Researchers Study Climate Change Effects on Mangroves for NASA
![Doctoral candidate Isamar Marie Cortés and Earth and Environmental Studies Assistant Professor Jorge Lorenzo Trueba are studying mangroves for NASA.](/magazine-archive/media/uploads/sites/12/2020/06/092419_7273_CSAM-Jorge-Trueba-and-Isamar-Marie-Cortes.jpg)
Earth and Environmental Studies Assistant Professor Jorge Lorenzo Trueba and doctoral candidate Isamar Marie Cortés received a three-year, $165,000 NASA fellowship grant to better understand how mangroves, a coastal plant species, respond to climate change. As part of the NASA Minority University Research and Education Project fellowship, Trueba and Cortés, who is working on a PhD in Environmental Science and Management, are collaborating with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to measure the negative impact of the changing ratio of evaporation to precipitation – a byproduct of climate change – on mangrove ecosystems.
Mangroves protect many coastal communities around the world and also provide a number of ecosystem services to those communities,” says Trueba. “In order to protect mangrove ecosystems, we need to develop quantitative tools to better understand how they respond to a changing climate.”