Dr. Matthew T. Costa studies coastal wetlands and how sediment, water, plants, and microorganisms interact, leading to the build-up or loss of carbon from those sediments. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate at in the Marine Science Center at Northeastern University, studying how different levels and types of nitrogen inputs affect salt marsh carbon sequestration and erosion vs. accretion. He was previously a postdoctoral scholar in the Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at UC San Diego, where he measured the flow of carbon among coastal ecosystems in La Jolla, CA, and the sequestration of carbon in protected and restored wetlands across San Diego County. He conducted doctoral research at SIO on carbon storage in mangrove forests in the Americas, sampling across Panama, the Galapagos Archipelago, and Mexico, completing his doctoral dissertation, “Mangroves in depth: long-term carbon burial across spatial scales” in 2019.