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New Professor at VT
New Professor at Virginia Tech Virginia Tech recently hired a new co-director for their Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Lab in northern Virginia. Stanley Grant came to VT from University of California Irvine, and he will also serve as a professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department. Grant has always been interested in nutrient pollution and transport, spending the last several...
Read MoreVirginia Tech and STAC
Virginia Tech has a long history of supporting CRC’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC). Brian Benham serves as chair of STAC, and Kurt Stephenson was recently appointed to the Executive Board. In addition, several VT researchers also serve on STAC, including Tess Thompson, Gene Yagow (retired), and Zach Easton, who recently led the review of the Chesapeake Bay...
Read MoreModeling Reef Restoration
Scientists across the Bay have long speculated that oysters improve water quality, leading managers to restore oyster reefs as a best management practice. Researchers Lisa Kellogg and Mark Brush at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and Jeff Cornwell of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) have developed a web-based, interactive computer model to help...
Read MoreCrab Migration Study
Researchers from University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) joined researchers from Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and University of Florida to study crab population migrations across the east coast. Scientists have generally understood that crabs spawn in Virginia’s salty waters and then make their way north to Maryland. Since their movement is determined by weather,...
Read MoreInvasive Plants Can Boost Blue Carbon Storage
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. “We were aware of the...
Read MoreCatching Some Rays
Since 2014, a team of researchers at Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) has been tracking the migration of cownose rays. The rays are often spotted in the Chesapeake Bay in the summer, but until now nobody knew where the rays went for the winter. During a three-year tagging study published in August, Matt Ogburn and Charles Bangley tracked the rays all the way down the east coast...
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