Linda Ann Deegan is an estuarine and arctic ecologist with expertise in freshwater inputs, food web interactions, eutrophication, estuaries, and coastal processes.
Her research combines ecosystem perspectives, energy flows, and community dynamics to tackle issues such as the effects of habitat degradation on fish communities, the importance of fish in exporting nutrients and carbon in estuaries, and the response of upper trophic levels to increased nutrient trends in arctic landscapes.
Deegan earned her bachelor of science in biology from Northeastern University in 1976, where she worked on mummichog in the Plum Island estuary.
As of 2009 Deegan has served as the director of the Comparative Analysis of Marine Ecosystem Organization (CAMEO), a joint NSF and NOAA program.
[2] The project is the only coastal ecosystem-scale nutrient addition experiment in the world, as it adds chemical fertilizers to regions of the marsh in order to examine the impact on the ecosystem.