Lisa Schile

Lisa Schile is a coastal ecologist who studies wetland plants, carbon cycling, and biogeochemistry. She is a postdoctoral research fellow for the Smithsonian’s Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network, a new global marine network. She’s studying how different wetlands around the world sequester carbon in the soil and uses a new technique to measure plant decomposition by burying tea bags everywhere she goes. She’s currently studying wetlands in Panama, Belize, San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, and Florida. Lisa worked with Pat Megonigal in 2013 to quantify carbon storage in coastal ecosystems of Abu Dhabi.

When she got her first pair of rubber boots at the age of eight, Lisa began to explore rivers and mucky soil and she hasn’t stopped since.