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A restoration ecologist who is more interested in whether a restored habitat works than in whether the plants survived.
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Sofia Marchetti has joined the Department of Life Sciences as assistant professor of marine conservation, arriving from a postdoctoral position on a large restoration monitoring program.
Her research is on coastal habitat restoration, principally seagrass and salt marsh, and on a question that the field has been slow to press: whether a restored habitat does what the original did. Restoration is routinely declared successful on the basis that the vegetation survived three years, a standard she describes as measuring the planting rather than the habitat.
"Species use, carbon accumulation, wave attenuation — those are what the meadow was doing before, and those are what you should have to demonstrate," she said.
She takes over the seagrass plots in the Aldwych estuary, which have now held through two winters, and will use the long-running transect record at Prentice as a reference for setting restoration targets against local history rather than general expectation.
Marchetti teaches ENVS 460 Environmental Impact Assessment and contributes to MBIO 240 Marine Botany and Algae. She is taking graduate students from fall.
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