Creed studies the impacts of global climate change on ecosystem functions and services, often focusing on the hydrology of freshwater wetlands and catchments.
From 2022 to 2024, she held the distinguished Wallenberg Professorship awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry for contributions to the recognition and promotion of wetlands as nature-based climate solutions.
[10] Creed has served on numerous Canadian and international advisory boards, panels, delegations and committees, including for the Canadian Wetlands Roundtable, the Government of Alberta Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas, Alberta Innovates, the International Joint Commission, and United Nations High-Level Political Forums on Sustainable Development.
Using unique suite of methodologies and statistics, Creed and her lab discovered the variation of nutrient sources areas in catchments and where changes in the soil redox environment affect the exchange of greenhouse gases from and into the atmosphere.
[23] This work utilized International Organization of Standardization (ISO) tools in order to gain a better understanding of the risks associated with natural resource extraction in the region.
[24] Creed has led two reviews that set research agendas for improving the scientific understanding of global change effects on freshwaters, focusing on hydrological and biogeochemical processes controlling the downstream movement of from headwaters to large rivers, proposing a conceptual model explaining the observation that rivers show a tendency towards chemostats,[25] and examining the effects of global changes on the browning of lakes.
[26] Creed was part of a team of international scientists who reviewed existing understanding of pressures on the world's freshwater ecosystems in the face of a global freshwater aquatic biodiversity crisis, and documented twelve new or intensifying threats to these ecosystems including global climate change and harmful algal blooms in a highly cited peer-reviewed article in Biological Reviews.
[27] Creed has published numerous articles in her studies to identify many of the conditions that provide cyanobacteria a competitive advantage over other algae,[28][29] including higher temperatures, hydrological intensification, and iron limitations,[28][30] which give rise to harmful algal blooms in northern temperate forest lakes.
Aspects of this argument were presented in a series of high impact peer-reviewed articles urging policy makers to develop management strategies that recognize and protect these vulnerable waters.