Tom Wilding
Science Panel member
Dr Thomas Wilding is Associate Professor of Innovative Environmental Assessment at SAMS, the Scottish Association of Marine Science.
Tom is a benthic ecologist and statistical modeller specialising in assessing the impacts of man’s activities. He leads the development of novel imaging and eDNA-based approaches to monitoring change and is challenging current monitoring and assessment approaches.
His focus is on aquaculture, oil and gas decommissioning and marine renewables and he frequently works at the interface between research, policy, and regulation.
In relation to aquaculture, Tom leads the development of eDNA-based alternatives to traditional macrobenthic monitoring (BactMetBar) and the application and training of deep-neural nets to help industry and regulators in assessing priority marine features in seabed survey imagery (SEA-AI).
He is an HSE Part IV qualified diver with over 20 years’ experience of designing and conducting underwater experiments.