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Conquering Climate Change
8 Ways Nature Can Help Us Conquer Climate Change Written by Kristen Minogue for the Shorelines Blog. Original article. 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. They believe that Mother Nature can lend a far more powerful hand than we thought, if given the chance. Led by...
Read MoreNew Hire at MarineGEO
After writing a globally-recognized sea grass study in 2018, Jonathan Lefcheck has joined the team at the Marine Global Earth Observatory (MarineGEO), directed by Smithsonian’s Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network (TMON). MarineGEO is an international and pan-institutional network, directed by the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) is both a foundational...
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...
Read MoreShark Tagging
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...
Read MoreBlue Carbon in Wetlands
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...
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