Harnessing the Power of Citizen Scientists The SERC team deploying tiles into the San Francisco Bay in 2016. Credit: SERC/Marine Invasions Lab Imagine working on a small team of field researchers and having to process 100,000 images. What used to take years and tons of funding to accomplish can now be done quickly [...]
As Sea Level Rises, Wetlands Crank Up Their Carbon Storage Written by Kristen Minogue for the Shorelines Blog Some wetlands perform better under pressure. A new study revealed that when faced with sea-level rise, coastal wetlands respond by burying even more carbon in their soils. Coastal wetlands like this one in Maryland store carbon more [...]
A team of researchers set out to understand the decline of soft-shell and razor clams in the Chesapeake Bay that has been ongoing since the 1970s. Scientists believe the decline could be due to habitat loss, predators, disease, recruitment, and environmental changes. A team of researchers looked at all of these factors by surveying the Chesapeake [...]
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 [...]
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 member of the network (along [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
