Category: Latest News

We parked our boat on a sand bar on the falling tide in the middle of Plum Island Sound at about 5pm and hung out until about midnight when the tide came back in and extinguished our bonfire. Swimming, fire-grilled dinner, and good times!

We have moved our lateral exchange measurements to the mouth of Plum Island Sound and to each of the major estuaries (one per year) during this next stage of the Plum Island Ecosystem LTER Project. We mounted a Sontek M9 off the side of the Growler to run cross-sectional boat transects. We conduct measurements from…

Undergraduate Gabriella Giordano completed and presented her Senior Thesis in Spring 2020. Gabriella’s thesis is titled “Spatial Analysis of Heavy Metals in Marsh Soils and Ribbed Mussels (Geukensia demissa) from Plum Island Estuary, MA.” Gabriella is off to graduate school in the Marine Sciences program at the University of Georgia. Congratulations Gabriella!

Sandra Demberger successfully defended her MS thesis titled “Quantifying and Valuing Carbon and Nitrogen Sequestration as Ecosystem Services in Salt Marshes” in Spring 2020. Sandra has taken a position as an ORISE Fellow with the Environmental Protection Agency. Congratulations Sandra!

Kristen Jezycki successfully defended her MS thesis “Assessing Heavy Metal Pollution in Estuarine Systems Along the Eastern United States in Relation to Land Use Land Cover Changes” on May 7. This is the culmination of an immense amount of work over the past two years. Congratulations Kristen!

Six graduate students in the Masters in Environmental Science program at Villanova University visited the Plum Island research site in coastal Massachusetts in October 2018. Conducting lateral exchange measurements at a tidal creek site over an 11-hour tidal cycle. Conducting dawn and dusk metabolism transects along the 24-km Parker River – Plum Island Sound estuarine…

Congratulations to the 2018 graduates! The Weston lab is especially proud of undergraduate students Olivia Cacciatore (grad school at University of Florida), Diana Lampasona (position with ESRI), and Mikala Jordan (grad school at the University of Utah), and graduate students Elise Rodriguez, Alec Davis, and Mary Zawatski (shown in picture during graduate ceremony), who all…

Elise Rodriguez successfully defended her thesis “Land cover impacts on mineral sediment delivery and accretion rates in tidal wetlands” on April 20. Elise combined Pb-210 counting from cores taken in systems along the East Coast with an in-depth GIS land cover change analysis to evaluate how sediment delivery and accretion rates are linked. It’s an…

Mary Zawatski successfully defended her thesis “Carbon Exchange and Sediment Deposition in a Heterogeneous New England Salt Marsh” today.  Mary has compiled an amazing data-set over the last two years that required multiple trips to Plum Island to measure ecosystem gas exchange.  This is also the first graduate defense in  the Weston Lab and in the…

The lab will host a research intern during summer 2018. This position is open only to current Villanova undergraduate students. Applications due March 2. Click here for more information and to apply.