MEES IN THE NEWS

FEBRUARY 2025 - foundation spotlight: EARTH & OCEAN SYSTEMS

NEWS ARCHIVE

MEES RESEARCH CENTER

An Assessment of Prescribed Burns on HERBACEOUS COMMUNITY STRUCTURES SARAH BOMAR (‘22, Ph.D.)

Sarah Bomar (nee Roth) is a third year doctoral MEES student based in the Appalachian Laboratory at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.  Advised by Dr. Mark Cochrane, Sarah’s research interest is in plant ecology, fire ecology and spatial distribution modeling. Sarah’s doctoral research is currently investigating prescribed burns as an effective way to support the understory growth of forest communities.  A prescribed burn is a controlled fire used to achieve specific management goals like: help restore ecosystems, reduce wildfire risks, improve wildlife habitats, manage vegetation and recycle nutrients tied up in old plant material.  

However, according to a study out of the University of Idaho, controlled burns “remained stable  or even decreased [in the American West] from 1998 to 2018..[snip].. [with] 70% of all prescribed fire completed primarily by non-federal entities in the Southeastern US” (Kolden, 2019).  Sarah’s research focuses on specifically evaluating the impacts of prescribed burning on herbaceous community structures at Sideling Hill Creek Preserve near Hancock, Maryland and aims to further demonstrate the importance of the natural fire regime in protecting native plant species. 

Prior to joining the MEES graduate program, Sarah graduated with honors (summa cum laude) with a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences and a Minor in French & Francophone Studies from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK) in Fall 2020 completing her degree requirements in just 2.5 years. While at UTK, She maintained an outstanding GPA (3.98), while engaging in a rich portfolio of research and civic leadership activities. While a senior in high school, Sarah completed research at Dr. Keerthi Krishnan’s lab at the UTK studying the molecular basis of memory formation in mice.  This research incorporated R-programming, behavioral studies, and genetic testing to create 3-dimensional models of the brain. The research resulted in Sarah co authoring a paper in a neuroscience journal. While at UTK, Sarah had the opportunity to work with Dr. Xingli Giam on an independent research project examining the drivers of invasive fishes in the Tennessee River Basin.  This work was slated to soon result in another publication.  Sarah won a place in a competitive summer REU program on a research project undertaking statistical and mathematical models of sea turtle reproductive success. For these research and academic accomplishments, Sarah was awarded the Outstanding Undergraduate prize and the University of Tennessee named her a Vol of Distinction.  Sarah also has extensive experience serving in community and civic leadership roles.  While an undergraduate at UTK, Sarah worked as a mentor with a local elementary school providing students with supplementary math and reading help, helping them to develop social skills, and teaching them French.  Sarah was also very active in the UTK undergraduate community active in the Fossil Free Tennessee Campaign and Students Promoting Environmental Action groups based in Knoxville. Since Sarah joined the MEES Graduate Program, Sarah has been passionate about environmental conservation and protection and, after graduation, looks to have a career focused on environmental conservation and protection.   Sarah’s dissertation research poses to answer how prescribed burns: alter the greenness of the herbaceous layer of central Appalachia, changes the species composition with the reintroduction of fire to the system as well as how the timing and frequency of the prescribed burns affect the species composition of the herbaceous layer regrowth. Sarah is currently conducting a comprehensive vegetation survey to quantify species presence and abundance throughout Maryland’s forests. For more information on Sarah, please click here.

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Dr. MENG XIA

Estuarine & Coastal Dynamics: predicting climate change impacts using HDM

Dr. Meng Xia is Professor in the Department of Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Dr. Xia, a long time MEES faculty member, joined UMES in 2011 and is a physical oceanographer by training whose research interests focuses on estuarine and coastal dynamics, specifically river plume and estuary dynamics, larval transport processes, TMDL and watershed modeling, wave current dynamics and sediment transport processes. Dr. Xia has recruited and currently mentors many MEES graduate students and has instructed many MEES courses with students noting Dr. Xia’s engaging teaching style and the ability to convey difficult concepts in a very understandable way.  UMES recently featured Dr. Xia, along with a group of researchers including our very own MEES doctoral student Haoran Liu in an article regarding a project aimed at better understanding freshwater plume dynamics using hydrodynamic modeling (HDM) under well-defined climate change scenarios.   According to the research paper published in JGR Oceans, Lake Michigan, which is a vast freshwater source,  “in recent decades .. has been witnessing impacts of global warming in terms of lake-ice depletion, a lengthier summer, heavy rainstorms and rising lake surface temperature and air temperature.”  (Sahoo et al., 2021)  Looking at historical data including those from the previous decade (2010 - 2019),  a high-resolution model was applied to investigate water currents and circulation during the ice-free months of 2010–2069.  The results predicted an average current speed rise of 6.5% per decade until 2050, with an increase in coastal current rates at 6.5% per decade until 2050.  The study noted the challenges regarding: “ the uncertainty involved in hydrodynamic simulations due to the lack of high-resolution atmospheric products,  the degree of complexity associated with climate change and lake geography, the current insufficient knowledge of the lake’s three-dimensional thermal profile, and the diversity in episodic and regional (sector-wide) lake hydrodynamics” (Sahoo et al, 2021).  The study aimed to not only better understand climate change indicators and its impact on the lake atmosphere in future decades, but also to benefit the broader field of physical oceanography.  Dr. Xia also participates in the NOAA Climate & Global Change (C&GC) Postdoctoral Fellow program mentoring early career scientists in several projects that include developing the numerical model to investigate the response of estuarine and coastal ocean to climate change including sea level rise.  Dr. Meng Xia received his Ph.D from North Carolina State University in 2007 and his M.S. degree from First Institute of Oceanography in China in 2002. Before coming to UMES, he served as Research Investigator in the Cooperative Institute of Limnology and Ecosystems Research at the University of Michigan. For more information on Dr. Xia, please click here.

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MEES RESEARCH CENTER

Impacts of Environmental Drivers ON ESTUARINE POPULation DYNAMICS

Samara Nehemiah (Ph.D., ‘24) is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), working on a project, in collaboration with the NOAA-Alaska Fisheries Science Center, that aims to create a more holistic understanding of the spatiotemporal productivity dynamics of sablefish by implementing simulation testing. Samara earned her Ph.D. in MEES at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES), based out of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory (CBL) in Fall 2024. Under the advisement of Dr. Michael Wilberg and supported by a NMFS and Sea Grant Population and Ecosystem Dynamics fellowship, Samara’s dissertation focused on developing new statistical methods to estimate the abundance of ecologically important fish species in the Chesapeake Bay.   Samara’s research interests include fish population dynamics, fisheries management, quantitative fisheries, and stock assessment. 

Prior to joining the MEES program, Samara, from a young age, had always been fascinated with sharks and aquatic life and aspired to become a marine biologist.  Despite being discouraged by one of her early college advisors, Samara transferred to the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP) and found a home in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy (ENSP).  It was through a College Park advisor there that Samara laid her sights on pursuing fisheries biology and through her advisors’ encouragement and support, Samara had the opportunity to study abroad in South Africa. Samara’s academic achievements include Dean’s List honors for nearly every semester in the ENSP program; Samara earned her Bachelor’s of Science in ENSP from the UMCP in 2015, concentrating in Wildlife Ecology and Management. 

After graduation, Samara was awarded an internship with the Florida Program for Shark Research, and started working with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission where Samara managed the International Sawfish Encounter Database (ISED) including maintaining the International Shark Attack File (ISAF) and conducting public outreach events on sawfish conservation efforts.  Eventually, Samara joined the Master’s Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences program in the School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences at the University of Florida in Fall 2018.  Samara’s master’s research studies factors influencing recruitment of Spotted Seatrout in Cedar Key, FL and evaluated the current methods of identifying year-class strength for this species.  At the time, recent Florida stock assessments suggested that the Spotted Seatrout are undergoing recruitment overfishing in the Cedar Key region. These assessments also recognized the importance of environmental drivers on recruitment and population dynamics, but these factors have not yet been incorporated into current stock assessments.  Samara’s thesis, which was funded by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), aimed to serve as an important collaboration needed to enhance future stock assessments of this species and other sport fishes to ultimately improve management decisions as well as to highlight the importance of understanding how environmental drivers affect population dynamics of estuarine species.   While at UF, Samara completed an advanced quantitative fisheries assessment course that provided graduate students with the skills necessary to build complex models and simulations and work through common problems in applied fisheries management.  Samara also served as TA for a fish population dynamics class which was cross listed at both the graduate and undergraduate level.  Samara graduated with her Master’s in Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, from UF in Summer 2020. Samara joined the MEES graduate program that fall, and under the advisement of Dr. Michael Wilberg, Samara’s dissertation was focused on developing new statistical methods to estimate the abundance of ecologically important fish species in the Chesapeake Bay. Utilizing Striped Bass as a pilot species, Samara tested these methods and evaluated how well spatially-explicit models perform (e.g., accuracy of abundance estimates) compared to spatially-implicit assessment approaches.  In 2024, Samara was awarded the prestigious and highly competitive Clint Waters Scholarship and earned her doctoral degree from the University of Maryland Center for  Environmental Sciences this past Fall 2024.  Samara enjoys being able to educate local communities as much as possible,  inspire future biologists, and promote long-term sustainable practices that will benefit the health of the Earth’s oceans. In 2023, Samara had the opportunity to present her research during the NOAA Library Seminar Series, which you can find here. Samara finds that “there really is no better day than those I can jump on a boat, drive out to sea, and experience the blue ocean around me.”  For more on Samara and her research, please click here.

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