Role
Dr Hicks is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Sciences. She currently teaches Geodiversity and Environmental & Wildlife Law & Policy. Helen is Deputy Director of Doctoral Programmes in ARES and runs fortnightly seminars with PhD students. External to NTU Helen is the Chair of the British Ecological Society Agriculture Special Interest Group.
Career overview
Helen started her career with an Undergraduate degree in Geography (BSc Hons) from the University of Birmingham in 2005. She completed her MSc in Applied Ecology and Conservation at UEA in 2006. Helen then went on to work for a number of research institutes (Rothamsted Research and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology) and conservation charities (Wildlife Trusts and Freshwater Habitats Trust), before returning to academia to complete her PhD in agricultural ecology at the University of Reading. Helen’s PhD research looked at the effectiveness of agri-environment schemes for providing nesting and foraging habitat for farmland birds. Her postdoctoral research was part of a BBSRC funded project investigating herbicide resistance in UK agriculture. Helen has been lecturing in Environmental Science since 2018 and incorporates her research interests into the delivery of modules on undergraduate taught courses.
Research areas
Helen’s research interests focus on sustainable agricultural practices and the challenge of balancing food production with biodiversity conservation. Her recent work examines the causative factors driving herbicide resistance in UK arable weeds and the implications for agricultural management. Currently, she is investigating the collateral impacts of pesticide use in arable landscapes, particularly the links between herbicide application and antibiotic resistance in soil microbial communities.
Alongside this, Helen is developing eDNA tools to quantify weed seeds within soil seedbanks, enabling targeted herbicide application to reduce chemical use and costs for farmers. She is also interested in how farmers’ information networks and risk perceptions influence management decisions, especially regarding agri-chemical use and strategies to mitigate herbicide resistance.
Helen completed a fellowship at the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology, where she authored a policy briefing on Balancing Nature and Agriculture. Her passion for agro-ecological research began with her PhD, which modelled farmland bird populations and assessed how ‘wildlife-friendly’ agri-environment schemes could meet the forage and nesting requirements of 19 bird species. She continues to collaborate with academics from the University of Sheffield, Rothamsted Research, and the Natural History Museum.
External activity
Dr Hicks has a network of collaborators from UK universities and research institutions: University of Sheffield, Natural History Museum (NHM, London), University of York, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, and Rothamsted Research. She also has close contacts with Defra and the National Trust.
Helen is the Chair of the British Ecological Society (BES) Agriculture Special Interest Group and is a member of the BES Grant Review College.
Publications
Selected publications:
Goodsell, R.M., Coutts, S., Oxford, W., Hicks, H. L., Comont, D., Freckleton, R.P. and Childs, D.Z., 2024. Black-grass monitoring using hyperspectral image data is limited by between-site variability. Remote Sensing, 16 (24): 4749. ISSN 2072-4292
Varah, A., Ahodo, K., Childs, D.Z., Comont, D., Crook, L., Freckleton, R.P., Goodsell, R., Hicks, H.L., Hull, R., Neve, P. and Norris, K., 2024. Acting pre-emptively reduces the long-term costs of managing herbicide resistance. Scientific Reports, 14: 6201.
Goodsell, R.M., Comont, D., Hicks, H. L., Lambert, J., Hull, R., Crook, L., Fraccaro, P., Reusch, K., Freckleton, R.P. and Childs, D.Z., 2024. Quantifying the impacts of management and herbicide resistance on regional plant population dynamics in the face of missing data. Journal of Applied Ecology. ISSN 0021-8901
Hicks, H. L., Lambert, J., Pywell, R., Hulmes, L., Hulmes, S., Walker, K., Childs, D.Z. and Freckleton, R.P., 2021. Characterizing the environmental drivers of the abundance and distribution of Alopecurus myosuroides at a national scale. Pest Management Science. ISSN 1526-498X
Varah, A., Ahodo, K., Coutts, S.R., Hicks, H. L., Comont, D., Crook, L., Hull, R, Neve, P., Childs, D.Z., Freckleton, R. P. & Norris, K. (2020) The costs of human-induced evolution in an agricultural system. Nature Sustainability doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0450-8
Comont, D., Lowe, C., Hull, R., Crook, L., Hicks, H. L., Onkokesung, N., Beffa, R., Childs, D.Z., Edwards, R., Freckleton, R.P. and Neve, P., 2020. Evolution of generalist resistance to herbicide mixtures reveals a trade-off in resistance management. Nature Communications, 11 (1): 3086. ISSN 2041-1723
Comont, D., Hicks, H. L., Crook, L., Hull, R., Cocciantelli, E., Hadfield, J., Childs, D., Freckleton, R. and Neve, P. (2019), Evolutionary epidemiology predicts the emergence of glyphosate resistance in a major agricultural weed. New Phytol, 223: 1584-1594. doi:10.1111/nph.15800
Ahodo, K., Oglethorpe, D., Hicks, H. L. , & Freckleton, R. (2019). Estimating the farm-level economic costs of spring cropping to manage Alopecurus myosuroides (black-grass) in UK agriculture. The Journal of Agricultural Science, 157(4), 318-332. doi:10.1017/S0021859619000650
Hicks, H. L., D. Comont, S. R. Coutts, L. Crook, R. Hull, K. Norris, P. Neve, D. Z. Childs and R. P. Freckleton (2018). The factors driving evolved herbicide resistance at a national scale. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2(3): 529-536.
Freckleton, R., Hicks, H L., Comont, D., Crook, L., Hull, R., Neve, P. and Childs, D., 2017. Measuring the effectiveness of management interventions at regional scales by integrating ecological monitoring and modelling. Pest Management Science
Lambert J, Hicks H L, Childs D, Freckleton R, 2017. Evaluating the potential of UnmannedAerial Systems for mapping weeds at field scales: a case study with Alopecurus myosuroides. Weed Research
Balancing Nature and Agriculture, 2012, Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology POSTnote 418
Course(s) I teach on
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Undergraduate | Full-time / Sandwichhttps://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/animal-rural-and-environmental-sciences/ug/bsc-hons-environmental-science
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Undergraduate | Full-time / SandwichCOURSE
Geography - BSc (Hons)
https://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/animal-rural-and-environmental-sciences/ug/bsc-hons-geography
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Undergraduate | Full-time / Sandwichhttps://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/animal-rural-and-environmental-sciences/ug/bsc-hons-ecology-and-conservation
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Undergraduate | Full-time / Sandwichhttps://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/animal-rural-and-environmental-sciences/ug/bsc-hons-wildlife-conservation
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Undergraduate | Full-time / SandwichCOURSE
Agriculture - BSc (Hons)
https://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/animal-rural-and-environmental-sciences/ug/bsc-hons-agriculture