MEES IN THE NEWS

APRIL 2024 - national earth month

NEWS ARCHIVE

MEES RESEARCH CENTER

Ecosystem Restoration & Habitat Sustainability: MARINE DEBRIS FIELDS & POPULATION DYNAMICS

BENJAMIN FREY (M.S. ‘22)

Benjamin Frey (M.S., ‘22) is a Coastal Program Biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service currently responsible for building partnerships and implementing coastal-related projects in the Western Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair focus areas.  Benjamin graduated (cum laude) with his Master’s in MEES in Spring 2022 from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Under the advisement of Dr. David Secor at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, Benjamin’s research focused on employing a novel approach to age interpretation or validation of fish populations, comparing the black sea bass, a species with known age markers, and the Atlantic monkfish, a species without a valid aging procedure. Without accurate age interpretation or validation, serious errors in the management and understanding of fish populations can occur.  Benjamin’s research demonstrated that this new method using a microconstituent analysis of trace elements of hardparts, the calcified structures in fish, exhibited an 80.7% agreement with known-age samples. Prior to joining the MEES program, this Long Beach, California native earned a B.S. in Biology (cum laude) from Morgan State University in Spring 2018. According to Dr. Rosemary Jagus, who worked with Ben during a summer internship at the Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), his family fully expected Ben to pursue a career in dentistry, but Ben’s research interests drew him elsewhere.  While at Morgan State, in his second semester, Benjamin was accepted in the Clara I. Adams Honors program, and was on the Dean’s list every semester until graduation, and was offered one of only six positions in the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program where, in the lab of Dr. Robert Javonillo, Benjamin participated in research regarding spermatogenesis and possible endocrine disruption in the redbreast sunfish (Lepomis auritus), a species that lives in a nearby urbanized stream.  This research fueled Ben’s passion to further develop his research skills and led him to participate in a summer internship at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy Interdisciplinary REU program that resulted in a co-authorship for a paper as well as an award at the 2017 Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students. These results were published in Angewandte Chemie entitled “Elasticity in Macrophage Synthesized Biocrystals” at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students in Phoenix AZ (2017), the 19th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Chemical and Biological Sciences (2016), and the Washington, Baltimore, Hampton Roads- Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Undergraduate Research Symposium (2015). In 2018, Benjamin participated in another summer undergraduate internship program through support from the LMRCSC, at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), and under the advisement of Dr. Rosemary Jagus, determined whether some of the views the lab had developed on translation initiation factors in zebrafish could be generalized to other fish species. Through a joint meeting with interns and faculty at IMET, where Dr. David Secor was presenting a lecture entitled, “One fish, two fish, old fish, new fish”,  Ben stayed after the talk to further talk to Dr. David Secor who had an emerging project on a novel aging method approach for monkfish. With the support of both Dr. Jagus and Dr. Secor, Ben applied and was accepted to the MEES program, where he joined Dr. Secor’s lab and continued his research which produced very useful results supporting the generality of the lab’s findings.  In his final year in the MEES program, Ben was awarded the prestigious 2022 John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship (2022) where he worked in NOAA’s National Ocean Service’s Marine Debris Program where he gained in-depth knowledge of marine debris issues affecting the ocean and Great Lakes, as well as experience working with international partners and the U.S. Department of State to address transnational marine debris issues.  Ben is currently working as a Coastal Program Biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and is responsible for meeting with partners (other biologists/conservation professionals within the Fish and Wildlife Service and outside of the agency) and with the public both one on one and in regional meeting settings to identify potential projects of mutual interest. Ben also works with the USFWS Great Lakes Coastal Program team in reviewing and identifying priority projects across the Great Lakes region, building expertise in coastal restoration and science as well as supporting the implementation of the Coastal Program in the Great Lakes.

Ben’s passion is to continue to support coastal restoration efforts, inspire youth to have a career in the environmental sciences,  and to advance science for the betterment of all. For more information on Ben, please click here.

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environmental impacts on species interactions: aN ASSESSMENT OF OYTSER REEF HABITATS

Dr. Allison Tracy is Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.  Dr. Tracy also holds an appointment as Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore School of Medicine.  Dr. Tracy, who joined the MEES program in March 2023, is a community ecologist studying the impact of the environment on species interactions.  Understanding the conditions that promote healthy populations (like corals and oysters) is important because these foundation species build reefs that support biodiversity, ecosystem services and coastal economies. Dr. Tracy was recently featured in an article by UMBC regarding a new study using novel techniques to assess the types of habitats provided by oyster reefs in the Chesapeake Bay.  Dr. Tracy, who is lead author on the study published in the October 2023 issue of the Marine Ecology Progress Series journal, joined a team of researchers from UMBC, the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) to use a remote rapid assessment method to survey oyster reef habitats in 12 tributaries and repeatedly sampled habitats from two of the tributaries in 2017, 2019, and 2021 in order to track changes over time. The study found that complex reef structure tends to create richer habitat for oysters and other bay wildlife, such as fish and crustaceans. In the UMBC article, Dr. Tracy sees the management of harvest and restoration as “two of the biggest tools manager[s] have” noting the tool’s ability to detect habitat patterns from “harvest, restoration, and salinity together”  and that restoring reefs while designating some reefs as sanctuaries for oysters is only part of the solution. As stated in the article,  “The solution is not to stop harvesting, “ Tracy says. Instead Dr. Tracy recognizes that the harvested reefs still provide habitat, “contributing something different while also having economic importance.”  Prior to joining the MEES Program, Dr. Tracy graduated with honors (summa cum laude) with her B.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with a Certificate in Spanish Language and Culture from Princeton University in 2010, and, advised by Dr. Andrew Dobson, went on to earn her doctorate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University in 2019. Dr. Tracy is currently advising MEES graduate students and is broadly interested in answering the question: “How does the environment alter ecosystem function through effects on species interactions?”  For more information on Dr. Tracy, please click here.

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MEES RESEARCH CENTER

phytoplankton & food web dynamics: a remote sensing approach

William Atkinson (‘20, E&O) is a fourth year MEES Master’s student set to defend his Master’s thesis this Spring 2024 at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Under the advisement of Dr. Victoria Coles, William’s thesis entitled, “Mesoscale Eddies Influence Zooplankton Distribution and Grazing in the Gulf of Mexico” is about the role of mesoscale eddies in zooplankton distribution and grazing. The thesis uses an eddy detection algorithm tuned for the Gulf of Mexico to calculate the biomass of zooplankton and phytoplankton within eddy centers. By combining ocean color remote sensing data with mechanistic ecosystem model equations, these calculations can help demonstrate how changes in phytoplankton biomass and community structure propagate through the food web to phytoplankton. 

As a native of Salisbury, MD, William was always curious about how the ocean impacted the environment, and spent most of his time growing up near water bodies like the Chesapeake Bay, the Wicomico River, and the Atlantic Ocean.  This fostered William’s strong passion for marine science and physical oceanography and led him to the University of Maryland, College Park, where William earned his B.S. in Atmospheric & Oceanic Science (AOSC) in Spring 2020, completing an undergraduate senior research thesis on precipitation measurements in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria.  Using ground based precipitation data along with multiple satellite precipitation observations, Williams’s research aimed to understand potential error in precipitation measurements used in the Hurricane Maria Tropical Cyclone Report.  After graduation, William continued this research through the Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) which was in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where William created a 30 year climatology at daily and annual timescales for Puerto Rico.  William aimed to develop a better understanding of these complex physical processes, and desired to help educate the general public on challenges facing the atmosphere and ocean as well as ways to mitigate future climate change impacts. 

Since entering the MEES Master’s  graduate program in Fall 2020, and under the advisement of Dr. Victoria Coles, William is currently working on a NASA funded project which aims to predict, validate and understand zooplankton distributions from space in eddy rich oceans using a coupled physical-biogeochemical model (HYCOM-NEMURO) to develop mechanistic algorithms based on phytoplankton growth and grazing equations to estimate zooplankton grazing and biomass.  William’s thesis research applies those algorithms to satellite-based observations to determine how mesoscale features like fronts and eddies impact zooplankton biomass, grazing and trophic transfer in the food web.  William’s thesis aims to demonstrate how such advances in remote sensing that allows the discrimination of phytoplankton functional types, can be useful in providing an explanation for variations in larval fish growth and in turn, a more complete base of the food web.  William has also made significant contributions to the program itself; being a member of the MEES Graduate Student Organization (MEES-GSO) Representative, serving as a student liaison to faculty and staff, helping to address any student’s questions or concerns as well as assisting in improving new student onboarding by facilitating and developing the first MEES system wide MEES Student Survival Guide.  William is currently actively serving as Vice President of the MEES GSO. William is set to graduate with an M.S. in MEES this Spring 2024.  More info on William, please click here.

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