Geoff Bryant

Operations Administration Volunteer

About me

My interest in wildlife, mainly birds, began after leaving university. I enjoyed the challenge of photographing birds locally and at nearby WWT Martin Mere and Leighton Moss. When I retired from being a software developer in June 2019 I decided to help with conservation by volunteering at Slimbridge. I specifically wanted an “office” job rather than physical work and so joined the Reserve Management team working in The Fen office.

In my working career I worked at BAe on Concorde and Tornado, and then at Smiths/GE on various aircraft, developing software for undercarriages, various systems and cockpit displays. Non-aerospace work included telecoms network management and ticket vending machines.

My role

My role at WWT initially was transcribing the paper Martin Mere records from the 1980s into spreadsheets for importing into Recorder. This work is ongoing. I also transcribed WWT Washington monthly records from 1974 to 1988. I later wrote VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) software to reformat London Wetland Centre dragonfly tables into a format for import into Recorder.

I’ve also written VBA code to take raw water quality records and transform them into the specific formats in different worksheets, which previously had been painstakingly done manually, and provided VBA to analyse 1000s of WWT expenditure records and calculate the overall carbon footprint. This is ongoing as we await the data for the next year.

While checking records in Recorder, I noticed 1,000s of duplicates and other errors using more VBA. It is an ongoing task to identify and fix those.

Experience and interests

• Software languages such as C#, VBA, Javascript.
• Tenacity in sorting out problems, born of working with high integrity software in the aerospace industry.