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When Forests Grow Back Naturally, Climate Change Takes A Hit.

Friday, September 25th, 2020

by Aliya Uteuova

Mountain forests with red, purple, yellow and green foliage.

Fall color in the Dolly Sods Wilderness, part of Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. “Natural forest regrowth,” a climate-mitigation strategy where forests regrow without human interference, could store 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon annually. (Credit: Kent Mason)

Trees have a powerful ability to absorb carbon dioxide, and a lot of it. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, American forests offset about 12% of the carbon emissions the U.S. creates each year from fossil fuels. While it’s great to plant trees, it can be costly. It’s also important to plant the right species in the right places to avoid disrupting other ecosystems. A major new study published Sept. 23 highlights the potential of an alternate strategy—natural forest regrowth—which can soak up excess carbon and help mitigate climate change.

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Who’s Left Swimming in Chicken Manure…and Its Bacteria?

Friday, June 19th, 2020

New study finds antibiotics from poultry farms can lead to drug-resistant bacteria in the water

by Kristen Minogue

Chickens stand in a Pennsylvania poultry barn. Crowded conditions in poultry barns increase the danger of a disease spreading through the flock, leading many poultry farmers to rely on antibiotics. (Credit: Steve Droter/Chesapeake Bay Program. Creative Commons License)

90 tons. That’s how much chicken manure—mixed with feathers, uneaten feed and leftover bedding—a Maryland poultry farmer scrapes out of a single barn each year.

Manure is just one of many issues poultry farmers on the Delmarva peninsula have to wrestle with. Poultry farming isn’t an easy industry, for the chickens or the farmers. To get started, a farmer generally needs to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a poultry barn to house roughly 45,000 birds. Companies like Purdue and Tyson supply the chicks, and pay the farmers based on how many pounds the flock puts on. To have any chance of making a profit, there’s enormous pressure to grow broiler chickens as fat and as fast as possible. A typical poultry barn can go through five to seven flocks a year. After each flock moves out, the farmers are left to deal with the muck.

“The folks that grow the chickens, it’s a really tough job that they do and hard to make a buck at it,” said Tom Jordan, an ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center who specializes in how farming impacts Chesapeake Bay.

Another thing that’s hiding in the chicken manure? E. coli bacteria. Some of these E. coli don’t cause disease. But others can inflict both chickens and people with diarrhea and other unsavory side effects, like urinary tract infections.

Some E. coli bacteria have become resistant to our antibiotics. This May, scientists reported that because chicken manure fertilizes farms throughout the Chesapeake, that antibiotic resistance can also spread in the water. Besides the already-prevalent problem of nutrient pollution, this could put swimmers and boaters who use the water for recreation at further risk.

“Right now, sometimes the poultry barns get cleaned and they immediately apply it on land, so it’s just fresh waste going directly on our land,” said Jay Graham, lead author of the new study and a public health researcher with the University of California, Berkeley. “So if it rains, then all that ends up in our waterways.”

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Leased Farmland Hearkens Back to Smithsonian’s Agricultural Roots

Friday, June 21st, 2019

The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center stays close to its heritage by leasing land to farmers

by Stephanie Fox

Hills with rows of green crops on a misty morning

Summer farm fields on the SERC campus (Photo: Nicole Campbell)

Before the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) became a bustling scientific center, adorned with research labs and paved roads, it was the Java Dairy Farm, run by an eccentric millionaire named Robert Lee Forrest. In 1962, Forrest passed away, leaving his 368 acres of farmland and other properties along Maryland’s Rhode River to the Smithsonian Institution. Despite some talk of selling the farm to grow the Smithsonian’s endowment, further inspection of the abandoned property revealed an ideal space for field biology and ecology studies.

Over the past 57 years since Forrest’s donation, the property has grown to 2,650 acres, 19 labs and nearly 100 researchers. The majority of the natural terrain is dedicated to studying environmental issues like nutrient pollution and climate change. But SERC also has set aside about 270 acres (three plots of land) for local farmers to lease, as a reminder of the center’s agricultural origins. 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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Rethinking Carbon

Thursday, April 11th, 2019

A new team is using big data to change how the world calculates its carbon budget on the coasts

by Kristen Minogue

Mashup of 4 photos: Man kneeling in rainforest; man in muddy clothes and boots in marsh; man in sunglasses in marsh; woman doing math on a glass wall

Left to right: Jorge Ramos of Conservation International (Credit: Laura Jaramillo/Conservation International); James Holmquist of SERC (Credit: Lauren Brown); David Klinges of SERC (Credit: SERC); Kathe Todd-Brown of the International Soil Carbon Network (Credit: Andrea Starr/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory).

There’s a gaping hole in Earth’s carbon budget. Scientists have known about it for years, but the data to balance the books have proven hard to find. The blank line is for coastal wetlands—ecosystems that could protect us not only from climate change, but hurricanes, pollution and a host of other environmental hazards.

“When we think of carbon storage or natural climate solutions, a lot of the time forests and trees come to mind,” said David Klinges, a research technician at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). “Because trees have a lot of mass, they store a lot of carbon. But what is not as publicly recognized is that soils—and other forms of plants besides trees—they also store carbon.” Click to continue »

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8 Ways Nature Can Help Us Conquer
Climate Change

Thursday, November 15th, 2018

by Kristen Minogue

The United States may be officially pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, but scientists are still brainstorming ways the country could meet its original goals. Mother Nature can lend a far more powerful hand than we thought, if given the chance.

Led by The Nature Conservancy, a team of scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and other organizations looked at 21 “natural climate solutions,” like restoring forests and wetlands or planting cover crops. According to the report published Wednesday in Science Advances, these tactics could knock an estimated 1.2 trillion kilograms off the U.S.’s yearly carbon emissions—just enough to hit the country’s 2025 targets for the Paris agreement. And they come with a range of side benefits, including increased yields for farmers and decreased risks of catastrophic wildfires.

But to work, they would also require a serious rethinking of how our society values carbon. Today, saving 1,000 kg of carbon is worth about $10. To provide enough incentive to make these solutions widespread, the authors estimated those credits would need to go for at least $100 per 1,000 kg.

We’ve highlighted eight of these solutions below, but you can read about all 21 in the full report.

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Climate Change

Taking Back the Marsh at Cheston Point

Wednesday, August 1st, 2018

By Philip Kiefer

If you were to unravel the Chesapeake Bay shoreline, to smooth out every river mouth and tidal basin, it would stretch from New Jersey to Miami. This twisted shoreline, and the marsh behind it, is part of what makes the Chesapeake so productive: It’s an entire universe for young fish and crabs, a constellation of places to hide when soft and feed when hungry.

Marsh grass and forest behind a seawall.

A living shoreline at SERC’s Cheston Point. (Credit: SERC)

And it’s disappearing quickly. Anywhere from half a foot to 10 feet of Chesapeake marsh erode every year, depending on which shoreline you’re standing on. Lost marshes mean lost habitat for migratory birds, molting crabs, and young rockfish. Hundreds of islands have disappeared from the Chesapeake Bay in the last century, leaving behind tidal mudflats, sandbars, or open water.

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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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Tidings from the Sunset Coast (4)

Tuesday, August 8th, 2017

An Ecological History of SERC-West’s California Home

By Ryan Greene, science writing intern

An aerial view of a cove with many buildings and a number of moored ships.

A naval net depot was one of the many institutions to occupy the site on the San Francisco Bay where the Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies now operates. Photo courtesy of the Tiburon Landmarks Society and Romberg Tiburon Center. [Cropped]

The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s (SERC) main West Coast outpost, SERC-West, is located in Tiburon, California, on San Francisco Bay. The entire stretch of North America separates SERC-West from SERC’s main campus on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. To bridge this distance, we’ve launched “Tidings From the Sunset Coast,” a summer series about all things SERC-West. Our last post explored SERC’s research on invasive green crabs in Seadrift Lagoon. Our next post dives into the history of the site that SERC-West calls home. This blog post is nowhere close to comprehensive. Rather, we hope it can serve as something of a “highlight reel.”

The Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies (or Romberg Center for short) sits on a 36-acre parcel of waterfront land whose history is rather kaleidoscopic. Depending on when you were here, you could have found a cod packing plant, cables destined for the Golden Gate Bridge, or multi-mile antisubmarine nets. And this is just a smattering.

The Romberg Center is a research and teaching facility run by San Francisco State University. Nearly two decades ago, in 2000, SERC ecologist Greg Ruiz stationed part of his Marine Invasions Lab here. Since then, this outpost has become the hub of SERC’s West Coast ecological research. In addition to Smithsonian and San Francisco State biologists, the Romberg Center is also home to members of NOAA’s San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. Together, these institutions use the historic site as a base for exploring the Bay’s ecology. This, though, is only the most recent in a long line of land uses. And looking more closely at what people have done here in the past can provide a glimpse into a host of ecological issues still shaping San Francisco today. 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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