Rate My Professor Marcus Collier

Dr. Marcus Collier serves as Associate Professor in the Discipline of Botany within Trinity College Dublin's School of Natural Sciences, where he is Head of Discipline. He earned his PhD exploring collaborative governance policies and future land use in severely damaged landscapes, with a focus on conflicting stakeholder rationalities and power asymmetries. Prior to academia, he worked as an environmental consultant, collaborating with communities, volunteers, and non-governmental organizations to co-create and implement environmental projects through adaptive collaborative processes. Collier draws on this experience to inform his empirical research methodologies, emphasizing co-production of knowledge and transdisciplinarity to support the Sustainable Development Goals. His distinguished honors include the Trinity Fellow award in 2023, the European Research Council Consolidator Grant in 2021, and the Government of Ireland Champion of EU Research Award in 2011, presented by President Michael D. Higgins.

Collier's research expertise lies at the human-nature interface, encompassing nature connectivity, social-ecological systems thinking, land use and land-use change, resilience and societal transitioning, collaborative management and planning, urban and rural governance, restoration ecology, rewilding, novel ecosystems, and nature-based solutions. He coordinated the Horizon 2020 Connecting Nature project, uniting 29 partner organizations from 16 EU countries to pioneer nature-based solutions in 11 cities, evaluating impacts on climate adaptation, health, well-being, social cohesion, and sustainable economic development. As Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded NovelEco project (2021-2026), he utilizes citizen science to measure urban wild spaces and their effects on sustainability behaviors. He also contributes to GoGreenRoutes. With over 127 peer-reviewed publications, notable works include "Premises, practices and politics of co-creation for urban sustainability transitions" (Urban Transformations, 2025), "A global review of urban nature-based solutions: Identifying knowledge gaps and opportunities at the research frontier" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025), "Redefining co-design for social-ecological research and practice: A systematic literature review" (Environmental Science and Policy, 2025), and "Finding justice in wild, novel ecosystems: a review through a multispecies lens" (Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 2023). His scholarship influences urban sustainability, environmental justice, and policy on novel ecosystems and biodiversity conservation.