I lead Washington Sea Grant's state-wide, app-based community science monitoring program for invasive European green crab (Carcinus maenus). In just a single year of leadership, I grew the program from concept to a program with 500 trained participants and 15 partnering organizations. Hear more about it in this KUOW segment from June 2024.

wsg.washington.edu/moltsearch (website written & managed by me!)

I lead Washington Sea Grant's 300-volunteer early detection network that collects data related to invasive European green crab (Carcinus maenus). I manage the recruitment, training, retention, gear, and data integrity for volunteer and partner-staff at the 68 sites monitored with rigorous protocols 6 mo/yr across all of Washington's shorelines.

wsg.washington.edu/crabteam

The goal of this project is to identify interventions that may reduce litter in populated environments. Data was collected by citizen scientists at Woodruff Summer Camp in N. Georgia via a phone app called "Litterati". The property operates as a mini-city, with hundreds of youth and adults staying for 1 week camps, repeated over 8 weeks. Populations patterns are known across the property, meals are standardized, all supplies and food are supplied by the camp for the week. These factors, enhanced by replication across 8 weeks of identical camp, remove much of the uncertainty that exist in traditional urban litter studies.

View the summary of ongoing results, which were shared with a summary blurb in the camp paper each week. 

Following community science principals, I partnered with Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, one example of many NGOs collecting incredible data on trash in local waterways. I found their existing, underutilized data did allow for scientifically-relevant analysis about floating trash composition, transport, and sources.

Related publication:
Watkins L, Yu Jordan, Bonter DN, Sullivan PJ, Walter MT. The utility of trash trap data for advancing river plastic pollution research. (In Prep).

I found co-located app-based Litterati citizen science data was comparable in litter composition to expensive, extensive municipal litter audits, but spatially, app data reflected population patterns instead of litter patterns. I also uncovered hyper-local and regional drivers of litter patterns.

Related publication:
Watkins L, Bonter DN, Sullivan PJ, Walter MT. Methods for monitoring urban street litter: a comparison of municipal audits and an app-based citizen science approach. Environmental Science: Advances, 3 (6), 885-896. DOI: 10.1039/D4VA00008K.

Through a wide search of the literature, combined with some field measurements from New York (thanks to 10 undergraduates over 3 years!), I have found an alarming trend. While you'd expect measured microplastic concentration to be relatively similar no matter how you sample the water, I find orders of magnitude different concentrations can be measured at the same time and location with only a simple switch of methods. 

Related publication:
Watkins L, Sullivan PJ, Walter MT. 2021. What you net depends on if you grab: A meta-analysis of sampling method's impact on measured aquatic microplastic concentration. Environmental Science & Technology, 55 (19): 12930–12942 . DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.1c03019

Our goal is to identify whether beach plastic pollution is driven by land-based or ocean drivers. PhD student Tyler McCormack is creating the ocean model to complement PhD student Anya Sherman and undergraduate Frank Obando's beach samples. We are also working with The Plastic Wave project to fine-tune their citizen science methods so community members' data can help answer these scientific questions, too!
I advise this interdisciplinary, international team. 

Related publication:
TBD! 

We found that dams had significant local effects on microplastic concentration (plastics seemed to settle out of the water and into the sediment behind dams). It didn't appear that upstream dams affected the amount of plastics at downstream dams though. Susan McGrattan & Anna-Katharina von Krauland + other students were the all-stars that made this work possible! 

Related publication:
Watkins L, McGrattan S, Sullivan PJ, Walter MT. (2019). The effect of dams on river transport of microplastic pollution. Science of the Total Environment, 664:834-840. DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.02.028 

I advised this impressive undergraduate thesis by Gray Ryan, and together we crafted it into a published piece. We found that the ratio of food-to-plastic in fish stomachs was higher than that ratio in the water. That told us fish were seeking out food and avoiding plastics when they foraged. 

Related publication:
Ryan MG, Watkins L, Walter MT. (2019). Hudson River juvenile Blueback herring avoid ingesting microplastics. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 146:935-939. DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2019.07.004 

To investigate how timing of sampling may affect microplastic concentrations measured, I coordinated 18 volunteers sampling over two 24 hour periods. We learned that time of day doesn't affect microplastic concentration, but that seasonal high flows come with lower concentrations of plastics. 

Related publication:
Watkins L, Sullivan PJ, Walter MT. (2019). A case study investigating temporal factors that influence microplastic concentrations in streams under different treatment regimes. Environmental Science and Pollution Research, 26:21797-21807. DOI: 10.1007/s11356-019-04663-8 

As an intern-turned-consultant with Environmental Defense Fund, I created an easy to use mapping tool in ESRI ArcMap that allowed policy makers to calculate (for different states and regions) what demographic groups lived in different proximities to oil & gas extraction sites. 

Related publication:
Proville J, Roberts K, Peltz A, Trask E, Watkins L, Wiersma D. (2022). The demographic characteristics of populations living near oil and gas wells in the USA. Population and Environment. DOI: 10.1007/s11111-022-00403-2 

I generated flood risk ratings for field-measured culverts across counties in New York. I delivered these ratings to county governments, who then made decisions on prioritization of infrastructure upgrades based on the results. I also trained them on the use of the model I used to generate them (built in ESRI modelbuilder, ArcMap and Python). 

Related publication:
Truhlar AM, Marjerison RD, Gold DF, Watkins L, Archibald J, Lung ME, Meyer A, Walter MT. (2020). Rapid, remote assessment of culvert flooding risk. Journal of Sustainable Water in the Built Environment, 6(2). DOI: 10.1061/JSWBAY.0000900 

I managed a summer long, remote field campaign to sample river reaches across New York. Supervising 2 undergraduate researchers and coordinating with the director of the State's Trees for Tribs initiative, I led data collection, analysis and results delivery for this preliminary exploration.

Our unsatisfying answer was: maybe? 

Related publication:
Watkins, L. (July 2016). Monitoring Riparian Restoration:  Trees for Tribs in the Hudson and beyond. Report submitted to NYS DEC Trees for Tribs, March 2017. 

I founded a cooperative bike space that functioned as a teaching-oriented bicycle maintenance 'shop', an abandoned bicycle rehabilitation & adoption program, and a hub for group rides, bike films, taco nights and various other forms of community-campus interactions around bicycles. I secured funding through Clemson University transportation department and tire giant, The Michelin Group. It has changed over the years since I left, but over 5 years after I moved away, I'm proud to say it is still going strong. 

https://www.clemson.edu/campus-life/parking/students/recyclery.html 

A project from college: I won a $5000 grant for our proposal for a zero-waste football stadium experience. Though the system is yet to be implemented at Clemson University, in the process of writing our proposal, we networked with waste managers and sustainability directors at Clemson, Ohio State University and Colorado State University.