Posted by Kristen Goodhue on August 6th, 2018
By Philip Kiefer
Even healthy trees in the forest, like this tulip poplar, might be producing methane.
Until a decade ago, scientists believed forests were ravenous consumers of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But we’re discovering that the story is more complicated. It turns out that while forest soils absorb methane, trees might actually release the gas. The problem is, no one is sure how much methane the trees are producing, or why they’re producing it at all.
“We’ve seen anything from 5 percent to 100 percent offset,” says Paul Brewer, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). That’s an enormous amount of uncertainty: The forest could be consuming as much methane as we once thought (almost all of it), or barely any at all.
SERC Intern Helps Pin Down Numbers
Maddie Peterson, an intern working for Brewer at the SERC Biogeochemistry Lab, is spending her summer trying to pin these numbers down.
She’s working to solve two questions. First, how much methane is an average tree releasing? And second, why is it doing so at all?
“The big question,” says Peterson, “is whether the trees are acting as straws” – siphoning methane up from deep in the earth – “or incubators” – cradling methane-producing bacteria in their trunks. Answering these questions will help scientists understand how methane moves in and out of the atmosphere, which is critical for predicting the course of climate change. Click to continue »
Posted in Climate Change, Interns | Comments Off on How’s a Tree like a Cradle and a Straw? SERC Intern Studies Forest Methane Emissions
Posted by Kristen Goodhue on 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.
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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Posted in Land Use | Comments Off on Taking Back the Marsh at Cheston Point
Posted by Kristen Goodhue on July 20th, 2018
by Kristen Minogue
Most visitors to Palau don’t come for its forests. The chain of 300-plus Pacific islands is more famous for its coral reefs, giant rays and hundreds of flamboyantly-colored fish species.
“It’s known as one of the top dive sites on the planet,” said Benjamin Crain, a postdoc at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). Crain is the exception. He’s visited Palau twice in the last year. Naturally fair-skinned, with a dark blond beard and ponytail, Crain has earned plenty of suntans and callouses trekking across the islands’ uneven terrain. He was seeking some of Palau’s forgotten gems on land—its rich diversity of orchids. Click to continue »
Posted in Ecology, Endangered Species | Comments Off on The Secret Orchids of Palau
Posted by Kristen Goodhue on July 11th, 2018
By Philip Kiefer
Maya Bhalla-Ladd, who is beginning her second summer as an intern at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), didn’t think growing up that she would be a scientist. “In high school, I spent all my time on ballet,” she says. “I danced professionally. I lived on my own in New York.”
But when health problems forced her to turn away from ballet, she found herself drawn to the ocean. “I remember going to the aquarium as a kid and watching the rays,” she says. “The way they move is very naturally beautiful. So when I stopped being able to dance, I wanted to spend the rest of my life preserving that kind of natural beauty for other people to enjoy.”
Maya with a hand-crafted temperature sensor! (Maya Bhalla-Ladd/SERC)
Maya spent last summer at SERC’s Global Change Research Wetland (GCREW), investigating how climate change could affect photosynthesis in marsh plants. While there, she became fascinated with a tool used to measure photosynthesis in leaves. The tool seals a single leaf in a chamber and exposes it to light, causing the leaf to begin photosynthesis. It can then measure the precise gas composition of the chamber as the plant produces sugar. In effect, it can watch the plant breathe.
“I think that the instrumentation that enables science is so cool, and that we don’t spend enough time thinking about it,” Maya says. Click to continue »
Posted in Climate Change, Interns | Comments Off on Wiring the Marsh: Intern Helps Build the Wetland of the Future
Posted by Kristen Goodhue on July 9th, 2018
By Hannah-Marie Garcia, science writing intern
Think back to your early childhood science classes. Was there
ever a time you had to watch a plant grow? Your first natural sciences teacher may have used plant growth to explain basic concepts of plant biology. The process is a rewarding learning experience for students to observe their hard work pay off as those first few leaves sprout from the soil.
Walker Mill Middle School sixth-grade students and their orchid experiments.
(Credit: Hannah-Marie Garcia/SERC)
Now, imagine the work you did was part of a larger scientific project, with real-world applications. That is exactly what four sixth-grade classes are doing this year at Walker Mill Middle School. Located in a Capitol Heights neighborhood of the Prince George’s County school system, Walker Mill is one of seven schools in the Maryland area working with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) on a project called “Orchids in Classrooms.”
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Posted in Ecology, Education, Interns, Participatory Science, SERC Sites and Scenes, Volunteers | Comments Off on “Orchids In Classrooms” Turns Sixth-Graders Into Citizen Scientists
Posted by Kristen Goodhue on July 3rd, 2018
by Kristen Minogue
Don’t panic. The new robot greeting visitors at the Reed Education Center isn’t about to stage a technological coup over the SERC campus. But it can pose for selfies, tell people about SERC programs and break out a dance move or two.
The robot goes by the name Pepper. Technically, Pepper has no gender, though most visitors—and a few staff—have taken to calling the robot “she” by default. The Smithsonian received a team of Pepper robots in February from SoftBank Robotics, to test out in their museums and other programs. Two Peppers went to the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), where staff and students are programming them to interact with the public. Click to continue »
Posted in Education, Interns, SERC Sites and Scenes | Comments Off on Meet Pepper, The Android Docent
Posted by Kristen Goodhue on June 21st, 2018
by Kristen Minogue
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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Posted in Climate Change, Ecology, Publications | Comments Off on 800 Million Tons of Blue Carbon May Lie Buried in U.S. Tidal Wetlands
Posted by Kristen Goodhue on June 14th, 2018
by Mollie McNeel
Smooth dogfish shark (Mustelus canis), one of four species Smithsonian scientists are tagging and tracking along the Atlantic. (Mollie McNeel)
Sharks. They’re everyone’s favorite underwater enemy. Between nerve-wracking dramas like Jaws to stories about prehistoric mega-sharks, we have all but made the shark species a completely fictionalized being. But scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) are hoping to change that.
Charles “Chuck” Bangley, a marine ecologist at SERC, travels up and down the East Coast catching and tagging four species of sharks found in the Chesapeake Bay and along the Atlantic: smooth dogfish sharks (Mustelus canis), bull sharks (Carcharhinus leucas), blacktip sharks (Carcharhinus limbatus) and dusky sharks (Carcharhinus obscurus).
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Posted in Ecology, Fisheries, SERC Sites and Scenes | Comments Off on Understanding Sharks One Tag at a Time
Posted by Kristen Goodhue on May 25th, 2018
Kim Komatsu stands in a grassland at Konza Prairie Biological Station, in Manhattan, Kansas.
(Credit: Cynthia Chang)
by Kim Komatsu,
ecosystem conservation ecologist
One of the unexpected perks of my life as a scientist has been the opportunity to travel for work. As a grassland ecologist, my studies have taken me to South Africa and Tanzania to investigate the roles of fire, grazing, and nutrient availability in determining plant growth and species diversity. In these exotic field sites, I would drive by impalas, zebras, elephants, giraffes, cheetahs, lions, and leopards before arriving at my experimental plots. Then I would spend my day working in the hot sun to survey the plant communities in my plots, all the while guarded by a park ranger with a loaded rifle to protect me from the very animals I marveled at on the way to the field site. (Thankfully those rifles were never fired during my trips.) With grasslands all over the world, I have many more grassland types on my research wish list, including the Mongolian steppes, the Pampas of South America, the Cerrado of Brazil, and the rangelands of Australia and Europe. Click to continue »
Posted in Confessions of a Real Life Scientist, Ecology | Comments Off on Confessions of a Real Life Scientist: Grasslands of the World
Posted by Kristen Goodhue on May 22nd, 2018
SERC researchers race to find out how higher temps will affect coastal wetlands
by Mollie McNeel
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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Posted in Climate Change, Ecology, SERC Sites and Scenes | Comments Off on Wetlands of the Warmer World
