Rate My Professor Meredith Steele

Meredith K. Steele is an Associate Professor and Associate Director of Undergraduate Programs in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Virginia Tech. She earned two B.S. degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2004, one in Environmental Science and Policy and the other in Agriculture and Natural Resource Economics, followed by an M.S. in Soil Science from the University of Maryland in 2007 and a Ph.D. in Urban Biogeochemistry from Texas A&M University in 2011. After completing her doctorate, she held a Postdoctoral Associate position at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University from 2012 to 2013. In 2013, she joined Virginia Tech as an Assistant Professor of Landscape Ecosystem Services in the Department of Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences as part of a cluster hire focused on water issues and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2023. Steele teaches CSES/ENSC 3134: Soils in the Landscape and ENSC 3604: Fundamentals of Environmental Science. She serves as Treasurer for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Association for 2024-2025 and as a Subject-matter Editor for Ecosphere journal in the area of Macrosystems Ecology. In January 2024, she was named the Graduate School’s Faculty Mentor of the Month for her outstanding support of graduate students.

Steele’s research focuses on macrosystems ecology and biogeochemistry in urban and agricultural landscapes, examining how development influences land, water, ecosystem services, and biogeochemical cycles at broad scales. Her current projects explore urban salinization effects on water quality and ecosystem function, urban morphology heterogeneity under changing climate conditions and implications for ecosystem services, multi-scale drivers of nutrient exports from United States watersheds, and global macroscale soil biogeochemical cycling. Key publications include "Historically inconsistent productivity and respiration fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems" (Nature Communications, 2022, cited by 72), "Urban soil carbon and nitrogen converge at a continental scale" (Ecological Monographs, 2020, cited by 63), "Continental-scale homogenization of residential lawn plant communities" (Landscape and Urban Planning, 2017, cited by 177), and "Assessing the homogenization of urban land management planning in a state-wide extent" (Landscape and Urban Planning, 2014, cited by 159). She has co-developed global databases such as the Monthly Global Soil Respiration Database (MGRsD) and Hourly and Daily Timescale Global Soil Respiration Data (HGRsD), both released in 2021. Her scholarship, with over 3,000 citations, informs updates to ecosystem models for climate change predictions.