Currently Emeritus Professor at the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre and formerly of Sheffield Hallam University, Ian has over 40 years in university research, local government, voluntary, and private sectors, with research addressing core themes of ecology, sustainable development, quality of life, education, and empowerment.

His diverse work has included outdoor and wildlife leisure and tourism (nature-based, heritage, and garden-leisure and tourism), community issues, economic impact assessments, sustainable development, and economic and social regeneration, and major work on woods, forest landscapes, and cultural history. This includes landscape ecology such as treescapes, peat bogs, flooding, and land management, invasive and non-native species, relict and indicator species, urban hydrology, sustainable ecology, assessment and remediation contaminated / degraded landscapes, and problems of land and water contamination along industrial rivers.