Mozdzer Ecology Lab

12/15/2025

Happy holidays from the Mozdzer lab!

12/11/2025

This October, our Ecology class welcomed a Bryn Mawr College photographer into the field with us as we measured carbon sequestration in Morris Woods! 🌲

Students resampled individual trees in forest plots first established in 2014 - helping us to understand how carbon storage on campus is changing year by year.

Bryn Mawr College is a vibrant, diverse community dedicated to the highest academic standards, women’s empowerment, and preparing students for leadership roles in a global environment. Founded in 1885, Bryn Mawr was the first women’s college to offer its students the ability to earn the Ph.D. Th...

12/11/2025

Mozdzer lab at the 2025 GCREW census! Another year in the books thanks to this fabulous crew!

12/11/2025

Three students and post doc Brian Donnelly representing the lab at the Coastal and Estuarine Research Ferderation meeting in Richmond, VA.

Congratulations to Max Monks for winning "Best Undergraduate Student Poster"!

12/11/2025

As the semester comes to an end, I wanted to share some photos from my Ecology class this past semester where we explored Lake Vickers and Mill Creek

03/17/2024

Sending you all warm wishes from students and faculty participating in the Bryn Mawr College "Coasts in Transition" 360 trip to South Water Caye, Belize

08/20/2023

Last week students from Bryn Mawr College, with help from students from Northeastern University, and staff from the Woodwell Climate Research Center collected over 4000 individual plant samples, and measured traits on over 2000 plants. Working collaboratively, we now have data for the 21st year of the TIDE project! Long term data from this experiment will help us understand how ecosystems can recover from chronic nutrient pollution, and this year we also collected data on plant fitness traits to inform evolutionary processes.

07/29/2023

A record setting annual census during a record setting heat wave. This year 6 members from my lab group from Bryn Mawr College helped measure and record the height and traits on thousands of plants at the Phragmites elevated CO2 & N experiment at GCREW in only two days instead of the typical three. The heat was intense, but starting each morning at dawn ensured we were off the marsh by the heat of the day. The data collected from this experiment serves many purposes. In addition to informing our knowledge on ecosystem responses to near future global change and species invasion, data collected from this experiment will calibrate models to determine the influence of rapid evolution to global change.

A special thanks to my amazing crew from Bryn Mawr, Andrew Peresta for organizing the whole event, and to lab alum, Rachel Hager, for coming back to GCREW to volunteer for a day nearly a decade after your time at Bryn Mawr.

06/10/2023

This past week, members of my lab from Bryn Mawr College joined their fellow lab members, who are conducting an internship at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, at the Smithsonian GCREW. We measured plant traits and photosynthetic rates on plants in a long term elevated CO2 and nutrient enrichment experiment. These data will help calibrate a carbon cycling model that will combine ecosystem ecology with evolutionary processes to help us determine the consequences of rapid evolution from global change. We also had an opportunity to visit our field site at Parker's Creek, found some fossilized shark teath, and spent the last evening kayaking. Great week of field work.

07/21/2022

This summer's first goes to Skylar Livengood, a sophomore from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. So far she’s enjoying her to the point where she can’t choose a single top experience. “It sounds corny, but I honestly can’t think of a ‘favorite’ thing about this internship so far," she says. "I’ve learned so much… from how to extract DNA and perform microsatellite assays to how to survive a 95-degree day on the marsh.”

Skylar is interning for Melissa McCormick in SERC’s Molecular Ecology Lab, where she focuses on the invasive common reed, Phgramites australis. She's looking at the genetic effects of long-term elevated levels of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Her mission is to model a marsh ecosystem with these elevated levels, so the world can prepare for how to assist these ecosystems in the future. Skylar hopes to earn a Ph.D. in genetics, ecology or conservation after she completes her undergraduate program.

(Photo: Timed selfie by Skylar Livengood)

09/25/2021

07/23/2021

Keep up the excellent work at the Smithsonian GCREW Julia! Looking forward to having you back in the lab in the fall!

Meet Julia Smeltzer, a rising junior at Haverford College and an for the next two summers with our Molecular Ecology Lab! She’s helping with an ongoing four-year project at the SERC Global Change Research Wetland (GCREW) located in Edgewater, Maryland. Scientists at GCREW conduct experiments to see how wetlands will cope with environmental conditions like higher concentrations of carbon dioxide brought on by climate change.

Julia’s personal project focuses on how plants, specifically invasive Phragmites reeds, respond to elevated levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and the combination of the two in the soil. Each week, she measures the height growth of 300 plants housed in growth chambers and takes leaf tissue samples for further DNA analysis in the lab.

Julia’s interested to see if the reeds, under these conditions, are selecting for certain genetic traits, like growth patterns. If so, traits like these could be passed on to future plants and inform how other wetland plants could respond to elevated levels of carbon dioxide and nitrogen in a changing climate.

Having visited SERC’s main campus with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation years ago, Julia’s happy to be back and spending a large portion of her in the field.

(Photo: Julia Smeltzer)