Congratulation to SERS PhD Students, Ana Carolina Esteves Dias and Jessica Turecek on receiving the Davis Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded annually to outstanding University of Waterloo Graduate students in the field of Ecology.
Ana Carolinas research addresses a real-world, complex, and socially relevant problem: trade-offs and synergies between marine conservation and the wellbeing of coastal communities experiencing new threats and drivers of change. She has conducted fieldwork in the Southeast coast of Brazil, and she is currently developing a framework for decision-makers to incorporate linkages and address trade-offs between ecosystem services and social wellbeing into MPA planning and implementation.
Jessica is exploring new ways to integrate cross-disciplinary ecological, hydrological and geomorphological data to improve our understanding of how urbanization affects theecological function and structure of urban rivers.