Warning: A non-numeric value encountered in /home1/siedu/public_html/sercblog/wp-content/plugins/blackhole-bad-bots/inc/blackhole-ip.php on line 113 Shorelines Shorelines - Page 14 of 50 - Life and science at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
add_filter('bloginfo_url', function($output, $property){
error_log("====property=" . $property);
return ($property == 'pingback_url') ? null : $output;
}, 11, 2);
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.
Restored forests could save an estimated 307 billion kg CO2. (SERC)
Sustainable logging can save another 267 billion kg CO2. (Jonathan Billinger)
Grasslands like this Kansas prairie store carbon in the soil. (Kim La Pierre)
Planting cover crops like crimson clover also preserves soil carbon. (USDA)
Zimbabwe students fertilized these spinach plants with urine. (Peter Morgan)
Methane digesters help farms capture methane from animal manure. (USDA)
Tidal wetlands emit less methane when joined to the sea. (Gary Peresta/SERC)
Smaller, prescribed burns help prevent larger, catastrophic wildfires. (USFWS)
Article contributed by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
Using environmental DNA (eDNA) to track the presence of fish in waterways is emerging as a powerful tool to detect and understand the abundance of species in aquatic environments. However, relatively few studies have compared the performance of this emerging technology to traditional catch or survey approaches in the field.
Researchers from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center field tested using eDNA—tracking the presence of fish by identifying DNA that has been left behind in the water—to detect river herring in tributaries of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. They found that tracking and quantifying herring DNA from the environment corresponded well to more traditional field methods and has great potential to assist future monitoring efforts of river herring abundance and habitat use.
“Sampling a single river, you need a net, crew, permits, it can be expensive,” said study author Louis Plough of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “The eDNA approach is an alternative where you just take water and you get an idea of the abundance of fish.” Click to continue »
Posted in Ecology, Fisheries, Publications | Comments Off on eDNA emerges as powerful tool for tracking threatened river herring in Chesapeake Bay
High school sophomore Nia Zagami and her classmates collected data on conserving threatened pink pink orchids, which brought her in front of an audience of scientists at the Native Orchid Conference this year. (Credit: Tony Zagami)
While preparing two students to speak at the 2018 Native Orchid Conference held at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center this summer, citizen science coordinator Alison Cawood assured them that their presentation on pine pink orchids would be low stress.
Sitting in the back of the conference room and smoothing over their dresses, the students felt otherwise.
“I feared that I would not be smart enough to share the data, and that I would mess up or look clueless,” said Nia Zagami, a sophomore at Sherwood High School and presenter at the conference. “Knowing that I was just a high schooler who was expected to speak in front of scientists and orchid enthusiasts really made me nervous.”
The nerves didn’t fade until Zagami, joined by fellow Sherwood sophomore and presentation collaborator Sudha Sudhaker, walked to the front of the conference room and adjusted her microphone multiple times. And then, the pair eased into their normal student voices to explain their own data and what citizen science means to them. An audience of blank stares began grinning.
Zagami and Sudhaker had recently finished their second semester of Honors Biology under teacher Laura Dinerman. Although Honors Biology is a common science course for underclassmen at Sherwood, Dinerman’s 60 students taking the course during spring 2018 did something decidedly less common: a professional conservation experiment. Dinerman’s class measured the growth of the pine pink orchid (Bletia purpurea). Though common in the tropics, in the continental U.S. the pine pink orchid grows only in Florida, where it’s threatened. The students grew the orchids under different soil nutrient conditions (fungi, fertilizer or unchanged soil) in their classroom, as part of a citizen science project led by the Smithsonian.
Roughly half of the species living in the San Francisco Bay are newcomers, brought (often unintentionally) by humans. The Bay has been an international shipping hub for over a century, and it’s accumulated biological detritus from around the world. But not everything that’s brought here sticks: It’s something of a mystery why some species proliferate in an alien environment while others die off.
Intern Kenyan Pappe pulls up a fouling panel at a local marina. (Jenny Parr/SERC)
This summer, two interns at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s West Coast branch (SERC-West), investigated how one invader cements itself in the environment during environmental chaos. Jenny Par and Kenyan Pappe looked at the golden star tunicateBotryllus schlosseri, a type of marine invertebrate that often lives around marinas.
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.
There’s a war of attrition playing out on the coastlines of the San Francisco Bay that is in a ponderous class of its own. A tiny snail, called a rough periwinkle (Littorina saxatilis), might be pushing its native counterpart, the checkered periwinkle (Littorina scutulata), from the beaches it once called home. But no one is quite sure why, or even how quickly it’s spreading.
Adrielle Cailipan examines a handful of invasive periwinkles. (Philip Kiefer/SERC)
Adrielle Cailipan, a recent graduate of San Francisco State University, is spending her summer internship in the world of periwinkles with the West Coast Lab of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). She’s working not only to document the spread of the rough periwinkle, but also to understand what makes the invader so successful.
In the messy world of science, real progress often happens when experiments don’t go as planned. It’s in these moments that scientists learn that the world doesn’t work like they expected. This year, two teaching fellows at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) had a taste of that during a summer project on oyster predation. Although the data they collected didn’t answer their questions about oysters, it did tell an unexpected story about the coastline. They’re bringing that knowledge back to their classrooms, to show students that science isn’t just about collecting facts, but about how to creatively interrogate the natural world.
This summer, SERC’s West Coast lab hosted two fellows from California’s STEM Teacher and Researcher (STAR) program. The fellowship supports STEM teachers who want to actively pursue science research during the summer in order to bring that experience back to their classrooms.
Evie Borchard and Jason Thomas, teacher-researchers at SERC, stand in front of prime oyster habitat in the San Francisco Bay. (Philip Kiefer/SERC)
“We want to give teachers the opportunity to do research that they can share with their students,” said Erin Blackwood, an education and outreach coordinator at San Francisco State University who organizes the STAR program locally. “At the same time, the program gives our scientists a new perspective on science education–they have to think about how they would teach their research to a high-school student.”
Some invasive plants like Phragmites australis, the light-brown stalks on this Maryland marsh, could more than double the ability of marshes and other coastal ecosystems to store blue carbon. (Credit: Gary Peresta/SERC)
When invasive species enter the picture, things are rarely black and white. A new paper has revealed that some plant invaders could help fight climate change by making it easier for ecosystems to store “blue carbon”—the carbon stored in coastal environments like salt marshes, mangroves and seagrasses. But other invaders, most notably animals, can do the exact opposite.
Alaska has a near-pristine marine ecosystem: There are fewer invasive species in its waters than almost any other state in the U.S. But that could be changing. With help from local volunteers, biologists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and Temple University have reported a new invasive species in the Ketchikan region, the invertebrate filter-feeder Bugula neritina, and documented the continuing spread of three other non-native species.
The newly discovered invasive bryozoan, Bugula neritina. (Melissa Frey/Royal BC Museum)
Ketchikan, a town of about 8,000 people on the southern tip of Alaska, is a gateway to more remote Alaskan waters in the north. It sits fewer than 100 nautical miles from British Columbia, so invasive species travelling from southern ports are likely to appear in Ketchikan first. But detecting marine invasive species is a constant challenge, even in a single harbor. By collaborating with citizen scientists from Ketchikan, Smithsonian researchers were able to document these new invasive species hopefully as soon as they arrived.
The invasive tunicate Botrylloides violaecus has nearly completely covered this crab’s shell. (Gary Freitag/University of Alaska Fairbanks)
“It’s really important to know when new non-native species show up. They may be tiny invertebrates, but they can create big problems,” said lead author Laura Jurgens, who was a SERC postdoc at the time of the study. “Early detection means you have a better chance of controlling them before the populations get established. In other places, like California, Oregon and Washington, these organisms have displaced local marine animals or had economic impacts by fouling boats, fishing or aquaculture gear.”
Infected eelgrass blades show the dark lesions of eelgrass wasting disease. (Credit: Olivia Graham/Cornell)
by Kristen Minogue
Every year, the world loses an estimated 7 percent of its seagrasses. While the reasons are manifold, one culprit has long confounded scientists: eelgrass wasting disease. This September a team of biologists is zeroing in on the problem, in the first study of the disease to stretch along the Pacific Coast from southern California to Alaska, with a $1.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
“There are a number of seagrass monitoring programs that work on regional and to some degree on global scales, but most of them are really only looking at the cover and the abundance of the seagrass itself,” said Emmett Duffy, director of the Marine Global Earth Observatories (MarineGEO) headquartered at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.
The new grant builds on collaborative work by the Zostera Experimental Network (ZEN), led by Duffy, and will look at how climate, biodiversity and other environmental aspects can change the course of the disease. The team is deploying a wide arsenal of weapons to understand it: In addition to marine biologists, they are bringing on geographers, computer scientists, artificial intelligence and drones. Click to continue »
Posted in Climate Change, Grants | Comments Off on Eelgrass Wasting Disease Has New Enemies: Drones & Artificial Intelligence
