Virginia Water Center Nationally Recognized for Water Issues The Virginia Water Resources Research Center, housed at Virginia Tech, was one of 12 institutes to be nationally recognized as “outstanding” by the U.S. Geological Survey. This designation was recently given after a panel of scientists reviewed the center’s progress between 2011 and 2015. In particular, the [...]
Aerial SAV Surveys Support Collaborative Science, Management, and Restoration Submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) is a vital component in the health of the Chesapeake Bay and worldwide coastal ecosystems. The SAV program, centered at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) is world-renowned for its monitoring and restoration projects. Robert “JJ” Orth, program director of the [...]
Virginia Tech Researcher Looks at Human Impacts of Coastal Flooding Over half of Virginia’s population lives along the coast and face increasing threats from extreme weather events and sea level rise. There is a need to better understand the impacts coastal flooding and hazards pose for these coastal communities and how to develop resilience strategies [...]
Warming Temperatures May Be Better for Wetlands The Global Change Research Wetland (GCREW), located at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), is home to several long-term experiments designed to predict the effects of sea-level rise and climate change on coastal wetland ecosystems. Genevieve Noyce, a coastal wetland biogeochemist and research scientist at SERC, works on [...]
ODU Researchers Engage Community About Flood Adaptation Flooding and sea level rise (SLR) pose a problem to nearly every part of the Hampton Roads area. A research team from Old Dominion University (ODU) Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience designed the Action-Oriented Stakeholder Engagement for a Resilient Tomorrow (ASERT) framework to engage stakeholders in adaptation [...]
Understanding the Factors that Impact Climate Risk Management Strategies Planners use all kinds of projections to understand how climate change will affect infrastructure, but all projections are based on assumptions that change their outcomes. Decision makers are tasked with weighing different projections to design cost effective risk management strategies to protect populations from rising seas. [...]
Shorter marsh grasses and adapting to sea level rise One of the experimental changes on the marsh. Credit: Tom Mozdzer. As carbon dioxide increases, most plants respond by getting bigger. CO2 acts like fuel for most plants, allowing them to grow higher and thicker, increasing their biomass. But what happens when you look [...]
