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800 Million Tons of Blue Carbon May Lie Buried in U.S. Tidal Wetlands

Thursday, June 21st, 2018

by Kristen Minogue

Man with muddy clothes in grassy wetland

Smithsonian ecologist James Holmquist explores a wetland in Humboldt Bay, California. (Credit: Lauren Brown)

It’s a true story of “grassroots science.” A team of over two dozen researchers set out to estimate how much carbon tidal wetlands across the U.S. can store. But the official datasets didn’t give them much info to work with. So they pooled their resources, creating a new dataset of nearly 2,000 wetland soil cores.

Their final estimate: Nearly 800 million tons of carbon may lie buried in the tidal wetlands of the contiguous U.S. The team published the discovery June 21, in a new study in Scientific Reports led by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. The study also leaves another major legacy. The 1,959 soil cores they compiled could help finally unlock some secrets of wetlands, ecosystems that have been overlooked for centuries.

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Wetlands of the Warmer World

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2018

SERC researchers race to find out how higher temps will affect coastal wetlands

by Mollie McNeel

Woman in hat collecting marsh plants

Genevieve Noyce collects a blade of marsh sedge to measure in lab, in the Smithsonian’s “wetland of the future.”
(Kristen Minogue/SERC)

Wetlands are typically filled with the sounds of crickets chirping, bees buzzing and frogs croaking. But at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), those are all accompanied by the whirring of motor-powered pumps. These pumps are driving air from hexagonal carbon dioxide chambers to a greenhouse gas analyzer, helping scientists create a “wetland of the future.”

Scientists at SERC are attempting to predict how the warming climate and rising carbon dioxide levels will impact coastal wetlands with an experiment called SMARTX—Salt Marsh Accretion Response to Temperature eXperiment. It’s one of many futuristic experiments on the center’s Global Change Research Wetland.

“Wetlands are a really important part of our planet in terms of storing carbon, and we’re hoping to get an idea of how higher temperatures will affect them,” said Genevieve Noyce, an ecology postdoc at SERC, as she moved among grass-covered warming plots, measuring gas exchange over five-minute intervals.

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Six Reasons To Celebrate World Wetlands Day

Friday, February 2nd, 2018

by Kristen Minogue

SERC scientist Lisa Schile in a marsh in San Francisco. (Courtesy of Lisa Schile.)

February 2 is most widely known as Groundhog Day, the day people all over the U.S. look to a rodent in Pennsylvania to predict the future. But it also marks a less famous holiday: World Wetlands Day, celebrated around the world since 1997, to mark the first international agreement to protect wetlands on Feb. 2, 1971. Curious why anyone would make a holiday for wetlands? Here are a few reasons to celebrate the unsung guardians along our shores.

wetland covered by grasses and yellow flowers

A wetland by the Kenai River in Alaska (Dennis Whigham)

  1. They protect our homes from storms and floods. Standing between us and the elements, wetlands soak up destructive energy from waves and storm surges. In an extreme example, it’s estimated during Hurricane Sandy wetlands along the East Coast prevented $625 million in property damage.
  2. They help keep pollution out of Chesapeake Bay and other waterways. Wetlands are sometimes called the “kidneys” of the Bay, because they’re able to filter out pollution from fertilizers, sewage, pesticides and harmful toxins before it streams into the water.
    3. red-winged blackbird among reeds.

    Red-winged blackbird. Wetlands provide a home or resting point for many birds on their migrations. (Kristen Minogue/SERC)

  3. They’re good for our drinking water. Most of the water we drink comes from groundwater beneath the surface. But wetlands can replenish it as some of their water seeps underground. And because of their filtering powers, the water is cleaner after passing through a wetland.
  4. Birds and fish love them. Herons, egrets, ducks and bald eagles all pass through Chesapeake wetlands as visitors or year-round residents. Striped bass and other popular fish rely on them for spawning ground or nurseries, as do crabs and shellfish.
  5. They store carbon. Plants soak up carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, making them critical players in fighting climate change. “Blue carbon” is the official name for carbon stored in wetlands and other coastal ecosystems. At the same time, wetland soils can also emit methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, making it tricky to know how much carbon wetlands store overall. Scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center are helping devise better ways to calculate this. So far they’ve found wetlands with more saltwater generally emit less methane and store more carbon.
  6. They’re natural air conditioning. With their lush plants and high water levels, wetlands can radiate moist air, cooling down areas nearby. This makes planting wetlands especially valuable near cities in tropical or dry climates.

Learn more:

Wetlands Can Resist Rising Seas, If We Let Them

The Blue Carbon Market Is Open

Coffee, Carbon and Crime: 22 Reasons to Love Trees

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The Ocean Is Losing Its Breath. Here’s the Global Scope.

Thursday, January 4th, 2018

by Kristen Minogue

Dead corals and crab shells

Low oxygen caused the death of these corals and others in Bocas del Toro, Panama. The dead crabs pictured also succumbed to the loss of dissolved oxygen.
(Credit: Arcadio Castillo/Smithsonian)

In the past 50 years, the amount of water in the open ocean with zero oxygen has gone up more than fourfold. In coastal water bodies, including estuaries and seas, low-oxygen sites have increased more than 10-fold since 1950. Scientists expect oxygen to continue dropping even outside these zones as Earth warms. To halt the decline, the world needs to rein in both climate change and nutrient pollution, an international team of scientists asserted in a new paper published Jan. 4 in Science.

“Oxygen is fundamental to life in the oceans,” said Denise Breitburg, lead author and marine ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “The decline in ocean oxygen ranks among the most serious effects of human activities on the Earth’s environment.”

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In San Francisco, One Wet Winter Can Switch Up Bay’s Invasive Species

Thursday, December 7th, 2017

Winter rains make Bay less salty, knocking back some invaders

by Kristen Minogue

Man in sunglasses on rocky beach

Marine ecologist Andrew Chang tracks invasive species in California, and is discovering ways climate change and extreme weather can alter the playing field. (Credit: Julia Blum)

For many Californians, last year’s wet winter triggered a case of whiplash. After five years of drought, rain from October 2016 to February 2017 broke more than a century of records thanks to a series of “Pineapple Express” storms, referring to atmospheric rivers that ferry moisture from Hawaii to the Pacific Coast. In San Francisco Bay, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center biologists discovered a hidden side effect: All that freshwater rain can turn the tables on some of the bay’s invasive species.

“As you get wetter and wetter, there are fewer and fewer [marine] species that can tolerate those conditions,” said Andrew Chang, lead author of the new study published Dec. 7 in Global Change Biology.

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What Changes When You Warm the Antarctic Ocean Just One Degree? Lots.

Thursday, August 31st, 2017

Morning commute in Antarctica. (Photo: Lloyd Peck)

Morning commute in Antarctica. (Photo: Lloyd Peck)

After warming a natural seabed in the Antarctic Ocean by just 1° or 2° Celsius, researchers observed massive impacts on a marine assemblage, as growth rates nearly doubled. The findings of what the researchers call the “most realistic ocean warming experiment to date” reported in Current Biology on August 31 show that the effects of future warming may far exceed expectations.

“I was quite surprised,” says Gail Ashton of the British Antarctic Survey and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “I wasn’t expecting a significant observable difference in communities warmed by just 1°C in the Antarctic. I have spent most of my career working in temperate climates where communities experience much greater temperature fluctuations and wasn’t expecting such a response to just 1°C of change.”

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Scientists Turn Up the Heat on Herbivores and Their Food

Friday, July 28th, 2017

By Joe Dawson, science writing intern

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Japanese beetles make a meal of evening primrose leaves (Credit: Dejeanne Doublet/SERC)

Plants can seem pretty boring. They just sit there, after all. Sure, they can be pretty; they can make us sneeze. But what else do they do? A lot, it turns out. They are able to shift their own water and energy resources from leaves to stems to roots and back, grow tall or stay low and bushy, defend themselves through biological warfare, or warn their neighbors of danger. When doors get blocked, plants have ingenious ways of sneaking out through windows.

What, then, will plants do when humans spread a carbon dioxide blanket over the planet, warming it by burning fossil fuels? Research scientist Nate Lemoine of Colorado State University, with John Parker of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and others, decided to investigate one such relationship with an experiment on the SERC campus in 2013 and 2014. Click to continue »

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Time Travel, with Trees

Monday, July 10th, 2017

by Joe Dawson, science writing intern

Looking at the Kirkpatrick Marsh on the Rhode River, a time machine is not the first thing that comes to mind. Tall grasses dominate the landscape, with vertical PVC pipes popping up here and there and octagon-shaped chambers rising out of the wetland every ten paces or so. Take a step off the walkway, and you might lose a shoe. But five experiments on the marsh are designed to take sections of the marsh into the 22nd Century, and the marsh has been dubbed the Global Change Research Wetland, or GCReW. The expertise that GCReW scientists have in simulating the future brought National Museum of Natural History scientists here to mirror the past.

Rich Barclay and Scott Wing are paleobotanists at the National Museum of Natural History. Paleobotanists are the ones who stare at leaves in Jurassic Park and say, “Alan, these plants haven’t been seen since the Cretaceous Period,” as everyone else stares at brachiosauruses. Ancient plants are their bread and butter, and for Wing and Barclay, the bread is toasted and the butter melty. They study one of the warmest periods in the last 100 million years, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During this period, global temperatures skyrocketed, increasing by 10-15 degrees Fahrenheit. By looking at plants that grew during this time, they hope to learn more about what Earth was like 55 million years ago.

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Large growth chambers being built around newly-planted ginkgo trees on the SERC campus (Credit: Rich Barclay)

Barclay, Wing, and colleagues have started another experiment on the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s (SERC) campus, in a forest a few miles down the road from the GCREW marsh. The project grows ginkgo trees in varying carbon dioxide levels. They hope to study these trees and compare them to fossil specimens to learn about the past. Click to continue »

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The Environmental Cost of Shoreline Hardening

Wednesday, June 21st, 2017

New study shows hardened shorelines may mean fewer fish and crustaceans. 

by Ryan Greene

A split image with a wooden bulkhead on the left and a rocky riprap revetment on the right.

A new SERC study shows that both bulkheads (left) and riprap revetment (right) are associated with lower abundance of several species of fish and crustaceans in the Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware Coastal Bays. Credit: SERC

For decades, ecologists have suspected that hardened shorelines may impact the abundance fish, crabs, and other aquatic life. But now they have evidence that local effects of shoreline hardening add up to affect entire ecosystems. A new study by scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) shows that more shoreline hardening means fewer fish and crustaceans in our waters.

Given the predictions for the coming years (i.e. rising seas and more of us living on the coast), this finding is a cause for concern. Many people will likely try to protect their land from flooding and erosion by armoring their shorelines with vertical retaining walls (bulkheads) or large rocks (riprap revetment). But as SERC researchers found in their new paper, published in Estuaries and Coasts, the impact of these hardened shorelines adds up.

Lead author and former SERC postdoc Matt Kornis likens shoreline hardening to littering. While each individual bit of trash isn’t a huge problem, the combined effect can be enormous. Kornis, now a biologist for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, says the same is true of shoreline hardening. Each individual bulkhead or riprap revetment may not be catastrophic, but cumulatively they can contribute to shrunken populations of ecologically—and economically—important species like the blue crab.

“Shoreline hardening can cause loss of habitats important for young fish, like wetlands and submerged vegetation,” Kornis says. “That may be one reason we observed low abundance of many species in estuaries with a high proportion of hardened shoreline.” Click to continue »

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Humans Are Short and Trees Can’t Talk

Tuesday, June 20th, 2017

That’s why Uzay Sezen carries a crossbow and liquid nitrogen into the forest with him.

by Ryan Greene

Intern Alex Koure (left) and postdoctoral researcher Uzay Sezen (right) are using a crossbow to get leaf samples from hard-to-reach branches. A fishing line attached to the arrows helps them shake down leaves from the canopy. Credit: Ryan Greene/SERC

Intern Alex Koure (left) and postdoctoral researcher Uzay Sezen (right) are using a crossbow to get leaf samples from hard-to-reach branches. A fishing line attached to the arrows helps them shake down leaves from the canopy. Credit: Ryan Greene/SERC

Uzay Sezen is a new postdoc at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), and he’s on the hunt for good data. Literally.

A researcher holds a crossbow and metal container of liquid nitrogen in a forest.

Uzay Sezen with his crossbow and liquid nitrogen in Harvard Forest. Credit: SERC

With senior scientist Sean McMahon and other members of the Quantitative Ecology Lab, Sezen is embarking on a multiyear study which aims to unveil the genetic patterns of tree growth. Their mission: Find out if tree species present at both SERC and Harvard Forest grow in the same way, and whether there are particular genes they express when they grow. Not only will this help us understand how trees respond to day-to-day changes in sunshine, temperature, and rainfall, but it may provide insight into how forests will react (and already are reacting) to global factors like climate change.

Since about 2009, scientists at SERC have been using metal bands called dendrometers to measure how trees grow (within a hundredth of millimeter!) over years, seasons, weeks, and even days. According to SERC technician Jessica Shue, combining these physical measurements with Sezen’s genetic analysis may help reveal what makes some trees in the forest winners and others losers.

“Now that we can look at the genetics, we can look at a much finer scale at what’s causing some trees to be dominant in the canopy, and others of the same species [to be] stuck in the understory,” she says.

How, though, do you ask a tree which genes it’s using?

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