Featured Powell Center Fellow

Ian Reeves is the fellow working with the Dynamic Coastal Change working group, which met in July 2023 and August 2024 in Fort Collins. Ian joined the group as a research geographer at the St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center in October 2022. The goal of the working group is to bring together ecologists, geographers, oceanographers, geologists, and social scientists to better understand feedbacks among ecological processes, physical landscape change, and human activities in the coastal zone in an effort to improve forecasts of sea-level rise and other climate change-related impacts. Ian has been instrumental in meeting this objective by developing the Mesoscale Explicit Ecogeomorphic Barrier (MEEB) model that integrates aeolian, marine, shoreline, and vegetation processes across spatiotemporal scales. MEEB has had high predictive skill for a case study location on North Core Banks, North Carolina, and Ian hopes to continue to develop his tool for other barrier island locations. Ian came to the USGS from the Coastal Environmental Change Lab at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied the impacts of vegetation on sediment exchange within barrier-marsh-bay systems. He works remotely from Berkeley, California, where his white cat Woody serves as his research assistant. Ian’s working group mentors report that he is a joy to work with due to his strong interpersonal, writing, and analytic skills – in addition to his uncanny ability to anticipate the working group’s organizational needs.