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 [...]
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. [...]
Farmers in Lancaster County, PA. Source A researcher at Penn State University (PSU) is investigating temperature changes in the Northeast and how these changes will impact corn growth and development. Heather Karsten, associate professor of crop production ecology in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences, used climate data and models from Syracuse, New York, [...]
Rip in his element In 2017, Rip Hale joined the staff at Old Dominion University (ODU) as an assistant professor in the Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences department. His research looks at sediment transport and deposition across a variety of spatial and temporal scales using acoustic and optical sensors to measure the movement of water and sediment [...]
During the water treatment process, toxic compounds are often oxidized into what scientists presumed were less harmful chemicals called "transformation products." But less is known about these transformation products than scientists thought. "Once the chemical is gone, the job - it would seem - is done, but in fact we don't always know what removal of [...]
Harihar Rajaram will join the Dept. of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) as a Professor in September 2018. Rajaram was previously Professor, President’s Teaching Scholar and Clark Faculty Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Rajaram’s research focuses on mathematical modeling of environmental and earth systems, including computational, analytical and stochastic approaches. [...]
Environmentalists and watermen have come together to reach a broad set of recommendations for restoring oysters in the Choptank and Little Choptank rivers. OysterFutures, led by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) and funded by National Science Foundation, is a research project aimed at achieving thriving oyster populations. Watermen and environmentalists have long [...]
A team led by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and Marine Global Earth Observatory (MarineGEO), and including participants from Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), University of Maryland (UMD), Old Dominion University (ODU) George Mason University (GMU), and several other institutions conducted a large initiative to document the biodiversity of the Chesapeake Bay on July [...]
Researchers from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) gave the Chesapeake Bay an overall grade of "C" in their annual report card. Although the "C" grade has remained constant since 2012, this is the first year that scientists have seen a statistically significant positive trend. Alexandra Fries, a senior science communicator at UMCES, told [...]
SERC Biological Technician Gabriella Marafino collecting a water sample for eDNA analysis. Credit: SERC. Two types of river herring, alewife and blueback herring, used to be abundant in tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay . These days, however, herring are threatened by habitat loss, overfishing, and dams that block the route to their spawning locations. [...]
