Last day at GCOOS – moving to Vancouver

After a busy year of working to understand the potential impacts of marine heatwaves in the northern Gulf of Mexico, I have finished my NASEM Gulf Research Program Science Policy fellowship with GCOOS. We managed to make some great progress, including creating some short reports on regional marine heatwave impacts (now available in English on the GCOOS website, with Spanish versions ready soon), setting up a webinar series on marine heatwaves in the northern Gulf region (with recordings available on YouTube here), and getting some preliminary results from a run of the Weather Research & Forecasting Model looking at the relationship between marine heatwaves and nearshore weather in the Houston/Galveston Bay region (with some results available on GitHub here). Working with the GCOOS team has been an incredible learning experience, and I am indebted to my coworkers (especially Dr. Chris Simoniello, Xiao Qi, and Dr. Jorge Brenner), our collaborators at the University of South Alabama/Dauphin Island Sea Lab (Dev Rao and Dr. Brian Dzwonkowski) and staff at TX Sea Grant, LA Sea Grant, and MS-AL Sea Grant Consortium for teaching me an immense amount about the Northern Gulf region, fisheries, marine science, and more. I am excited to keep collaborating with them in the future, especially as we examine the relationship between marine heatwaves and urban heat.

As this fellowship ends, I am excited to begin my new position as a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia Vancouver Campus! I will be working with Dr. Lorien Nesbitt and the Urban Natures Lab to examine how local urban forest policies are reflected in urban forest structure and health, with a specific interest in understanding how government action interacts with community and private action to structure urban forests. This is a return to urban forestry, which is a field that I am more familiar with, but I am excited to bring some of what I have learnt about science policy and coastal urban conditions as I learn about Vancouver and its urban forest.

I will share more updates as the project develops!