Madison Griffin recently joined the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Acidification Network (MACAN) as its new workforce development fellow. Griffin is a Ph.D. student at the William & Mary Batten School of Coastal and Marine Sciences at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), studying natural oyster reef resiliency in Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. She holds a B.S. in biology with a concentration in marine biology from Duke University.
Griffin is interested in the application of statistical approaches to address complex ecological problems and inform policy and management. Since starting her studies at VIMS, she has developed a novel method using Gaussian mixture modeling to conduct a cohort analysis of oyster reefs in Chesapeake Bay, which identified older, yet smaller, oysters, an important signal of resilience in the oyster reef population. The future chapters of her dissertation will focus on developing statistical methods to quantify resiliency and communicate with policy stakeholders.
Through this MACAN fellowship, she will develop skills in applied science for resource management. She will deepen her knowledge of coastal and ocean acidification (COA) and commercial shellfish fisheries by investigating pH and aragonite saturation state thresholds, as well as analyzing the relationship between COA and the geographic locations of source and sink populations for the eastern oyster and Atlantic sea scallop, using both fisheries-dependent and independent data. This work will culminate in an additional fisheries matrix data layer on MARCO’s Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal.