expanding the science of river ecology
News
- November 2025: Open Graduate Assistantship to study the thermal landscape of rivers starting January 2026. Duties: To quantify water temperature fluctuations in response to different forestry practices and land-use/land-cover, the student selected for this project will be trained to process remote sensing imagery to characterize the thermal landscape of rivers and assess spatial and multi-year variation in summer water temperature. The selected student will help prepare manuscripts for peer-reviewed publication, present results at professional conferences, provide support as a teaching assistant, and complete the requirements for an M.S. degree in 2-2.5 years. If the student already has an MS degree, it could also be converted to a Ph.D. position, depending on the candidate’s background and goals. Qualifications: A bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering, forest engineering, agricultural engineering, environmental sciences, geosciences, geography, or a related field, and knowledge of remote sensing and satellite imagery analytical tools are required. Technical expertise using ArcGIS Pro, Python, and Google Earth Engine is highly desirable. Excellent oral and written English communication skills are required. To apply: please send an email with the subject line “river thermal landscapes” to Dr. Sandra Correa (sbc257@msstate.edu) and Dr. Padmanava Dash (pd175@msstate.edu) with the following documents: (1) cover letter or statement of purpose describing experiential background, career goals, and project interest; (2) resume; (3) email addresses and phone numbers for three references; (4) copy of college transcripts; (5) TOEFL or IELTS and GRE scores (optional). The successful candidate will be required to submit a formal application and official transcripts to MSU Graduate School.
- January 2025: Aaron Johnson and Adrian Munoz joined the Correa River Ecology Lab to pursue their M.S. degrees. Welcome both! Check out their profiles under the lab’s Team page.
- September 2024: PI Sandra Correa traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, to participate in a meeting of the Multidisciplinary Expert Scientific Advisory Group for the Seventh Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7) hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
- August 2024: PI Sandra Correa traveled to the Colombian Amazon to launch the Fruit for Fish research project in collaboration with the National University of Colombia-Leticia and Florida International University. The project is funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
- PI Sandra Correa presented “Floodplain forests drive fruit-eating fish diversity at the Amazon Basin scale” at the 8th Frugivores and Seed Dispersal Symposium in Bahia, Brazil.
- Camren Fraser joined the Correa River Ecology Lab to pursue a M.S. degree. Welcome Camren! Check out his profile under the lab’s Team page.
- May 2024: PI Sandra Correa traveled to Manaus, the Brazilian Amazon, to participate in the Amazon Waters Week organized by the Wildlife Conservation Society.
- March 2024: PI Sandra Correa, Josh Granger (faculty member of the Department of Forestry at MSU), and Sitha Som traveled to Cambodia to conduct research funded by the USFS Asia-Pacific program, in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society. The project investigates the biological and socio-economic significance of floodplain forests.
- August 2023: Sitha Som joined the Correa River Ecology Lab to pursue a Ph.D. degree. Welcome Sitha! Check out his profile under the lab’s Team page.
- July 2023: PI Sandra Correa traveled to French Guiana to participate in a TV documentary series on forests worldwide and the ecological interactions that maintain them. An episode on Amazonian forests highlights her research on seed dispersal by fish.
- June 2023: PI Sandra Correa visited Pablo Tedesco’s Lab at the University Paul Sabatier, Institute of Research for Development – Evolution and Biological Diversity, in France. We are currently collaborating on the Forest-Fisher Project sponsored by the European Union.
- May 2023: PI Sandra Correa joined collaborators of the Forest-Fisher Project sponsored by the European Union, focusing on conservation planning for fruit-eating fish in the Amazon Basin, for a project update meeting in Braganca, Portugal.
Mar 2023: PI Sandra Correa was invited to give a plenary talk at the VI Colombian Meeting of Zoology, Monteria, Cordoba. Conservación de ríos funcionales y biodiversos en el Antropoceno.
- October 2022: Our lab completed one year of monthly sampling of larval and juvenile fish in floodplain forests of the Pascagoula River, Mississippi.
- May 2022: Congratulations to undergraduate research assistants Haley Blische, Autumn Carroll, Alicia Waters, and graduate research assistant Laura Horowitz on their graduation from Mississippi State University’s College of Forest Resources.
- Mar 2022: Congratulations to MS student Laura Horowitz for defending her thesis entitled “Stress response and recovery of Atlantic Tarpon (Megalops Atlanticus) to catch-and-release angling“.
- Oct 2021: We are launching our Community Fisheries Assessment Tool iFISH. Check out our data visualization App for the Sre Ambel River Fishery, Cambodia.
- Oct 2021: Our lab visited the Pascagoula River in Mississippi to select sampling sites for a new project funded by the Eppley Foundation for Research that investigates whether flooded forests provide critical habitat for fish in early life stages.
- Jan 2021: Congratulations to MS student Conner Owens for defending his thesis entitled “Investigating ecological links between floodplain forests and aquatic communities“.
- July 2020: PI Sandra Correa was invited to help lead an initiative to identify Aquatic Conservation Targets for the Amazon. This is a collaborative effort with Dr. Elizabeth Anderson (Florida International University) and Dr. Michael Goulding (The Wildlife Conservation Society), sponsored by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. We are creating a network of approximately 20 scientists focusing on three teams: Amazon-Andes Connectivity, Fisheries and Aquatic Biodiversity, and Floodplain Ecosystems.
- Feb 2020: PI Sandra Correa was invited to join the Science Panel for the Amazon, organized by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a Global Initiative for the United Nations. The goal of this Panel is to synthesize information on the state of Amazon’s ecosystems and make recommendations for the conservation and sustainable development of the Amazon region through a Science Report presented to the next United Nations Biodiversity Conference to be held in China in 2021.
- Feb 2020: PI Sandra Correa and collaborators from Mississippi State University (Wes Neal, Peter Allen, Thu Dinh, Wes Schilling) and the Wildlife Conservation Society-Cambodia (Sitha Som and Simon Mahood) received an award from the USAID-Fish Innovation Lab to work on fisheries management and food security in the Sre Ambel River, a coastal river in Cambodia.
- Jan 2020: MS student Conner Owens received a Grant in Aid of Research from the prestigious Sigma-Xi, The Scientific Research Society, to support his research on food webs in the Pascagoula River, MS.
- Dec 2019: MS student Conner Owens received a Student Research Scholarship from the Mississippi Chapter of the American Fisheries Society to support his research on food webs in the Pascagoula River, MS.
- Oct 2019: PI Sandra Correa received an award from the Eppley Foundation for Research to support research on riverine and estuarine food webs in the Gulf of Mexico.v
Press Releases
July 2018: An Ancient Alliance of Fish and Forest in the Amazon Is in Danger. By: Bhanu Sridharan, The Wire. Some species of fish specialized in eating fruits and dispersing their seeds far and wide 65 million years before birds and bats did. Now, they’re disappearing from the water, threatening the survival of the forest. Read more.
https://thewire.in/environment/amazon-rainforest-tambaqui-frugivorous-fish-manaus-dams
June 2018: These Fish Keep Forests Alive—And Fishing Threatens Them. By: Adam Popescu, National Geographic. Scientists have found that many South American forests rely on large fish to transport their seeds—and that may put them at risk. Read more.