Becky Swerida
Current Job: Stewardship Coordinator, MD DNR, MD Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve
Current Project: Reserve based SAV long term monitoring and research and volunteer engagement (including SAV Watchers). Also research on the impact of living shoreline restoration on SAV. Of course there is also my personal project, Bio Bites with Becky, where I make fun little environmental education videos to help engage with folks across the internet about the coolness of estuarine science!
State(s) working in: Maryland
Where are you from: Originally the New Jersey shore (Belmar), currently living in Edgewater MD
What do you think is the main reason we should protect SAV?
It's really cool! It's cool for a lot of reasons, including the huge number of ecosystem services that it provides benefiting both humans and nature. There's also real value in the fact that it's just a cool habitat to appreciate, get excited about and engage with.
How do you feel your research will make a difference in the SAV community?
Firstly, my work helps to improve our understanding of long term trends in SAV that will improve SAV management and ecological success over time. My more specific research helps to understand how shoreline restoration practices impact SAV so that we can improve our restorations techniques over time. But perhaps most importantly, I work to make connections within the SAV world through the National Estuarine Research Reserve, Chesapeake Bay focused groups and individual volunteers who can get excited and inspired by SAV.
What is one of your best memories working with SAV?
At one of my Reserve sites, there is a really engaged family of volunteers who has come out to help with both professional and community science SAV monitoring multiple times. I joke that the 6th and 8th grade kids know more about SAV than I do nowadays, but part of me really believes it! Every time I meet them after a day of monitoring the kids have a hand full of samples that they excitedly show me and a story about seeing a crayfish or a frog or some critter in the SAV bed. I absolutely love seeing community members get as excited about SAV as I am. There was also a time when an SAV mesocosm experiment kept getting mysteriously disrupted and one morning I finally found that the culprit was a muskrat who kept hopping into my tanks to play around in my trays of grass. I couldn't even be upset!
What keeps you motivated to keep caring about the future of SAV?
The resilience of SAV habitats themselves and those who love them.
More about Becky’s story
After growing up on the Jersey Shore with a love of the ocean, Becky attended Gettysburg College majoring in Environmental Science and Biology with a focus on marine and aquatic ecology. Later she earned a masters degree at the Horn Point Laboratory researching SAV hydrodynamic and sedimentary habitat criteria and restoration. Since then, she has worked at a few laboratories and has found herself at Maryland's Department of Natural Resources for the last 8 years. She absolutely loves her current position at DNR with Maryland's Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve where she gets to work on a wide variety of projects ranging from research to stewardship to outreach. When Becky is not out in the middle of a marsh or beautiful SAV bed, she is a big reader, a growing ceramic artist and thespian and care taker to three incredible, troublemaking felines named Queen Ripley, Prince Wombat and Madam Chili Pepper.
