Cheryl is currently a visiting assistant research scientist through UMD's Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center where she uses remote sensing to study how coastal salt marsh and mangrove ecosystems are responding to climate change. Her research pairs field ecology with earth observation across spatial scales to monitor the impacts of climate change on coastal habitat distributions, structure, and carbon storage dynamics.
For her MS in Biology from Villanova University, she studied how mangrove expansion into saltmarshes driven by a warming climate increased carbon storage and coastal protection in the wetlands surrounding NASA's Kennedy Space Center in the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. For her PhD in Geography from UCLA, she used optical imagery from drones and satellites to map saltmarsh biomass and monitor the past 35 years of change in the urban, and SLR-threatened, wetlands of Southern California. During this project, she also worked directly with regional management efforts to develop a SLR response model to predict future habitat losses and provide quantifiable objectives for regional adaptation planning. Her NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) Fellowship through the Goddard Space Flight Center working with Dr. Lola Fatoyinbo focused on high-resolution mapping in dynamic, climate-sensitive ecotones where tropical mangroves meet temperate salt marshes in order to capture changes in mangrove extent that have implications for Blue Carbon.