Ella Gatfield’s an interdisciplinary ecologist, writer, and environmental educator living in the mixing zone where the glaciated North Atlantic salt marshes meet the metaphor of the page. Her work is a practice of sustained, sometimes obsessive attention to the natural world, dissecting micro to macro entanglements that translate into environmental narrative.

From the Long Island coastline to the community food systems of the Bronx, Ella’s work is an iterative search for what it means to know a place. Whether restoring and educating about coastal habitats for Cornell Cooperative Extension Marine Program or co-directing the Food and Farm Hub at Riverdale Neighborhood House, she tracks the entanglements where ecology, ethics, and human presence collide.

Currently an M.A. Dean’s Scholar at NYU Gallatin, her research navigates the technical and the felt. Her master's thesis pairs fish eDNA research and data analysis of the Lower Hudson estuary with historical ecology and policy to reconstruct environmental baselines in the New York Atlantic region, anchored by field sampling on Governors Island with the Hudson River Park’s River Project. Funded by the Horn Family Fund for Environmental Research, she also spent this past summer gathering baseline environmental data and writing a creative anthology focused on Long Island salt marshes.

Ella writes the Substack newsletter Another Way Home and the monthly column “Field Notes” for The Southampton Press. She graduated with a First Class Honors in Environmental Journalism from the University of the West of England and is a graduate of the University of Vermont’s Farmer Training Program. When she isn’t behind a desk, she’s exploring coastal wetlands, baking, researching and cataloging species, reading, or tending to her garden allotment.