Ken Irvine

After gaining a PhD in 1987 at the University of East Anglia (U.K) for a study on shallow lake food webs, he worked as a Nature Conservation Officer for the U.K. Nature Conservancy Council, before moving to study ecosystem structure and estimating the secondary production of Lake Malawi in Africa. From there, in 1994 he moved to Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and spent a decade and a half grabbling with the intricacies of policy and ecology to support the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive. While in Dublin he continued to work on the African Great Lakes of Malawi and Tanganyika, and the ecology of the Makgadikgadi salt pans of Botswana.  In 2011 he moved to IHE Delft Institute of Water Education in the Netherlands to engage more fully in research and teaching to support capacity development. He is Chair of Aquatic Ecosystems, whose research is mainly on the biogeochemical processes, ecological assessment and capacity development within African wetlands and waterbodies. This necessarily requires a social-ecological and multidisciplinary perspective. As part of a special anniversary issue (2016) produced by the editorial board of Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, he was lead author in an open access article on tropical conservation, and was part of the editorial team in producing The Wetland Book (2020) published by Springer, a major source of information on global wetlands. More recently (2022) he was lead author on a chapter in Vegetated wetlands: from ecology to conservation management in the textbook  Fundamentals of Tropical Freshwater Wetlands: From Ecology to Conservation Management (Elsevier) and a section editor on Environmental Managment for the Encyclopedia of Inland Waters, 2nd edition (Elsevier). Recent publications span ecology to policy,and includes working with colleagues from other disciplines, institutes and Chair Groups. A list of key publications are provided below.

Other recent outreach work includes working on capacity development within the Danube basin,  Integrated Water Resource Management in India and S.E. Asia,  development of an Integrated Managment Plan for the Lower Mara, Tanzania , and an "Action Research" project, Women and Water for Change in Communities that has identified key elements needed for the effective engagement and agency for local communities development and support in water management. A development from this work has been a large scale capacity develoment project supporting and attempting to better understand the managment of community and livestock water pans in Kenya and Tanzania, and a partner on a WWF Darwin Initiative project on Community-led fisheries management in the Mara Wetlands.  Ken is an active Board member of the African Center for Aquatic Research and Education (ACARE) and sits on the Strategic Advisory Group of the UN Water intitiative  World Water Quality Alliance, and is currently working with colleagues on producing a White Paper on the Restoration of Shallow Lakes.