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From the Field

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Andre Rovai and Why the Military Cares About Mangroves 

Wednesday, March 25th, 2026

by Kiran Das-Goel

Andre Rovai, wearing a beige jacket and a cap with cloth neck shielding on the sides, stands in a patch of mangroves holding a measuring stick and a smart phone.

Andre Rovai measures mangrove growth in Sanibel Island, Florida. (Credit: Andre Rovai)

On a cool, fall day while doing fieldwork in Louisiana, Andre Rovai came face to face with an alligator.  

A colleague in the field with Rovai had stepped on the alligator’s nest. Rovai heard hissing near his feet, and there she was, a few steps away from him.  

Rovai, a principal investigator at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), had been working in coastal ecosystems for over two decades. At the time, he was an assistant research scientist with Louisiana State University. This did not prepare him to deal with an angry mother alligator.  

“We were like four or five feet apart from each other, looking eye to eye pretty much because I was sinking in the marsh.” Rovai said. 

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Bio Blitz! Critters of the Eastern Shore

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2018

by Carmen Ritter, SERC Fish & Invertebrate Ecology Lab intern

Picture that tiny town that one friend always tells you they’re from, with the single post office and the neighbors that know every detail of your personal life. Now picture that, on the water, even smaller. Welcome to Wachapreague, Virginia.

Wachapreague sits on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and claims to be “The Flounder Capital of the World.” The locals are some of the friendliest people you could find, and nearly everyone in the area fishes. I wasn’t there for recreational purposes, though.

This summer, I visited the Virginia Institute of Marine Science Eastern Shore Lab (VIMS ESL) with about 20 scientists from around the country to conduct a bio blitz documenting the biodiversity of Chesapeake Bay. The blitz was organized by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and MarineGEO (the Marine Global Earth Observatory). While most scientists were from the Smithsonian and other research institutions surrounding the Chesapeake Bay, some flew in from Florida, Washington State or Puerto Rico. After gathering for a meeting on the first evening, we all prepared the lab space for samples and headed to bed. The blitz officially started first thing Monday morning.

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You’re Not the Only One Stressing About Climate Change

Tuesday, August 28th, 2018

By Philip Kiefer

Stress is universal – possibly the most constant aspect of life on Earth. And it’s not just for things with a brainstem. Plants are constantly reacting to their environments; they’re just more private about it. They’re constantly adjusting internal chemical signals, redistributing sugar and water, and sometimes jettisoning unneeded bits in the name of survival.

Lyntana Brougham, a visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), is using these stress responses to look inside a salt marsh. By understanding how marsh plants like cordgrasses and sedges respond to higher temperatures, she hopes to develop a clearer picture of how climate change may stress the marsh as a whole.

Cordgrass illuminated by a flash of light.

Cordgrass at the GCREW marsh. (Philip Kiefer/SERC)

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Intern Logs: Tagging Sharks
in the Sunshine State

Monday, March 26th, 2018

by Claire Mueller

Selfie of three scientists with palm trees

Front to back: SERC interns Claire Mueller and Michelle Edwards, and SERC postdoc Chuck Bangley, explore windy Fort Pierce, Fla.
(Credit: Claire Mueller/SERC)

As the communications intern for the Movement of Life Initiative, I’ve had the pleasure of doing a variety of fun projects, but my favorite was accompanying our marine team this winter to Fort Pierce, Fla., to continue their work tagging sharks with Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University. Our mission was to tag as many bull sharks and cownose rays that we could with acoustic transmitters, allowing us to collect location data and determine the movement patterns of these two species.

When I arrived in Florida on January 14, I first caught up with Chuck Bangley, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), and fellow SERC intern Michelle Edwards. They had been there since the previous Wednesday, and already had managed to tag four cownose rays and two bull sharks. Matt Ogburn (our fearless leader and principal investigator of SERC’s Fish & Invertebrate Ecology Lab) and Jay Fleming (the professional photographer documenting our expedition) joined the team on Monday night. Click to continue »

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Posted in Ecology, From the Field, Interns | 2 Responses »

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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Jawshank Redemption: Understanding shark behavior through science

Wednesday, October 26th, 2016

by Heather Soulen

Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the movie Jaws, regarded by many as “the movie that changed Hollywood.” While true, Jaws shaped more than just Hollywood. With its ominous, adrenaline pumping two-note score and imagery of a bloodthirsty, torpedo-shaped predator with rows of razor-sharp teeth, Spielberg’s film shaped our perception of sharks.

Tagged juvenile bull shark

The team’s first tagged juvenile bull shark (Photo credit: Kim Richie)

After Jaws, fear of the unknown arrested us, and our lack of knowledge helped demonize sharks. But the winds are shifting. New research initiated by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s Fish and Invertebrate Ecology Lab aims to investigate habitat use, migration patterns, and species interactions of four underrepresented shark species found in the Chesapeake Bay and along the Atlantic Coast.

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Sink or Swim? Divining the Fate of Life-Giving Wetlands

Friday, August 12th, 2016

By Emily Li, science writing intern

You might have heard of The Giving Tree, a children’s picture book by Shel Silverstein about a boy and a tree. As the boy grew, he began to want more from the tree, and the tree happily gave and gave and gave: her apples, her branches, and even her trunk. While Silverstein’s heartbreaking story was a fiction, the plot is happening in wetlands around the world—and this time, it’s for real. Marshes improve water quality, mitigate hurricane damage, sequester atmospheric carbon, and serve as ideal habitats and nurseries for wildlife. In return, as sea levels rise, they’re in line to be the first casualties.

SERC intern Jefferson Riera shows off his sunburn.

SERC intern Jefferson Riera shows off his sunburn after a day in the field. (Photo: Emily Li/SERC)

That said, marshes are hardly a serene paradise. To Smithsonian Environmental Research Center intern Jefferson Riera, wetlands are ruined shoes caked in mud. Wetlands are wasp stings on his lips. Wetlands are spider webs of scratches from marsh vegetation. Wetlands are sunburns so severe his skin doesn’t match itself anymore.

And yet, he knows that they’re worth protecting. That’s why he, and the rest of SERC’s Ecological Modeling Lab, are working to develop a baseline understanding of local marsh elevation to educate policymakers on the state of wetlands—before their fates are sealed by the sea.

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The Mystery of the Muddy Creek Restoration

Monday, August 8th, 2016

SERC intern Lauren Mosesso takes a water quality reading

SERC intern Lauren Mosesso takes a water quality reading (Photo: Emily Li/SERC)

by Emily Li

One year ago, a team of scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center set out to restore a stream running through its campus in Edgewater, Md. No one ever said it would be simple.

At first glance, the restoration of Muddy Creek seems to be a closed case. Before the project began, the creek’s severely eroded banks were disconnected from its floodplains, turning the stream into a raging river during storms that stripped nutrients from the system and dumped them in the Chesapeake Bay. Now, after a facelift in January, the creek is nearly unrecognizable. Its gentle banks cradle the wide, slow-moving stream littered with leaves, ferns, and an abundance of other plant life. Choruses of croaks fill the air, accompanied by the hum of insects, bird chatter, and the occasional splash of frogs retreating into the cloudy water.

But another layer of mystery is clouding the waters. A mat of red Leptothrix bacteria coats some sections of the site, leading SERC senior scientist Dr. Thomas Jordan and his colleagues to ask a host of new questions. Are the bacteria harmful to the ecosystem, or an important part of the food web? Are they a short-term phenomenon or a permanent fixture to the stream? Exactly how much area do they cover? One SERC intern is hoping to find out.

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Posted in Ecology, From the Field, Interns, Interviews, Land Use, SERC Sites and Scenes, Water Quality | 1 Response »

An Acid Test for the Coasts

Monday, August 1st, 2016

Graham cleans her equipment of marine organisms

SERC intern Jasmin Graham cleans her equipment of marine organisms (Photo: Emily Li/SERC)

by Emily Li

Watching educational programs like Animal Planet or That’s My Baby—a series that documents pregnant animals—might evoke memories of flickering classroom projectors for most. But for Jasmin Graham, an intern with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), these shows were her childhood. Her love for marine science and wildlife followed her through high school science fairs and university research on shark genetics at the College of Charleston. Now, at an internship with SERC’s Ocean Acidification Lab, she studies acidification not in the open ocean, but in a far more dramatic arena, where the marine celebrities she grew up with may be at risk.

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Posted in Climate Change, Ecology, Extreme Weather, Fisheries, From the Field, Interns, Interviews, SERC Sites and Scenes, Water Quality | 1 Response »

How Clay Caterpillars Help Unlock Biodiversity’s Secrets

Friday, July 22nd, 2016

by Emily Li

Anna Nordseth surveys clay caterpillars for damage in BiodiversiTREE plot
Anna Nordseth surveys clay caterpillars for predation damage in BiodiversiTREE plot (Credit: Emily Li/SERC)

Anna Nordseth, a summer intern for the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s Terrestrial Ecology Lab, wasn’t surprised to be taking work home the first week and a half of her internship. What she wasn’t expecting was to be making nearly a thousand clay caterpillars.

Each caterpillar began life as a half gram of green clay, with a wire spine and ends rolled into a worm-like silhouette. By the time Nordseth had finished—several podcasts and three seasons of House of Cards later—she had 900 caterpillars and the hand cramps to prove it. But she was ready to begin her research.

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