Welcome Dr. Tricia Kyzar!
Dr. Tricia Kyzar has been hanging around the Angelini lab for a few years now and officially joined the Center for Coastal Solutions in July 2022 as a Researcher and Project Manager. She earned her Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning with multiple certificates in GIS and Spatial Analysis. Tricia’s research revolves around septic systems, water quality, land use/land cover, and climate change impacts. For example, her work has included the spatial analysis of changes in land cover and population in the southeastern United States to correlate the loss of undeveloped land cover types to developed land cover types as populations increase. Another project looked at the location, nutrient export, and climate change risk to septic systems in St. Augustine to understand when these systems might fail due to increasing groundwater, flooding, or sea level rise. This project was able to provide immediately useable information to the City of St. Augustine for prioritizing septic to sewer conversion projects based on their risk and nutrient export values. It also spurred a grant application and award to install more groundwater monitoring stations which will be used to monitor rising groundwater levels and nutrients in the groundwater.
Recently, Tricia has been working on replicating and customizing her projects through python coding to analyze larger study areas more efficiently. These results can be paired with funding opportunities to ultimately generate packages of ‘project suggestions’ that can be provided to stakeholders. These project suggestions will identify logical groups of septic systems that are in priority areas based on their environmental and socio economic parameters, and identifies those available funding opportunities resource managers can submit project proposals to.
In her own words:
“I love data! I always want more data – more locations, longer time series, more parameters, more data! The work that the Angelini Lab and now the Center for Coastal Solutions are doing is a power house of data collection, compilation, and analysis and I am so tickled to be a part of this work – to have the opportunity to work with these amazing people, play with the data, perform the spatial analysis and provide policy and project ideas to resolve the complex problems in our coastal environments is very satisfying.”