Dr. Erin Kinney is a Manager of Coastal Resilience and Communities and a Senior Research Scientist. She specializes in coastal and climate impacts to communities and ecosystems and communicating data and resilience strategies to stakeholders. Her research interests include how water use and distribution impacts communities and coastal ecology, how land use change and climate impacts coastal systems and communities near them, wetland loss, conversion and restoration, carbon and nitrogen cycling in wetlands, and how to make communities and ecosystems more resilient. Dr. Kinney leads stakeholder outreach efforts for the Galveston Bay Report Card and The State of the Bay for the Galveston Bay Estuary Program.
Dr. Kinney is interested in how water resources, and data, are managed and prioritized in Texas and the Gulf region and how integrated water management planning can provide adequate water resources for humans, industry, and the environment. She participates in working groups for the Texas Water Data Initiative, the Houston One Water Cohort, and Texas One Water, as well as the Galveston Bay Estuary Program subcommittees. Her key research projects for HARC include the Galveston Bay Estuary Program’s State of the Bay, the Galveston Bay Report Card, the Galveston Bay Estuary Resilience Assessment and Action Plan, Identifying Coastal Acidification in Galveston Bay, the For Us Tree project, Leading with Equity in Adaptation Practice (LEAP), and the Texas Litter Database.
Dr. Kinney graduated with a Doctorate in Biology from the Boston University Marine Program, and a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental and Evolutionary Biology from Dartmouth College.
She previously worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the department of Marine Biology at Texas A&M University at Galveston, and at the Ecosystem Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA.
