Joshua Styles
Botanist - Ecologist
Joshua Styles is an award-winning new face in the world of botany and conservation. At just the age of 25, he has recently added Countryfile and Springwatch, a new Radio 4 documentary, and a series of feature reports for Channel 4 News to his ever-growing list of credits.
Joshua’s on-going work in botany and ecology has not gone unnoticed. He recently won the ‘CIEEM Best Practice Small-Scale Nature Conservation Award’, and the ‘Echo Environmental awards: Environmental Champion winner’. Joshua is one of less than 40 people in the country, and the youngest person ever, to have received a level 6 Field Identification Skills Certification (FISC) from the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland. The FISC is a test devised to measure one’s botanical skill level, on a scale from 1 (beginner) to 5 (professional). A level 6 is only awarded to those in exceptional cases; which clearly Joshua is. This significant milestone indicates an individual is likely to be commissioned nationally to survey plants.
He authored the Edge Hill University Biodiversity Action Plan while at University, and also founded the British Botany Training course. Joshua acts as Project Coordinator to the multiple award-winning botanical conservation programme, the North West Rare Plant Initiative, a programme which he nonetheless also founded. He is regularly asked to make appearances as a speaker and promote conservation organisations on camera. Joshua received a First-class degree in BSc Ecology and is at present studying for his MSc in Ecology.
Currently employed as a senior ecologist, his passion for plants began at the tender age of six, when he used to find endless fascination in growing his own fruit and vegetables. Joshua has come a long way since then, and has accepted the amazing opportunity to share more about his work and life through the upcoming BBC Radio 4 documentary programme My Name Is. This programme will explore the deeper facets of Joshua’s botanical life, but also seek to shed a light on how Joshua has thrived whilst living with Asperger’s.
