Image

 ![Coastal research landscape used as the Northmoor University hero image.](/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2026-01/camilo-botia-k4vFDPJoDZk-unsplash.1600x1200.jpg.avif?itok=ujHvC8nC)

 

 



Image

 ![Coastal research landscape used as the Northmoor University hero image.](/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2026-01/camilo-botia-k4vFDPJoDZk-unsplash.1600x1200.jpg.avif?itok=ujHvC8nC)

 

 



Position title

Professor of Marine Ecology

 

Person type

faculty

 

 

Email

a.tanaka@northmoor.edu

 

Aisha Tanaka has walked the same four transects at Prentice Coastal Field Station every month since 2011, and inherited a record that had already been running for seven years before that. The survey is the longest continuous dataset the university holds, and most of her published work depends on it.

Her research asks a narrow question with an inconvenient answer. When a shore is disturbed — by a heatwave, a storm, a cold snap — what comes back? The assumption built into a lot of coastal management is that the community recovers toward what was there before. Tanaka's transects suggest that is often not what happens. After the 2021 heatwave, two of the four sites returned to something close to their previous state within three years. The other two did not, and show no sign of doing so.

She is careful about what that means. Twenty years is a long record by the standards of the field and a short one by the standards of the question. What she will say is that "recovery" is doing more work in the literature than the evidence supports.

Tanaka chairs the Department of Life Sciences and teaches MBIO 210 Invertebrate Zoology and MBIO 350 Coral Reef Ecology. She supervises graduate students in marine ecology and takes one or two undergraduate researchers each year, usually recruited from the transect walks.

Before Northmoor she held a postdoctoral position on a long-term monitoring program in the Gulf of Maine. Her doctorate is in marine ecology.



ORCID profile

[ORCID profile](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097)

 

Google Scholar profile

[Google Scholar](https://scholar.example.edu/tanaka)