Denise Breitburg

Denise Breitburg is an American marine ecologist specializing in the effects of deoxygenation on marine systems and organisms such as oysters and jellyfish. She is Scientist Emeritus, at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC).

Career
She received a B.S. in biology from Arizona State University and an M.A. in Biology and Ph.D. in biology from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is adjunct professor at University of Maryland, College Park.

Breitburg has made a specialty of studying the "dead zones" that occur in fresh water, and particularly in the Chesapeake Bay.

She has studied sustainable oyster harvesting, and the impact of non-native species. Her team's work on the oyster population in the Chesapeake Bayhas revealed, "... the oldest shells in Native American middens in the area dated to 3,200 years ago. They also measured the size of the oysters, to see if they were harvested before they reached full size. The results of the study suggest oysters were much larger hundreds of thousands of years ago than they are today, but they didn’t decrease in size between 3,200 and 400 years ago, when Native Americans were harvesting them."Her lab is currently studying effects of low dissolved oxygen on interactions and distributions of Chesapeake Bay organisms, potential effects of oyster decline and restoration on the Chesapeake Bay food web, how multiple stressors related to human activities influence coastal systems, how the complexity of food webs influences responses of coastal systems to stress, how links among regions of the estuarine landscape influence gelatinous zooplankton population dynamics, and how to improve oyster restoration.