About Stephanie Andrews

Stephanie Andrews is a Climate Scientist and Systems Specialist with NexSens Technology. She read Geography at the University of Cambridge (MA Cantab), where she was also sub-editor of the Geography department’s magazine, Compass. Andrews joined the Environmental Monitor Staff in 2024, focusing on highlighting environmental monitoring efforts across the world and NexSens user stories. In her free time, she enjoys exploring new places, scuba diving, and gymnastics.

Articles By Stephanie Andrews

The buoy systems play an integral role in monitoring the environmental impact and efficacy of OAE efforts in Halifax Harbor.

Earth

A Powerful Solution? Buoys Tracking the Potential of Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement

The climate is a complex network of interconnected systems. Halting the cascading impacts of climate change is not as straightforward as cutting anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Even if these emissions ceased entirely today, it would take many thousands of years for carbon dioxide (CO2) to return to pre-industrial levels....

Posted October 29, 2025

These systems are providing the first real-time tide data since legacy systems failed, providing valuable insight for local officials and regional RIMES monitoring.

Oceans

New Tide Gauges Bring Real-Time Ocean Data to Timor-Leste’s Shores

Timor-Leste is a growing country in Southeast Asia that occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor. Since its emergence in 2002 as the first new sovereign state of the 21st century, it has made “significant progress in key areas.” In August 2025, two real-time oceanographic and meteorological...

Posted October 6, 2025

Lake Geneva’s depth (over 300m at its deepest point) makes it a good place to measure waves without bathymetric influences, and is sometimes called the “pocket ocean".

Lakes

What’s Floating on Lake Geneva? How LéXPLORE is Revolutionizing Lake Science

Lake Geneva (or Lac Léman) was formed some 15,000 years ago by retreating glaciers and is shared between France and Switzerland. Fringed by vineyard terraces and overlooked by both the Jura Mountains and the Alps, the lake is popular with visitors who come to enjoy the sights and recreation....

Posted September 3, 2025

The CURBY on the Potomac River. It provided environmental observing support to aid teams working on-site.

Rivers

How NOAA’s CURBY Aided Recovery Efforts After the 2025 DCA Plane Crash

On the evening of January 29, 2025, a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight collided midair over the Potomac River on the final approach into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in Virginia, five miles from Washington, D.C. The incident marked the first major U.S. commercial airline crash...

Posted August 27, 2025

Two beavers sit in the hollowed-out interior of a large felled tree in the middle of one of their ponds.

Wetlands

Eager Beavers: Reintroducing Beavers to London for the First Time in Over 400 Years

Beavers are celebrated ecological engineers. Famously, they fell trees to access their primary food source–bark and leaves–and to build dams which trap sediment, creating ponds and meadows rich in biodiversity. Like humans, beavers initiate landscape-scale transformations, and their activities shape their surroundings, leaving a legacy for those that come...

Posted August 20, 2025

Adjustments being made to one of the systems, which sits at a tunnel mouth.

Earth

30 Minutes to Act: University City’s Award-Winning Flash Flood Prediction System

Flooding is already the deadliest severe weather hazard in Missouri, and under high-emissions scenarios, the central US is predicted to emerge as a flash flooding hotspot. University City, a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, is “violently” and “frequently” flooded by the River Des Peres, as Eric Karch–a civil engineer...

Posted August 11, 2025

The NexSens XB-200 “Smart Buoy” was deployed at White Lake in June 2025.

Lakes

New Buoy Boosts White Lake’s Water Quality Monitoring and Conservation

White Lake in Western Michigan is a vestige of North America’s glacial past, and gets its name from an interpretation of the Indian, “Wabish-Sippe,” meaning the river with white clay. The twin towns of Whitehall and Montague, which nestle on White Lake’s shore, have shared a close connection with...

Posted July 28, 2025

One type of station set-up, showing a radar water level sensor, weather station, water sampler, nutrient analyzer, and sondes for temperature, turbidity, conductivity, soil moisture and rainfall.

Lakes

Pushing Lake Science Upstream: Agriculture and Algal Blooms at Lake Erie

Lake Erie is the shallowest, most productive, and most southern of the Laurentian Great Lakes. Each summer, it suffers an algal bloom so large it can be seen from space. Since the 1960s, excess phosphorus—about 85% from agriculture—has fueled harmful algal blooms (HABs) typically between July and October. These...

Posted July 14, 2025

Lakes

From Paddles to Phytoplankton: Studying Vermont’s Wildest Lakes

For six months of the year, Rachel Cray, a third-year PhD student at the Vermont Limnology Laboratory at the University of Vermont, lives between a microscope and her laptop, running data. For the other six months, she is hiking and canoeing four of Vermont’s lakes, collecting bi-weekly water samples....

Posted July 7, 2025

A dock-mounted real-time monitoring station that is used to collect data on red tides.

Wetlands

From Hurricanes to Florida’s Red Tides: Monitoring the Southwest Gulf Coast

Nearly every year, southwest Florida is blighted by harmful Karenia brevis blooms–known colloquially as Florida red tides. These harmful algal blooms (HABs) form over the West Florida shelf and are pushed shorewards by winds and currents. Once in touching distance of the coast, they often intensify, fed by land-based...

Posted June 25, 2025

Monitoring station at Bound Brook, along the Herring River.

Wetlands

No Red Herrings: Data Driving the Largest Salt Marsh Restoration in the NE USA

The Herring River system encompasses around 1,000 acres in the Towns of Wellfleet and Truro, Massachusetts. In 1909, the Chequessett Neck Road dike was built at the river’s mouth, drastically limiting tidal flow. Today, it’s one of the most restricted estuaries in the northeastern United States. As a result,...

Posted June 16, 2025

The FAMU-SOE NexSens buoy is deployed in an important oyster faming area. Through an ongoing relationship, students, researchers, and farmers, are all able to glean environmental insights from the data it provides. Credit: The School of the Environment.

Oceans

Floating Global New Ideas: Buoy-Enabled Research at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University’s School of the Environment

Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), based in Tallahassee, Florida, is the highest-rated public Historically Black College or University in the United States. FAMU’s School of the Environment (FAMU-SOE) offers BS and BA degrees in Environmental Studies, and BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in Environmental Science, with specialisms available...

Posted May 28, 2025

NexSens Applications Scientist Joe Davidson assisting the Miami University team with the deployment of the XB-200 data buoy.

Fish Science

Three Decades of Research at Acton Lake

A multi-disciplinary team at Miami University, Ohio, has been studying the environmental change at Acton Lake for over three decades. Using three different NexSens buoys over this time, the team has an incredible archive of data that is helping build a picture of Acton’s past, present, and future. Until...

Posted May 21, 2025

Rivers

Data-Driven Advocacy on the Lower Deschutes River

Like many freshwater environments, the Deschutes River in Oregon is under pressure from development, pollution, and climate change. Many rivers, streams and lakes in the Deschutes Basin do not meet Oregon water quality standards–where state water quality monitoring assesses levels of bacteria, pH, dissolved oxygen, temperature, and fine sediment....

Posted April 28, 2025

A bridge with a rushing river below it and a flood monitoring system.

Earth

Safeguarding Communities with Real-Time Flood Monitoring in the City of Hazelwood

The City of Hazelwood is a suburb in St. Louis County, Missouri, home to around 25,500 people. Recently, the community has suffered increased flash flooding following severe storms, prompting the need for the installation of a flood monitoring system. In 2022, a NexSens X2 data logger was installed to...

Posted April 7, 2025

A drain running through a bog. Loss of water shrinks the peat and contributes to drying, which increases carbon emissions. As the bog dries, non-peat-building flora proliferate.

Earth

Save our Bogs! Culture, Conservation and Climate Action in Ireland’s Peatlands

Characterized by long-term accumulation under waterlogged conditions, peatlands exist on every continent and account for 3-4% of the global land surface. Small but mighty, these often overlooked wetland environments are estimated to hold as much as one-third of the world’s organic carbon in their soil—twice the amount found in...

Posted March 31, 2025

A sargassum mat fills a bay in Barbados.

Oceans

Sargassum Surge: How Seaweed is Transforming our Oceans and Coastal Ecosystems

Until recently, Sargassum–a free-floating seaweed–was distributed throughout the Sargasso Sea, the north Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico. But in the space of a decade, this seaweed has, as one scientist remarks, “Gone from a nonfactor to the source of a terrible crisis.” Driven by climate change, anomalous...

Posted March 24, 2025

Tunnel Boring Machine, "Ursula," lifted from the site at Chambers Wharf, Bermondsey.

Rivers

A Drop in the Ocean: Restoring London’s Tidal Thames

The United Kingdom has grappled with wastewater management problems for decades. Although sewage treatment in the 20th century allowed many rivers, including the tidal Thames, to have healthy fish populations, combined sewer overflows into rivers–most commonly during heavy rainfall–affected water quality and occasionally even killed fish. Problems reached a...

Posted February 17, 2025

Orcas passing a buoy in Whangārei Harbor.

Oceans

Have You Heard? AI Buoys Revolutionizing Marine Mammal Monitoring in Whangārei Harbor, New Zealand

In one history, Whangārei Harbor, nestled in the lush hills of New Zealand’s North Island, gets its name from the Māori, “waiting for the breastbone of the whale.” It seems fitting, then, that it’s now home to state-of-the-art acoustic monitoring buoys listening for marine mammals around the clock. In...

Posted February 12, 2025

Remedial works underway in a freshwater habitat to shore up the banks.

Fish Science

Bringing Fish Back: Reviving Britain’s Freshwater Habitats with the Wild Trout Trust

Freshwater covers less than 1% of the Earth’s surface but has an outsized impact on global ecosystems, supporting more than 10% of all known species, reports the World Wildlife Fund. Freshwater environments such as rivers and wetlands provide significant scientific, economic, and cultural value. But pressure from climate change,...

Posted February 3, 2025