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Ecology

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How To Throw An (Almost) Zero-Waste Music Festival

Thursday, November 21st, 2019
African-American choir singing underneath a tent outside

A capella group Washington Revels Jubilee Voices, at the Chesapeake Music Festival.
(Credit: Kristen Minogue/SERC)

by Sarah Wade

This article originally appeared in the November issue of the Smithsonian’s Sustainability Matters newsletter.

One small bag that could fit into an office-sized trash can. That’s all the waste that remained after a concert with more than 300 attendees, over 50 staff and volunteers, eight performing groups and four food vendors. Surrounding it, eight recycling containers and four composting bins waited for pickup. By and large, the first Chesapeake Music Festival achieved its goal of near-zero waste, to the exhausted but happy relief of its organizers.

Months of effort went into that lone trash bag: working with vendors, buying supplies, and encouraging the public to bring their own water bottles to cut down on single-use plastics.

Part of the Smithsonian Year of Music, the Chesapeake Music Festival on Sept. 14 included performances from Don Shapelle, Jeff Holland and That West River Band, Washington Revels Jubilee Voices and other folk singers from around the Bay. But when the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and the Arundel Rivers Federation teamed up to hold it, they had an even loftier target: make it zero waste. Click to continue »

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What’s the Perfect Temperature
to Bake Your Soil?

Friday, November 15th, 2019
Woman and man standing in marsh; man holds up long soil core.

SERC postdoc Genevieve Noyce (left) and senior scientist Pat Megonigal hold up a soil core from SERC’s Global Change Research Wetland. (Credit: Sairah Malkin/Horn Point Laboratory)

by Kristen Minogue

Soils don’t get much credit for their work powering the environment. Even among scientists, they’re routinely overshadowed by their flashier plant neighbors. But as the planet heats up, hidden soil microbes are on the verge of giving plant growth a serious boost.

However, there’s a hiccup in the system. In a new global warming study, ecologist Genevieve Noyce discovered soils and plants are just a couple degrees out of synch.

It boils down to one crucial ingredient: nitrogen. Plants need nitrogen to grow, so it’s a major component of most fertilizers. In the absence of fertilizer, plants get their nitrogen from soil microbes. But they’re at the mercy of supply and demand. In most environments on land today, soil microbes can’t produce nitrogen fast enough to meet plant demand.

In a futuristic experiment, Noyce and her colleagues baked patches of wetland soil to see if that would change in a warmer world. Click to continue »

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Female Blue Crabs Are Running Low On Sperm—Unless They Die Young

Friday, October 25th, 2019

by Kristen Minogue

Blue crab with orange sponge on abdomen

A female blue crab can produce sponges like this three times a year, each with millions of eggs. But if male crabs are in short supply, she may not have enough sperm to fertilize all her eggs.
(Credit: SERC)

If you want to save a fishery, protect the females. That’s been the operating logic for decades among fishery managers, and with good reason: Females carry the next generation. Throw one mature female back, and she could produce thousands or millions more offspring. But for female blue crabs, the story isn’t always so simple.

In a study published Oct. 24, scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) confirmed that a potential snag is in fact happening in Chesapeake Bay. Without enough male blue crabs to go around, some females aren’t getting enough sperm to reach their full reproductive potential. If they survive past their first year of spawning, they risk running dry. Click to continue »

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Because of Her Story: Jane Lubchenco, Voice for the Ocean

Thursday, October 3rd, 2019
Woman in life preserver in front of iceberg

Jane Lubchenco in the Arctic. (Credit: NOAA)

by Kristen Minogue

This October, you’re invited to meet a woman who has spent decades working to save the ocean. The journey has taken her from the coasts of Oregon to Panama, New Zealand, South Africa and the Seychelles. Her name is Jane Lubchenco. In 2009, she broke ground as the first woman to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But her history with the ocean began long before that.

She’ll speak in person about the future of our global ocean on the evening of Oct. 15, as part of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative and the finale for the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s 2019 evening lectures. The full details are here. (Spoiler: It’s free.) But if you’d like a preview, here are a few snapshots from Lubchenco’s life, and her unconventional path to become one the most powerful people speaking up for the seas: Click to continue »

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How Gassy is the Ground? SERC Intern Burps Baby Forests for Greenhouse Gases

Wednesday, October 2nd, 2019
Young man kneeling in forest with yellow gas sampler

Smithsonian Environmental Research Center intern Chaz Rhodes samples gases in the soil with equipment he helped design and install. It’s part of a new long-term study seeking to untangle what drives changes in the methane budget in forest soils.

by Alison Haigh

When it comes to forests, most people think of soil as a static ingredient in a recipe for growing trees. But talk to any forest ecologist, soil scientist, or biogeochemist, and you’ll get a radically different idea about dirt.

Soils are more like living, breathing ecosystems. Their most abundant residents aren’t plants or insects—they’re microbes. Microbes may be small, but they play a mighty role, especially in the carbon budget: They help make forests the largest carbon sink on the planet. Click to continue »

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High Carbon Dioxide Can Create “Shrinking Stems” in Marshes

Wednesday, September 25th, 2019

Marshes Grow Shorter, Denser Stems Under High Carbon Dioxide, Which Can Help Them Resist Sea Level Rise

by Kristen Minogue

Man in sunglasses and green T-shirt sitting in a marsh holding a measuring stick

Ecologist Meng Lu measures green blades of sedge in SERC’s Global Change Research Wetland in Maryland. Lu led a discovery that under higher carbon dioxide, sedges like these grow shorter and thinner stems. (Credit: Maria Sharova/SERC)

For most plants, carbon dioxide acts like a steroid: The more they can take in, the bigger they get. But in a new study published Sept. 25, scientists with the Smithsonian discovered something strange happening in marshes. Under higher levels of carbon dioxide, instead of producing bigger stems, marsh plants produced more stems that were noticeably smaller.

“I don’t think anybody expected this,” said Meng Lu, lead author of the new study in the journal Nature Climate Change. For years, scientists had known that carbon dioxide was bulking up the total biomass of marsh plants, so it seemed natural to think individual plants were getting bigger too. “Everyone thought, okay, [plants] increased, biomass increased, so the height, width, all should increase. But that’s not the case in a marsh,” he said.

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Global Change is Triggering an Identity Switch in Grasslands

Monday, August 19th, 2019
Landscape view of grasslands under blue, cloudy sky

Konza Prairie Biological Station in northeast Kansas. (Credit: Kim Komatsu/SERC)

Scientists Discover Species Turnover in Study of More Than 100 Grassland Experiments

by Kristen Minogue

Since the first Homo sapiens emerged in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, grasslands have sustained humanity and thousands of other species. But today, those grasslands are shifting beneath our feet. Global change—which includes climate change, pollution and other widespread environmental alterations—is transforming the plant species growing in them, and not always in the ways scientists expected, a new study published Monday revealed.

Grasslands make up more than 40 percent of the world’s ice-free land. In addition to providing food for human-raised cattle and sheep, grasslands are home to animals found nowhere else in the wild, such as the bison of North America’s prairies or the zebras and giraffes of the African savannas. Grasslands also can hold up to 30 percent of the world’s carbon, making them critical allies in the fight against climate change. However, changes in the plants that comprise grasslands could put those benefits at risk.

“Is it good rangeland for cattle, or is it good at storing carbon?” said lead author Kim Komatsu, a grassland ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “It really matters what the identities of the individual species are….You might have a really invaded weedy system that would not be as beneficial for these services that humans depend on.” Click to continue »

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May The Forest Be With You—SERC’s ForestGEO Census

Thursday, August 1st, 2019

by Quinn Burkhart

We’ve known for years that many of Earth’s forests are dying out and struggling to replenish their populations. At the Forest Global Earth Observatory, or ForestGEO, scientists are attempting to get to the root of this issue. A global network of research sites and scientists, ForestGEO studies how climate change is affecting tropical and temperate forests globally. Worldwide, ForestGEO examines how forests are changing over time at 67 sites in 27 countries. This totals to about 12,000 species and six million trees. Click to continue »

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Sharks Debut on SERC Field Trip Menu

Friday, July 12th, 2019

by Kristen Minogue

Woman standing with stuffed shark, holding out plastic bits.

SERC education coordinator Karen McDonald shows the contents in a stuffed shark stomach: bits of bone, a toy turtle and plastic. (Credit: Kristen Minogue/SERC)

Move over, blue crabs. There’s a new predator in the education department. Sharks are making waves as the latest addition to field trips and engineering programs at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC).

This spring, SERC added sharks as another station in its “Shoreline Connections” and “Exploring Nature” field trips. The education staff also created a day-long program that lets students think like scientists by planning a shark tagging expedition and designing their own shark tags.

“Most of the students and teachers and even parents don’t realize that there are sharks and rays in the Chesapeake Bay,” said Karen McDonald, director of SERC’s education center. “So this is new to them. And typically the organisms are vilified. So this is a chance for us to show their importance in the ecosystem.” Click to continue »

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The Invisible Flood: When We Can’t Tell We’re Drowning

Tuesday, June 18th, 2019

by Quinn Burkhart

Most people need to visit the ocean to get their sea water fix. But beneath their feet, those waters may already be closer than they think. “Saltwater intrusion,” which occurs when the sea level rises and pushes large amounts of saltwater onto the coast, is one of the most prominent—and least talked about—effects of climate change. Its influence on the Chesapeake Bay, one of the lowest regions in the United States, is gaining traction.

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