“In engineering, you mostly learn from textbooks, classes and labs. You don’t get to go out and do fieldwork. But this, it’s not just the whole math of the ocean. You get to see the whole ecosystem working together.”

Research fellow: Hannah Madison
Hometown: Latham, NY
School: University of Rhode Island
Major: Ocean Engineering
Mentors: Lindsay Green, Carol Thornber, Stephen Licht
Project: Monitoring harmful algal blooms in Narragansett Bay via ecological and aerial technology approaches and determining the impacts of climate change on the physiology of bloom-forming macroalgae

As an ocean engineering student, senior Hannah Madison says most of her undergraduate experience has taken place in classrooms and labs. But, the RI EPSCoR Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program changed all that.

“In engineering, you mostly learn from textbooks, classes and labs,” observes Madison. “You don’t get to go out and do fieldwork. But this, it’s not just the whole math of the ocean. You get to see the whole ecosystem working together.”

Madison spent her 10-week fellowship helping investigate the formation and regulation of macroalgal blooms in Narragansett Bay, testing the accuracy of recently developed aerial technology used to monitor the blooms. The project seeks to determine the response of bloom-forming macroalgae to predicted climate change scenarios with a focus on what happens with increased amounts of rain.

Macroalgal blooms appear frequently along coastal communities and pose serious ecological and economic threats. Under climate change scenarios, scientists predict the magnitude and duration of blooms will increase, wielding serious impacts on the structure and functioning of coastal marine food webs.

In essence, Madison explains, she is studying the overall effects of climate change on algal diversity, how their populations might thrive or die under different water temperatures and levels of nitrogen: “We go in the water and along the shoreline to count algal species, to see how the population of the different algae changes. We’re looking to see any trends because of climate change.”

In addition to the ongoing sites under study in Narragansett Bay, Madison says the summer fellowship has taken her to research in its second year at Napatree Point in Westerly, studying the seasonal differences from May to June, taking into account changes in temperature and nutrient levels.

“This has all been completely new to me,” she says, smiling. “I never looked at seaweed before.”

Looking ahead to graduation in the spring, Madison cites the Block Island wind farm project and the need for environmental impact studies: “I want to do something with renewable energy, study what the effects will be on these different species, what the engineering impact will be.”

Story and photo by Amy Dunkle