct butterfly species in Britain. Biological Conservation, 142, 2114 2121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2009.04.010