James Holmquist
Research Staff
(443) 482-2267
Specialty
Coastal Wetland Carbon Science and Mapping The SERC campus will be closed to the public on Saturdays 12/9/2023, 12/23/2023, 1/6/2024, and 1/20/2024 for our annual forest management.
The Woodlawn History Center is open Friday and Saturday, 10:00am - 2:00pm. Read Plan Your Visit for information on where to park, updated maps, safety, and more.
Wetlands are historically undervalued resources that have been ditched, drained, diked and extracted at the long-term cost of their many valuable services such as habitat, coastal protection, water quality improvement, and my focus, carbon storage. I am an ecologist specializing in wetlands and climate change issues at the ecosystem scale. I earned a BA in Biology from Loyola Marymount University, where I was also an undergraduate researcher in the Ballona Wetlands. During my Biology PhD work at University of California, Los Angeles, I began to research feedbacks between wetland landscapes, atmosphere, and climate on millennial time scales. I wrote my dissertation on the Holocene-length history of peat initiation, carbon storage, and hydrology of remote boreal peat bogs in Northern Ontario, Canada. As a postdoc at UCLA, and now at SERC, I lead efforts to measure carbon storage rates in coastal wetlands using dated sediment cores, as well as contribute to models of coastal resilience in the face of projected sea-level rise. I am currently funded by NASA Carbon Monitoring Systems improve our accounting of coastal wetland carbon storage in the US.