Senior Aquatic Ecologist joins Environmental Consulting Firm

SLR’s (UK) ecology team’s range of expertise has expanded with the appointment of Steve Coates, as Principal Aquatic ecologist. 

Steve, who will be based in the Glasgow office, is recognised as one of the foremost European experts in estuarine fisheries ecology and has delivered over 2,000 marine estuarine, river and lake surveys during his 25 year career.

Instrumental in the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) into UK statute law, Steve has also represented the UK as a WFD technical lead for intercalibration and development of classification tools.

Steve’s engineering background has enabled him to make valuable contributions to a number of high profile infrastructure projects. These have included; establishing baseline fisheries and ecology monitoring programmes on London’s Super Sewer, Heathrow Terminal 5, Docklands Light Railway, M25 motorway and Canary Wharf.

More recently, Steve has been working on the New Nuclear Build (NNB) programme as part of the design & EIA Team and has project managed a WFD investigation project in Northumberland. He is currently involved in a major infrastructural project in Qatar for the Doha New Port Project.

Steve’s has also acted as technical editor for the “Key to the Marine and Freshwater Fishes of Britain and Ireland. A guide to the identification of more than 370 species” – the standard text used by all UK & Irish Competent Monitoring Authorities as part of their WFD surveillance monitoring.