Cheryl is a NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) Fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center working with Dr. Lola Fatoyinbo. She uses remote sensing to study how coastal salt marsh and mangrove ecosystems are responding to climate change. Her research interests lie at the intersection of coastal wetland ecology and remote sensing, where she seeks answers to questions about how these valuable ecosystems are changing using Earth observation data.
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 current research focus is high-resolution mapping in dynamic, climate-sensitive ecotones where tropical mangroves meet temperate salt marshes in order to capture changes in mangrove extent and structure that have implications for Blue Carbon. The goals for her NPP project include high-resolution mapping of mangroves and saltmarshes in ecotones worldwide using WorldView and Sentinel data, detecting changes in mangrove extents and canopy heights and the implication to blue carbon, and finding hotspots of saltmarsh-mangrove ecotone change and determining the climatic factors driving it.