Nadja Steiner is a member of the OceanCanada Research Committee and the National Data and Integrated Scenarios (NDIS) Working Group. Within OceanCanada’s Changing Oceans Cross-cutting Theme (CCT), she is leading a study on the impacts of climate change on local communities in the western Canadian Arctic. She works as a research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), located at the Institute of Ocean Sciences (IOS) in Sidney, BC, with a temporary assignment at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (CCCma).
She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. Originally from Germany, Nadja did her PhD on modelling sea ice roughness at the Institute of Marine Research in Kiel, and came to Canada in 2000 to work within the Arctic Ocean Model Intercomparison Project at IOS. She continued as a postdoctoral fellow within the Canadian Surface Ocean Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS), where she began modelling ecosystem and gas exchange processes. She now works on the development of coupled atmosphere-ocean ecosystem models to study marine sulphur and carbon cycles in the north Pacific and Arctic oceans.
In collaboration with CCCma’s Canadian Earth System Modelling group, she is developing parameterizations for Arctic marine ecosystems and evaluates marine ecosystem responses to climate change. She is a contributing author of AMAP’s recent and upcoming Arctic Ocean Acidification assessments as well as the AMAP Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic (AACA) assessment. In addition, she leads the Arctic trends and projections assessment of DFO’s Aquatic Climate Change Adaptation Services Program and is co-chair of the research community Biogeochemical Exchange Processes at Sea-Ice Interfaces (BEPSII), previously SCOR-WG 140.
As an active chair within the Canadian Science and advisory secretariat (Pacific) for processes in support of Canada’s Marine Protected Area Network, she investigates the development of risk indicators, marine ecological classification systems, and the identification of ecologically and biologically significant areas. Nadja is OceanCanada’s link to the important work of the Arctic Council and AMAP and leads the contribution of our Partnership to ongoing Arctic research led by AMAP.