Fellow spotlight: Lia Domke

Lia Domke is an Alaska Sea Grant State Fellow with the Habitat Conservation Division of NOAA’s Alaska Regional Office in her hometown of Juneau. The Habitat Conservation Division promotes healthy and resilient coastal communities and ecosystems through conserving habitat. Domke is working to advance understanding of essential nearshore fish habitat while pursuing her interests in marine management, policy and research.

Domke’s fellowship work dovetails with the completion of her PhD in fisheries from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she is researching nearshore fish communities and their associated habitats. During her fellowship, she has been able to share her research, including in a recorded NOAA Central Library seminar titled, “The Role of Apex Predators, Habitat and Seascape Complexity on Nearshore Fish Assemblages in Southeast Alaska.”

During her fellowship, Domke has been developing a standardized sampling protocol for surveying nearshore ecosystems in Alaska. Through conversations and collaborations with researchers and nearshore ecologists from the Habitat Conservation Division, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, National Park Service and nonprofit organizations, she has identified and described methodologies consistently employed to sample nearshore fish communities. The resulting manual is intended to guide the Habitat Conservation Division and project partners’ study designs and sampling protocols, notably projects that contribute to the Nearshore Fish Atlas of Alaska. Establishing consistent protocols for sampling nearshore fishes is critical in detecting short-term and long-term changes in species densities, identifying areas of high productivity, predicting shifts in species distributions and better managing coastal resources.

As part of fisheries management, researchers in the Habitat Conservation Division develop species distribution models to identify essential fish habitat, and Domke has been able to collaborate on the development of species distribution models for nearshore fish life-stages. She attended a North Pacific Fisheries Management Council meeting to better understand implementation of these models and application of fisheries management in federally managed waters around Alaska.

“Through professional development opportunities both with the NOAA Habitat Conservation Division and Alaska Sea Grant, I have been able to foster personal and professional relationships within the scientific community throughout Alaska,” Domke said. “These relationships have already been invaluable for my career progression and cultivation of scientific collaborations.”

Prior to graduate school, Domke worked as a field and research technician with Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Forest Service. She received a bachelor’s in marine biology and international development studies from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.