Monster Seminar Jam: Alyssa Griffin

Alyssa Griffin, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow (University of California, Davis, Bodega Marine Laboratory & Earth and Planetary Sciences Department), is presenting a talk, "Carbon cycling and storage in tropical and temperate seagrass meadows."

Abstract

Seagrasses are one of the most widespread coastal ecosystems on Earth. Seagrasses provide many coastal communities with food security, livelihoods, and cultural benefits. They also provide nursing grounds for important fisheries and habitat for many other marine organisms. Seagrasses are important components of both local and global carbon cycles and could play a significant role in various climate change mitigation strategies. These strategies include, but are not limited to, 1) acting as a blue carbon sink by sequestering and storing organic carbon and 2) providing ocean acidification refugia by modifying surrounding seawater carbonate chemistry. Currently, the full potential of these strategies is not well known due to an incomplete understanding of carbon dynamics in seagrass meadows. In particular, the role sedimentary inorganic carbon fluxes play in seagrass carbon cycling remains unclear. In this talk, I will explore the spatial and temporal variability of carbonate chemistry in both tropical and temperate seagrass meadows and implications for the aforementioned mitigation strategies. I will also explain how in addition to storing organic carbon, other biogeochemical processes within sediments may provide a largely unaccounted for blue carbon sink in seagrass ecosystems. Improving our understanding of seagrass carbon dynamics is critical to supporting conservation, management, and restoration efforts of these valuable, but vulnerable ecosystems.

Bio

Dr. Alyssa J. Griffin is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Davis, Bodega Marine Laboratory & Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. Her research focuses on the biogeochemical cycling of carbon in nearshore marine environments, particularly within sediments. She uses numerous geochemical tools to understand how carbon storage and cycling in these important ecosystems are influenced by both natural and human-induced stressors across various spatial and temporal scales. Dr. Griffin also continues to initiate, develop, and support efforts that advance justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) within both the geoscience and greater scientific communities and has received multiple awards for this work.

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