Urban Wet Carbon Accounting and Climate Change

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific opportunity focuses on investigating carbon storage in wetlands in the New York area, assessing the value of these wetlands for preserving them in the face of coastal ecosystem degradation and managed restoration, in terms of regional and global biogeochemical cycles as well as in terms of climate change mitigation policies. Using satellite remote sensing and observational data, this study will characterize carbon stocks and fluxes in the lower Hudson Valley and the Long Island Sound, and develop measurement and analytical approaches for use in support of Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) frameworks in coastal wetlands. The research will couple space-based remote sensing with comprehensive field and laboratory experiments to quantify the areal extent of wetlands and determine the depths and carbon content of various types of wetland sediments (both riverine and marine-estuarine), examining the role of these wetlands in lateral exchanges of organic carbon with adjacent estuarine and coastal waters.