The effects of climate change on the northward range expansion of smallmouth bass (Micropterus dolomieu) and the consequential impacts on native fish populations (2007)
As of 2021, Sharma is a recipient of the Provostial Fellowship[4] at York University. Sharma's project, "Working Towards Equitable Access to Clean Water", will combine student and staff efforts in raising awareness and identifying solutions to poor access to clean water around the world.[4]
Research
Sharma's research takes interdisciplinary, team science,[5] Citizen Science,[6] and data synthesis approaches to examine and predict the effects of environmental stressors on ecosystems. She has led the assembly, integration and analysis of large, long-term aquatic datasets that enable
meta-analysis on a global scale. This approach has revealed how
climate change is producing abiotic and biotic seasonal changes (
phenology). Sharma's research group also examines how to improve the quantitative approaches used to generate these predictions.
Sharma's research on
climate change and
global warming has examined shrinking ice cover of freshwater lakes, and how fish distributions will be affected by a warming climate. The relation of ice cover loss to its impact on recreational ice skating in northern countries such as Canada, the United States, Sweden and Norway was widely covered in international media,[7][8][9][10][11] as well as local news outlets in communities directly impacted by her research.[12][13] Her work on the impact to freshwater fisheries projected that in
Ontario alone climate change would impact the trout fishery in over 1,600 lakes by 2050, and 9,700 by 2100.[14]