FFGS is pleased to announce the awarding of funds from the 2025 UF/IFAS Archer Early Career Seed Grant to two of its faculty members, Dr. Mysha Clarke and Dr. Lindsey Reisinger.
The UF/IFAS Archer Early Career Seed Grant program helps early-career faculty members establish new research programs. The program honors Dr. Douglas Archer, who was UF/IFAS Associate Dean for Research and a staunch champion of faculty development.
This was a highly competitive year for grant funding, with 28 early-career scientists across IFAS submitting excellent proposals. After a rigorous review by a panel of UF/IFAS faculty, the UF/IFAS Office of the Dean for Research was pleased to announce 15 awards totaling $740,719.58.
The funded projects include UF/IFAS faculty members from nine tenure homes and five Research Education Centers, demonstrating the growing distinction of a range of UF/IFAS research areas.
Dr. Mysha Clarke, Assistant Professor of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources, was awarded $50,000 for her research on “Urban Forests and Climate Resilience: A Comparative Assessment Between Kingston, Jamaica and Miami-Ft. Lauderdale Metropolitan Area, USA.” Dr. Clarke will examine the two coastal cities, which have similar ecological characteristics and face similar climate change threats, to understand how they are maintaining urban forests as a nature-based solution to improving climate resilience.
“To my knowledge, this research will be the first of its kind to do a two-country comparison about the role of urban forestry/greenspaces and adaptation to climate change in the tropics by investigating cities with such varied levels of economic, political, and social dimensions,” says Dr. Clarke.
As a social scientist, Dr. Clarke will use a mixed-methods approach involving qualitative (semi-structured interviews) and quantitative (survey) methods to collect data. The funds she was awarded from the Archer Early Career Seed Grant will be used to hire a master’s student and a temporary research assistant to help with the research.
Dr. Lindsey Reisinger, Assistant Professor of Freshwater Ecology, was awarded $49,957 for her research on “The Impacts of Urbanization on Animal Behavior Within and Across Aquatic Species.” She will use the funds to study how behavioral traits in three aquatic invertebrate species differ between urban and non-urban streams, which could reveal insights into the ecological consequences of urbanizing streams.
“Ecologists have traditionally evaluated ecological impacts by looking at which species are present in the environment,” says Dr. Reisinger. “I think this is valuable, but there could be other changes that are also ecologically important.”
Dr. Reisinger started thinking about how traits influence environmental impacts while studying invasive species, examining whether invasive species impact their environments differently due to their behavioral traits, compared with native species.
Dr. Reisinger’s lab focuses on how the environment shapes behavioral traits and how those behavioral traits then change the impact of an animal on the environment. She and her students also study how parasites change the traits of species, and the ecological consequences associated with those changes.
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