Led by senior scientist Anne Giblin and postdoctoral scientist Inke Forbrich, Ecosystems Center scientists have built a 40-foot instrumentation tower at the Plum Island Long Term Ecological Research site in northern Massachusetts to allow them to make year-round measurements of net ecosystem carbon exchange.

The particular site was chosen to ensure that measurements can take place even during winter. Due to potentially harsh climate conditions and ice drift, measurements so far have been restricted mostly to the growing season.

Salt marsh ecosystems are among the most productive ecosystems worldwide and these data will help to understand and quantify the ecosystem carbon uptake and release. While marsh grasses take up considerable amounts of carbon during the growing period, the marsh is expected to release CO₂ during winter.

The long term goal of these measurements is a better understanding of carbon cycling in the Plum Island Estuary and how the system can adjust to the projected sea level rise. Sea level is predicted to increase, and the scientists are interested in how these changes affect the salt marsh ecosystem. "The major question here is whether the marsh can keep up with a rising sea level by both sedimentation and peat accumulation. Since previous studies have shown that the sedimentation rate at Plum Island is relatively low, we will have a closer look at the carbon cycling in the salt marsh," Inke Forbrich said.

Jerry Melillo

Jerry Melillo and Gus Shaver of the Ecosystems Center have been named Fellows of  the Ecological Society of America (ESA). They are in the first group to be named to the new Fellows program by the 10,000-member society, the world's largest organization of professional ecologists.  A total of 40 Fellows were named. At the same time, ESA also established an Early Career Fellows program honoring young scientists.

“The Fellows and Early Career Fellows programs will recognize the many ways in which our members contribute to ecological research and discovery, communication, education and pedagogy, and to management and policy,” said ESA President Scott Collins.

Both Jerry and Gus have conducted research at the Ecosystems Center for more than three decades. Jerry, distinguished scientist and former co-director of the Center, is also a professor of biology at Brown University. In his research, he studies the impacts of human activities on the biogeochemistry of terrestrial ecosystems. He has studied carbon and nitrogen cycling in ecosystems across the globe, including arctic shrublands in northern Sweden, temperate forests in North America, and tropical forests and pastures in the Amazon Basin of Brazil.  Jerry served as ESA’s President in 2004-2005.

Gus Shaver

Gus is a senior scientist at the Center and a professor at Brown. He studies plant growth and nutrition and the role of plants in ecosystem element cycle, focusing his research on Alaskan tundra ecosystems, where low temperatures, low light intensities, low nutrient availability, and a short growing season all interact to limit plant growth. He is lead principal investigator of the Arctic Long Term Ecological Research program, based at Toolik Lake, Alaska.  Gus was ESA’s Vice-President for Science 2004-2007.

The report has updates on our many educational and outreach programs. The Semester in Environmental Science had its largest class ever in 2011, and students in the Brown-MBL Graduate Program in Biological and Environmental Sciences conducted research with their MBL advisors. Ecosystems Center staff also mentored local junior high and high students and judged science fairs, provided guidance to undergraduate interns at the center and in remote field sites, and participated in a mentoring program to encourage diversity in the science community.

Check out the new annual report web site, which also features an update from Ecosystems Center Director Hugh Ducklow, and then sign up for email updates from the Ecosystems Center throughout the year.

(Photo by Sarah Wilkins)

Greenheads, Dragonflies, Snails, and Tales of Young Scientists in the Salt Marsh

If you pay attention to a New England salt marsh in the summer you can see emergence. The greenhead that emerges from the grass. The dragonfly that emerges from the pond. The snail that emerges from the flooding waters. In Plum Island, if you're patient, you can see young scientists emerging from the marsh.

These young, intrepid marsh-minded scientists are part of the the Ecosystem Center's TIDE (Trophic cascades and Interacting control processes in a Detritus-based aquatic Ecosystem) Project, which is nestled within the Plum Island Long Term Ecological Research site. TIDE is a large-scale fertilization project in the salt marshes of the Plum Island Estuary in northern Massachusetts that is currently in its 10th field season.

The project is led by Ecosystems Center senior scientist Linda Deegan, and many center scientists have participated in the project. More importantly, the TIDE Project has provided opportunities for young scientists to get their feet wet (that is, wet, muddy, and mosquito-bitten) in science.

These young researchers write about their experiences in the TIDE blog. From the frontlines of the field, it gives first-hand accounts of the science being conducted.The most recent posting is by David Johnson, a research associate at the center who has been a part of the TIDE Project for 10 years. While greenheads and snails and dragonflies come and go, some who emerge on the marsh stay for a while.

Muskoxen (Ovibos moschatus) on the North Slope of Alaska. (Photo: Alex Huryn)

Land of Extremes Is Colorful Guide to Natural History of the Arctic Tundra

John Hobbie and Alex Huryn, long-time principal investigators on the Arctic Long Term Ecological Research project at Toolik Lake, Alaska, have just finished a book about the natural history of the North Slope of Alaska, the only Arctic tundra in the U. S. The book, Land of Extremes, A Natural History of the Arctic North Slope of Alaska, will be published this September by the University of Alaska Press.

The idea for the book came up in the dining hall at Toolik. Says Hobbie, “I was sitting at the dinner table with Alex, and was struck by the diversity of the expertise there. Scientists who were world experts on birds, mammals, microbes, plants, geology and so on. What an opportunity to bring together all that knowledge about one small region of the Earth – and a very interesting region it is too.”

The first section is devoted to climate, geology, landforms, and ecology; the second provides a guide to the identification and natural history of the common animals and plants and a primer on the human prehistory of the region from the Pleistocene through the mid-twentieth century. The appendix provides the framework for a tour of the natural history features along the Dalton Highway, the road that runs from the Brooks Range to Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean.

John Hobbie, currently senior scholar the Ecosystems Center, was instrumental in setting up Toolik as a research station in the mid 1970s. He has been going to the North Slope, in fact, since he began conducting his doctoral research in the late 1950s. Like Hobbie, Alex Huryn, professor at the University of Alabama, has carried out research in the Arctic year-round. “Alex is an excellent naturalist, and provided hundreds of color illustrations for the book,” said Hobbie.

JC Weber explains his laboratory's research in the deep Sargasso Sea to students from the New York Harbor School. (Photo: Debbie Scanlon)

Students from the New York Harbor School visited Woods Hole and the Ecosystems Center last month. JC Weber explained the work that he and Maureen Conte conduct in the Oceanic Flux program. He told students about one aspect, using organic chemical biomarkers extracted from deep sea particulate matter to learn about processes in the mesopelgaic zone of the deep Sargasso Sea.

Matthew Erickson gave an overview of the Palmer Station Long Term Ecological Research project in Antarctica. Research there is focused on the Antarctic pelagic foodweb.

The Harbor School is a small college preparatory school on Governor's Island in New York City. All students must choose a career and technical education program of study from one of these maritime related areas: marine technology, marine science, marine policy or SCUBA diving.

Vincent Lin and Jim Tang

The Ecosystems Center staff plays an active role in community outreach and education. Every year, scientists and research assistants volunteer to mentor students from the middle school and high school levels, helping them to refine ideas for their science fair projects. Many of the staff are also involved in judging projects at both the local and state science fairs.

Mentoring of seventh and eighth grade students at Lawrence School is organized by the Woods Hole Science and Technology Educational Partnership (WHSTEP). In 2012, Ecosystems Center researchers JC Weber, Sam Kelsey, Lindsay Scott, Suzanne Thomas and Kate Morkeski spent several hours with the students, helping them develop their science project ideas and organize their approach and methods. Other Ecosystems staff, eager to help the next generation of scientists, also mentored several motivated high school students who approached them independently with their scientific interests.

This year, three Falmouth High School students who were advised by Ecosystems Center scientists went on to win top awards at the Falmouth Public Schools Science Fair on March 3. The following week, all three won prizes in the South Shore Regional Science Fair at Bridgewater State University and will next compete in the Massachusetts State Science and Engineering Fair at MIT in May.

Vincent Lin, a junior at Falmouth High School who was mentored by Ecosystems Center scientist Jim Tang, won first prize at the Falmouth fair. He also received the Mary Sears Scholarship from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as well as an award from the National Marine Fisheries Service. His project was "Effects of Fertilization and Temperature on Greenhouse Gas and Nitrogen Oxide Emissions from Soils." Jim commented on the project, "The results will inform us how to appropriately fertilize lawns and agricultural crops in order to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon stocks in soils." Vincent will represent Massachusetts at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Pittsburgh this May. This was Vincent's third year winning of first prize at the science fair.

Another FHS junior, Ted Price, received first prize for his project, "Light Attenuation in West Falmouth Harbor." Melanie Hayn, research assistant at the Ecosystems Center, was his advisor. In addition, Ted was awarded a prize from Hydroid, Inc. His project looked at the factors that affect light penetration in West Falmouth Harbor. "He was interested in why you could see further below the water surface at some locations than others, and wanted to figure out what was responsible," noted Melanie. Ted looked at many factors, including chlorophyll, colored dissolved organic matter, suspended solids, salinity, and tidal state.

Steven Spall won second prize for his study of "Biomass Denitrification in Saltwater Estuaries." His mentor was Ken Foreman, director of the Ecosystems Center's Semester in Environmental Science. Steven won the Dr. Donald Zinn Award from the Salt Pond Area Bird Sanctuaries, Inc., and was selected as alternate to Vincent Lin for the International Science and Engineering Fair. The goals of his project, said Ken, were to use microcosms filled with wood chips to simulate a permeable reactive barrier designed to promote denitrification in the groundwater. Steven also evaluated the lifetime of the wood chips by measuring the decomposition of the wood via the release of carbon dioxide from the degradation of the wood in the outgoing water vs. the incoming water.

Ecosystems Center staff who judged at the Falmouth Public Schools science fair were JC Weber, Marshall Otter, Jim Tang, Suzanne Thomas and Miriam Johnston. Falmouth Academy's science fair, held in February, was judged by Hap Garritt. Marshall, Hap and JC also judge the science fair at the state level at MIT.

Volunteering in these educational initiatives gives the center staff an opportunity to share their own passion for science with the next generation of young scientists. “It’s an incredibly rewarding experience seeing the excitement and enthusiasm about science within the kids and the pride that they exude when presenting their final presentations,” noted Ecosystems research assistant JC Weber.

Dr. Nelson explains: "Salt marshes, such as the Great Marsh along the northern Massachusetts coast, are highly productive landscapes that provide a great number of ecosystem services. Some of the more well known ecosystem services provided by salt marshes are protection from storm surge and runoff filtration. There is another major service salt marshes provide that ecologist have long theorized about but rarely demonstrated and that is the export of food to adjacent habitats in the form of fish.

Each year in the spring the productivity engine of the marsh gets switched on and begins to produce enormous amounts of biomass in the form of small fish. These fish, primarily mummichog (Fundulus heterclitus), follow the pulse of the tides to feed on the abundant food in the relative safety of tidal creeks throughout the spring and summer. As the temperatures dip into the fall season these little fish must move out of the shallow tidal creeks and into deeper waters, where they become prey for larger fish such as striped bass (Marone saxatilis). Essentially, salt marshes act as food factories that package large amounts of production in a short period and then export that production to organisms in other systems. In fact, we have observed a strong correlation between the amount of mummichog produced and the number of striped bass. Therefore, maintaining healthy and productive salt marshes will help to maintain productive offshore fisheries.

"Human-caused nutrient pollution, however, is a major threat to the stability of this important ecosystem service. My work focuses on the effects of 'eutrophication' or human-caused nutrient pollution on the secondary (fish) productivity of salt marshes. To examine this I employ a number of techniques with the primary goal of answering two main questions: first, how does nutrient pollution change the number of fish the salt marsh can support? And second, what are the effects on fish growth from nutrient pollution? By knowing the number of fish and their rate of growth we can calculate the total production of fish in the salt marsh. Of course, actually determining fish growth in the wild can be quite difficult.

"This summer I utilized a new technique that marks the bones, and other hard parts, of fish with a fluorescent dye (Calcein) that can be used to determine a fish’s growth rate. The fish are marked by immersing them in a non-toxic solution of Calcein and salt water for two minutes. A major advantage of this method is the number of fish we can mark at one time. This summer I was able to mark 28,500 fish in a two-day period. The dye does not harm the fish and cannot be seen in normal light, so the fish’s natural behavior is not affected. Once marked with the Calcein the bony structures will glow green under ultraviolet light. The marked fish were released back into the creeks from which they were captured to grow during the summer. We conducted monthly sampling of the fish in these creeks to recapture the marked fish. In the lab an ultraviolet light will be used to illuminate the Calcein mark. We will then measure the additional growth beyond the calcein mark on several bony structures to determine the fish’s growth during its time at liberty. If we are successful we will be able to answer the question of how eutrophication affects the growth rate of these fish and draw conclusions about the overall effect eutrophication will have on the export of secondary production from marshes to fisheries species offshore."