The LTER Network Office is pleased to announce that we will be able to fund four site exchange fellowships in 2025. Site exchanges were designed to facilitate between-site comparisons and support the development of cross-site projects. The 2025 awardees exemplify a variety of approaches to such collaboration, including: shared sampling efforts, development and dissemination of new methods, collaboration on shared best practices, and work toward joint publications. Site exchange travel will take place during over the next year and we will plan to update the LTER community on project outcomes in late Spring 2026.
2025 Site Exchange Fellows
Mingyu Zhang, a doctoral student with Dr. Peter Raymond at the Plum Island LTER, will travel to the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER to improve models of carbon transport and compare methods for measuring air-water gas exchange. Read more
Dr. Marguerite Mauritz, an investigator at Jornada LTER, will spend about 10 days working with Dr. Marcie Litvak at the Sevilleta LTER to improve techniques for measuring CO2 exchange in drylands. Read more
Alexandra Cabanelas Bermudez, a doctoral student with Dr. Heidi Sosik at the Northeast Shelf LTER will travel to the California Current LTER to learn the ZooScan plankton imaging system. Read More
Margaret Baker, a doctoral student with Sven Kranz at the California Current LTER, will travel to Dr. Tom Kelly’s lab at the Northern Gulf of Alaska LTER to build skill in – and improve tools for using – bio-optical sensors in marine systems. Read more
Mingyu Zhang, Plum Island Ecosystems LTER
Mingyu Zhang, a doctoral student with Dr. Peter Raymond at the Plum Island LTER, will travel to the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER to improve models of carbon transport and compare methods for measuring air-water gas exchange.
The Project: Mingyu will collect sediment redox and porewater chemical species (alkalinity, sulfate, sulfide, pH, CH₄), along with overlying water CH₄ and CO₂ concentrations at marsh and seagrass sites in the Virginia Coast Reserve, expanding on her prior work at Plum Island and Florida Coastal Everglades LTER. She will also compare floating chamber and aquatic eddy covariance methods to quantify air–water greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes. The project will strengthen collaborations within the LTER network by linking data and modeling efforts across regions.
About Mingyu: A first-year PhD student at Yale University, Mingyu specializes in the lateral exchange of inorganic carbon (DIC, alkalinity, CO₂) within coastal blue carbon ecosystems. Her research explores the spatiotemporal dynamics, sources, and transport pathways of inorganic carbon across the land–ocean continuum, integrating field observations, laboratory analyses, and modeling techniques. She received her master’s degree in environmental science at Yale School of Environment and bachelor’s degree in chemical oceanography at Xiamen University, China. Mingyu loves playing basketball and dancing when she’s outside the lab.
Marguerite Mauritz, Jornada LTER
Dr. Marguerite Mauritz will spend about 10 days working with Dr. Marcie Litvak at the Sevilleta LTER to improve techniques for measuring CO2 exchange in drylands.
The Project: Together, Dr. Mauritz and Dr. Litvak will work to establish best practices for cross-comparison, diagnostics, and validation of eddy covariance in dryland ecosystems and develop cross-comparison metrics between eddy covariance NEE and long-term NPP data. They will also generate ideas for partitioning approaches that accommodate the pulse-dynamics and water-limitation issues that are common in dryland flux measurements. Tangible products include a perspective paper on challenges and solutions for dryland flux measurements and an AGU session proposal on flux partitioning in drylands.
About Marguerite: An Assistant Professor at University of Texas El Paso (UTEP), Dr. Mauritz-Tozer is interested in how ecosystem CO2 exchange responds to natural seasonal climate variation, ecosystem disturbances, and climate change. By combining net CO2 exchange measurements from flux chambers and towers, C isotopes, and experimental manipulations she tries to tease apart different components of ecosystem C cycling. Dr. Mauritz-Tozer has worked in dryland and Arctic systems, in rainfall and warming manipulations, to project how soil and whole ecosystem CO2 exchange will respond to projected changes in climate.
Alexandra Cabanelas Bermudez, Northeast U.S. Shelf LTER
Alexandra Cabanelas Bermudez, a doctoral student with Dr. Heidi Sosik at the Northeast Shelf LTER will travel to the California Current LTER to learn the ZooScan plankton imaging system.
The Project: In the Décima lab, Alexandra will receive hands-on training in digital ZooScan imaging and machine learning analysis to quantify zooplankton community composition. Integrating ZooScan information on community composition with δ¹⁵N and δ¹³C values will improve interpretation of size-based trophic niches and energy flow in the NES food web. Tangible products include new ZooScan data for the NES-LTER, which will also improve Alex’s dissertation with eventual publication.
About Alex: A PhD student in Biological Oceanography at the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, Alex is part of the Northeast U.S. Shelf Long-Term Ecological Research (NES-LTER) site. Her research focuses on zooplankton and forage fish trophodynamics, aiming to understand food web structure. She’s currently using stable isotopes and stomach contents to examine seasonal and spatial patterns in predator–prey interactions. As part of the site exchange fellowship, Alex will work with scientists at the California Current Ecosystem (CCE-LTER) site, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, to learn ZooScan workflow, a high-resolution scanner that digitizes zooplankton samples. Ultimately, she’ll use ZooScan to quantify size structure and taxonomic composition in NES-LTER samples.
Margaret Baker, California Current Ecosystem LTER
Margaret Baker, a doctoral student with Sven Kranz at the California Current LTER, will travel to Dr. Tom Kelly’s lab at the Northern Gulf of Alaska LTER to build skill in – and improve tools for using – bio-optical sensors in marine systems.
The Project: Maggie plans to develop a toolset to analyze large bio-optical datasets gathered during LTER fieldwork. These datasets include light absorbance and attenuation, particle backscatter, cDOM, and pigmented particle color which are used to characterize circulation, eddies, boundary zones, inform on phytoplankton communities and particle abundance pertaining to carbon export, and for remote sensing data validation. In exchange, Maggie will be trained in the use of the instruments that collect this data, which she will take to sea during the 2025 CCE process cruise. This collaboration will help to develop a cross-site dataset comparing two vastly different ecosystems.
About Maggie: Maggie is a PhD student at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She studies marine phytoplankton in a range of environments–from Antarctic sea ice to the coast of Southern California. In her work with the California Current Ecosystem (CCE) LTER site, she investigates the effects of marine heatwaves on the primary producer communities in the CCE. She is super excited to participate in the LTER site exchange and collaborate with the Northern Gulf of Alaska LTER site.
