Monitoring benthic communities and their functions across diverse estuarine habitats is vital for understanding biodiversity patterns and ecosystem health.

• SAV Community Structure & Efficiency: Showed that while high-biomass non-native (Hydrilla) meadows expand overall macroinvertebrate capacity, native Zannichellia palustris supports significantly higher per-biomass invertebrate density and hosts distinct indicator taxa critical for food web integrity.
• Host-Associated Microbe Zonation: Demonstrated via a manipulative transplant experiment that tidal stress gradients shape macroalgal microbiomes, with transplanted Fucus vesiculosus holdfast bacterial communities shifting toward high-zone species under elevated desiccation.
• Remote Sensing & Habitat Classification: Developed an open-source machine learning framework for rapid coastal habitat change detection, combining field ground-truthing with extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) to achieve 83.6% accuracy across dynamic barrier island habitats.
• Cross-Atlantic Microbiome Biogeography: Evaluated host-associated bacterial communities along a cross-Atlantic latitudinal gradient in Fucus vesiculosus, finding that temperature, tidal height, and host phylogeography drive microbial structure rather than photoperiod.
• Gulf-Wide Blue Carbon & Nitrogen Inventory: Synthesized >1,100 sediment cores to construct a regional blue carbon and nitrogen inventory, establishing that Northern Gulf of Mexico seagrass surface sediments store up to 7.03 Tg C and 0.43 Tg N.

Quantifying long-term ecosystem responses to environmental stressors is critical for developing effective coastal conservation and climate adaptation strategies.

• Thermal Stress & Vertical Squeeze: Analyzed four decades of Chesapeake Bay water quality and aerial imaging data to reveal that long-term water quality management enabled eelgrass (Zostera marina) to expand 0.89 m deeper into cooler waters, alleviating shallow thermal stress.
• Sea Level Rise & Habitat Loss: Utilized long-term monitoring from the Texas Seagrass Monitoring Program to show that rapid sea level rise (14–25 mm yr⁻¹) caused seagrass disappearance at 23% of sentinel stations and complete localized loss at deep-edge margins.
• Global Blue Nutrient Stocks & Loss: Conducted a global synthesis revealing seagrass sediments store ~174 Tg N and 27 Tg P in the top meter, demonstrating that meadow loss severely degrades long-term nutrient reservoir capacity and accelerates coastal eutrophication.

Ecoacoustic methodologies offer advanced non-invasive remote sensing capacity for monitoring dynamic metabolic processes and biomass in marine autotrophs.

• Acoustic Canopy Modeling: Formulated a novel effective medium model to characterize acoustic propagation and attenuation through seagrass leaf canopies.
• Acoustic Biomass Inversion: Developed a ray-based acoustic propagation model paired with Bayesian inference to track above-ground seagrass biomass over a 25-month deployment, validating acoustic inversion as a continuous monitoring tool.
• Acoustic Propagation & Soundscapes: Conducted a multi-year acoustic study in a Thalassia testudinum meadow, quantifying how tissue gas and photosynthetic bubble ebullition drive sound attenuation and ambient soundscapes across seasonal and solar cycles.

Quantifying the physiological tolerance limits and metabolic acclimation of marine primary producers is essential for predicting autotrophic survival under accelerating climate stress.

• Biosecurity & Chlorine Tolerance: Identified extreme resistance to reactive oxygen stress and biosecurity chlorination in holdfasts, cystocarps, and crusts of the invasive red alga Grateloupia turuturu, explaining its competitive success and vector risk.
• Desiccation Resilience & Gas Exchange: Validated infrared gas analysis (IRGA) for subtidal plants to quantify desiccation tolerance and carbon fixation, demonstrating higher desiccation resistance and carbon assimilation rates in deeper seagrass populations.
• Acoustic Ebullition & Productivity: Comparative acoustic ebullition monitoring revealed that photosynthetic bubble release tripled net ecosystem productivity in shallow Thalassia testudinum meadows compared to dissolved oxygen alone, while identifying species-specific acoustic frequency signatures (10 kHz vs. 40 kHz).
• Uncovering Hidden Autotrophy: Combined acoustic ebullition tracking with dissolved gas budgets to show that oxygen ebullition uncovers hidden net ecosystem productivity, transforming an apparently net heterotrophic seagrass meadow (-2.1 mmol O₂ m⁻² d⁻¹) into a strongly autotrophic system (54 mmol O₂ m⁻² d⁻¹).

Sustainable aquaculture and ecological restoration provide vital solutions for enhancing coastal ecosystem resilience and expanding nature-based bio-economies.

• Aquaculture Resilience & Climate Adaptation: Synthesized climate change scenario impacts on cold-water aquaculture in the Gulf of Maine to evaluate physical and ecological adaptation strategies for sustaining working waterfront resilience under warming trends.
• Seagrass Restoration & Seed Harvest: Investigated how light exposure during harvest and storage affects the quantity and quality of Zostera marina seeds to optimize seagrass restoration protocols.