About
I am a marine ecologist and am currently a PhD candidate in the Earth2Ocean research group at Simon Fraser University, supervised by Dr. Isabelle Côté.
My research passions revolve around nearshore coastal habitats like seagrass and kelps. Beautiful and productive, but also severely and increasingly affected by human impacts--I am often shocked by how little we know about our nearshore habitats like seagrass, kelp forests, and rocky reefs. We regularly explore the intertidal, walking up to the water’s edge, and sometimes wading in to get a closer look. But then we often stop and forget about what is happening just a bit deeper.
Currently, I use seagrass as a model system to understand how human impacts affect nearshore coastal habitats, particularly in the context of multiple stressors. I use a variety of techniques ranging from global-scale datasets examined using meta-analysis to local-scale experiments done in the field.
Research
Long-term global change in seagrass meadows
Seagrass meadows face growing threats such as poor water quality and coastal development. We reconstructed time series of seagrass meadow area at 547 sites and found declining trends in all seven bioregions with a total loss of 5602 km2 (19.1% of surveyed meadow area) since 1880. Declines were usually non-linear, often with rapid losses, but, in some bioregions trends have recently stabilised or reversed. Meanwhile, in individual meadows, trends were highly variable. Poor water quality and coastal development were commonly cited reasons for change; however, these attributions were primarily descriptive. This suggests that we urgently need to improve understanding of the causes of seagrass meadow loss if we are to improve local-scale management.