Meghan is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at UVM. She is a biogeochemist whose research interests are focused on how changing climate affects biogeochemical cycling. She has worked to understand how warming in northern ecosystems affects the spatial and temporal dynamics of greenhouse gas emissions. Through a combination of laboratory and field measurements, she has investigated drivers of greenhouse gas emissions and worked to create landscape scale carbon budgets in peat bog and upland forest ecosystems. In interior Alaska, she worked to understand the rate of carbon release from thawing permafrost tundra ecosystems, the decomposability of permafrost carbon, and whether carbon dioxide or methane dominates greenhouse gas emissions. Using eddy covariance measurements chamber-based measurements, she worked to constrain cumulative methane emissions on a landscape scale and potential biological, physical, and environmental drivers of fluxes related to thawing permafrost.
At UVM, she is working with Professors Carol Adair and Andrew Schroth to study the effects of winter warming events on sources and transport pathways of nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon from terrestrial soils to streams and rivers in the Lake Champlain watershed and how these warming events affect trace gas production and emissions from soils.