Category Archives: 2016 Student Posts

If you are apart of the ASCS 2016 seminar series, please use this as a specific category.

Outreach Product Proposal

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Oysters are the darlings of the Chesapeake. Oyster Bio Clump
People here have a profound sense of pride in the little reef-forming bivalves, and with good reason. Oysters provide numerous ecosystem services such as filtering our water, dampening erosive wave energy with their reefs, and providing habitat for a plethora of other species. They also support a fishery that has been crucial to human settlements for hundreds of years. Because of this, the public is well aware of the oyster narrative and concerned by the oyster’s struggle with disease since the 1960’s. I plan to use this innate interest to disseminate my research on oyster adaptation to disease.
My outreach product will be a shareable social media graphic created in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign depicting the socio-economic impact of oyster disease in the Chesapeake Bay. Data used will include oyster landings from the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, disease severity and prevalence from scientific literature, and economic data from Maryland and Virginia. It will be heavy on appealing visuals with as little text as possible. I want the message to come across quickly and easily through a carefully arranged series of graphs and images. I will likely make my own illustrations for this project in addition to using symbols from the Integration & Application Network. I plan to distribute the finished product through Twitter and Facebook. I am choosing to focus on this topic over the other two infographics (disease ecology and evolution of marine diseases) that I plan to make before graduation because the fishery just opened for the season and I believe there will be interest in the topic of the oyster industry and economics.
The infographic will start with some background on oysters and their value to the Chesapeake Bay. The introduction will lead into a graph of oyster landings over time. There is a precipitous drop in the oyster seed industry and wild harvest in the late 1950’s and 1980’s, respectively. This coincides with two major disease outbreaks. From there, I can explain the economic impact on Maryland and Virginia in terms of loss of money to the industry and also the social costs, such as the loss of jobs. I also hope to present a light at the end of the tunnel by summarizing some current oyster disease research, which indicates that the situation is improving.
My intended audience is coastal landowners and the Chesapeake community, but the distribution of the product will not be controlled, as it will be shareable on social media. Therefore, I hope to make it interesting to the general public because I am not sure who will come across it. Despite this, I still want to tailor the product to coastal landowners of the Chesapeake. My goal is to educate them about what is occurring in their backyards. I want to raise awareness about oyster disease as a way to get people interested in the disease and adaptation research that I am doing. I am hoping that this graphic will supply the “why we should care” portion of communicating my research because it will illustrate how disease has impacted the areas that the target audience inhabits.

Project Proposal – What Makes a Wetland?

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Defined as first- and second-order streams, headwaters and their adjacent wetlands establish the beginning of a river network. Located at the interface between uplands and surface water networks, headwater wetlands intercept shallow ground water and surface runoff, acting as a natural filter to improve downstream water quality. Important ecosystem functions provided by headwater wetlands include sediment retention, flood attenuation, and the removal of pollutants/excess nutrients. Headwaters also contribute to regional biodiversity by providing habitat/refuge, and sustain downstream aquatic and riparian biota by exporting essential products such as food, nutrients, and woody debris.  As compared to higher order streams, the loss or degradation of headwater wetlands is expected to have a disproportionate impact on downstream water quality.

Hydrology is the single most important factor driving the structure and function of wetlands, including headwater systems. Changes in hydrologic cycles resulting from land use and climate change have contributed to the degradation of streams, wetlands, and other aquatic ecosystems throughout the nation. The consequences of altered hydrology have been studied extensively in many aquatic ecosystems, however it is unclear to what extent land use and climate change will affect the hydrologic regime of headwater wetlands, particularly in flat coastal landscapes such as the coastal plain of Virginia.

Despite no net loss policies and specific guidance for mitigation of wetland impacts, Virginia continue to lose wetlands and ecosystem service capacity through both permitted activities and natural processes. My dissertation research seeks to inform the conservation and management of Virginia’s headwater wetlands by 1) identifying which wetlands are most vulnerable to climate change in the coastal plain of Virginia and 2) describing how the character and condition (i.e., land use) of headwater catchments influence their vulnerability to climate change stressors.

While direct wetland impacts such as filing and draining are immediately obvious, the indirect hydrologic impacts due to land use and climate change that I study require some understanding of wetland hydrology. An important concept fundamental to my research is the movement of water to and from headwater wetlands. One component of this work involves modeling water table fluctuations that contribute to the formation of wetlands in the coastal plain. The soil saturation conditions required to establish and maintain a wetland are consistent between all wetland types – the main differences being how the water is transported to and from the wetland. Therefore I would like to develop a product that teaches the fundamentals of wetland hydrology, in other words, what makes a wetland a wetland?

I plan to create a short (2-3 minute) whiteboard animation describing the hydrology of wetlands that could be used as an educational tool in schools and for the general public. I expect this product would be most appropriate for middle and high school aged students, and would complement lessons on the water cycle and/or wetlands. However, since it would not require in depth understanding of the water cycle, it could also be used in outreach events such as VIMS Marine Science Day. In addition to describing basic wetland hydrology, this video would focus on illustrating the hydrologic connectivity of wetlands to watersheds and downstream ecosystems. Other topics that I may cover include describing how hydrology influences the capacity of wetlands to perform ecosystem functions, and demonstrating how temperature and precipitation alter watershed/wetland hydrology.

Project Proposal

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Marine Plastic Pollution

Background

Over the past century, plastic has gone from invention to ubiquity due to its versatile, lightweight, and durable nature1,2. These desirable qualities in a commercial material, however, also make its disposal quite challenging. Plastic disposal has become a cause for concern as knowledge of plastic pollution in the marine environment has increased exponentially in the past few decades. By 2014, global plastic resin production increased 689% since 1975 with the largest market sector (~40%) being packaging – all intended for single use5. Jambeck et al. (2015) estimates that 4.8 – 12.7 million metric tons (MT) of plastic waste enters the ocean from coastal populations each year. Marine plastic pollution can already be found in many environments including all coastal areas and remote beaches, both poles and trapped in sea ice, throughout the open ocean and water column, and on the sea floor3.

The majority of investigations into the impacts of plastics on marine biota to date have focused on entanglement of marine animals as well as ingestion of plastic by many marine species1, 2, 3. Microplastic ingestion has been demonstrated in a large range of marine organisms including but not limited to seabirds, cetaceans, fish, crustaceans, oysters, pelagic larvae, zooplankton, and even corals1, 2. Ingested plastics can obstruct feeding and block the passage of food to the digestive tract or cause food intake to be limited by pseudo-satiation2. Due to a large surface to volume ratio, microplastics are also known to concentrate persistent organic pollutants, aqueous metals, and endocrine disrupting chemicals4, 7. In addition to concentrated environmental pollutants, plastic additives incorporated during manufacture may also pose a problem for marine organisms through leaching. These persistent pollutants, plastic additives, and plastic itself can then pose a major issue when considering trophic transfer. This also should be viewed as a potential human health concern since many impacted species are sold for human consumption6.

Another more recent concern, and the topic of my thesis research, has been the colonization of marine plastic debris by some potentially pathogenic microbes including members of the genus Vibrio8. This genus comprises several species of human and animal pathogens, which have caused several pandemics and countless epidemics across the globe. Since plastics have a degradation time of hundreds to thousands of years, they remain in the environment on drastically long timescales and thus provide habitats for the colonization and possible dissemination of pathogens and their associated infectious diseases8.

Project Description

The outreach product I intend to create will be an infographic targeting policy-makers for action managing plastic pollution. Whether these policy makers will be at the local, state, or national level remains to be determined. Generally this infographic will address the many issues of plastic pollution listed above and why alternative solutions and changed behaviors are imperative. This plastic pollution problem can be addressed in the form of energy expense in plastic production, waste production and disposal, and hazards of plastic in the environment. I will include a call for action section after determining key issues these policy makers are faced with. However, before speaking with these policy makers, I anticipate one of the calls to action recommending the development of a bill similar to that of France’s 2015 Energy Transition For Green Growth bill, which will ban plastic cutlery, plates, and cups by 2020. This bill should also include a ban on straws/stirrers and plastic bags – if I’m not getting carried away. But honestly!

Desired Impact

My hope is for this infographic to resonate with policy makers and support the idea of a ban of single-use plastic. A drastic change in the way we do things related to plastic use and its subsequent disposal is mandatory if we want a healthy and clean environment. Although disposable cutlery, straws, and plastic bags represent a smaller portion of marine debris than beverage bottles and cigarette filters, targeting these single-use items are nonetheless key in reducing our plastic footprint on the marine environment. Seeing these bans established in France provides hope that other nations, including ours, will responsibly follow in succession.

 

Literature Cited

  1. Andrady, A. L. (2011). Microplastics in the marine environment. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 62(8), 1596-1605
  2. Cole, M., Lindeque, P., Halsband, C., & Galloway, T. S. (2011). Microplastics as contaminants in the marine environment: a review. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 62(12), 2588-2597.
  3. Derraik, J. G. (2002). The pollution of the marine environment by plastic debris: a review. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 44(9), 842-852.
  4. Galgani, F., Hanke, G., & Maes, T. (2015). Global distribution, composition and abundance of marine litter. In Marine anthropogenic litter (pp. 29-56). Springer International Publishing.
  5. Jambeck, J. R., Geyer, R., Wilcox, C., Siegler, T. R. (2015). Science 347(6223), 768-771.
  6. Neves, D., Sobral, P., Ferreira, J. L., & Pereira, T. (2015). Ingestion of microplastics by commercial fish off the Portuguese coast. Marine pollution bulletin, 101(1), 119-126.
  7. Wardrop, P., Shimeta, J., Nugegoda, D., Morrison, P., Miranda, A. Tang, M. & Clarke, B. (2016). ‘Chemical Pollutants Sorbed to Ingested Microbeads from Personal Care Products Accumulate in Fish.’ Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.5b06280.
  8. Zettler, E. R., Mincer, T. J., & Amaral-Zettler, L. A. (2013). Life in the “plastisphere”: microbial communities on plastic marine debris. Environmental Science & Technology, 47(13), 7137-7146.