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 »
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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 at the GCREW marsh. (Philip Kiefer/SERC)
Every summer, cownose rays stream into Chesapeake Bay to mate and give birth to their pups. When autumn comes, they disappear—presumably to migrate south, but no one knew for certain where they spent the winter. Now, after a three-year tagging study published Aug. 23 and led by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), scientists have solved the mystery. Cownose rays all along the Atlantic winter near Cape Canaveral, Florida, and it’s likely they return to the same spots each summer. Click to continue »
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 »
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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.
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 »
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 »
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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.”
