Marcia Macedo

Marcia N. Macedo is currently the director of the Water Program at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Her research largely focuses on how land use management and agricultural expansion along with climate change affect connections between aquatic ecosystems and upland tropical forests. She is a first generation American with Brazilian roots.

Early life and education
Macedo’s grandparents were from the Amazon Region and she spent a significant portion of her childhood in Brazil. When she visited the Amazon for the first time at age 12, she instantly fell in love with its diversity, animals, and food. It was then when she realized she wanted to be a scientist. A decade and a half later, Macedo returned to the Amazon—this time to Suriname—to research the social structure of spider monkeys and their impact on the ecosystem. Based on her understanding of the harmful environmental impacts of processes such as gold mining and deforestation, she assisted conservation efforts to protect Amazonian spider monkeys and other primates.

In 1998, Macedo graduated from Duke University with a B.S. in biology. While studying at Duke, she was also a researcher at the Duke University Medical Center, as well as a research assistant at the university’s Primate Center. She earned her M.S. in sustainable development and conservation biology in 2001 from the University of Maryland, College Park. Around this time, she was a research assistant at Amazon Conservation Association for a year before joining the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Andes-Amazon Initiative where she worked as a program officer until 2006.

Career
After earning her Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology at Columbia University in 2011, Macedo began her position as an assistant scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center. Currently, she serves as an associate scientist and the Water Program Director. She is also a research associate at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Belém, Brazil. Macedo uses satellite data, modeling, and field observations to make land-use decisions.

Research
As an ecosystem ecologist, her current research explores land-use dynamics in both the Amazon and Cerrado ecoregions, with a particular emphasis on the environmental and societal drawbacks to agricultural extensification and intensification amidst climate change. In the Arctic, she is interested in examining how ponds are affected by wildfires. Last month, Macedo and three other scientists, under the leadership of Abra Atwood, were awarded grant funding for their project on how air temperature and land-use changes, such as housing development and the establishment of cranberry bogs, affects temperatures of coastal rivers in Massachusetts.

Macedo works at a field station run by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in the southeastern Amazon. While she is grateful that approximately half of the Amazon has some type of legal protection (either as a protected area or Indigenous land), she says that more needs to be done to halt the rapid ecosystem changes and shifts caused by anthropogenic climate change. Macedo believes collaborative, immediate action is vital in tackling climate change, and encourages people to support organizations working in countries that are most threatened by climate change.

Other activities
Macedo shares her research discoveries with diverse audiences, such as through The Climate Source project, which helps translate the information into understandable language for Indigenous communities and government land managers that provide training materials. Additionally, Macedo has participated in Indigenous-focused events at United Nations climate meetings. She is a member of a United Nations working group that discusses sustainable development in the Amazon. Macedo has also written popular science articles for the New York Times, including an article she co-wrote with Brazilian activist and policy expert Valéria Paye Pereira titled "We Know How to Stop the Fires," which was part of "The Amazon Has Seen Our Future" opinion series.

Whenever Macedo does field work in the Amazon, she loves spending time with her family and friends.

Awards
Macedo was a Fulbright Program at the University of Brasília and a recipient of the CHANS-Net Fellow Award.