The San Diego Union Tribune published an article on our work at the South Bay Salt Works, part of the larger NASA-funded OAST project. Check it out here: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/environment/story/2019-11-05/seeking-life-in-the-solar-system.
We have a new paper published this week in Frontiers in Environmental Science on estimating ecosystem services along the western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). This was one of the most challenging academic efforts I’ve been involved in, and is the culmination of nearly 5 years of effort since co-author Barbara Neumann and I conceived the idea during a serendipitous meeting at a Columbia-Kiel University workshop on marine science back when we were both postdocs.
Ecosystem services, the direct and indirect contributions of ecosystems to human well-being, is a concept that’s received a lot of attention as a critical abstraction at the interface between science and policy. Scientists have gotten very good at understanding ecosystem processes and relating them to other ecosystem processes. Economists and social scientists are getting better at quantifying the social and economic costs of environmental change. What’s frequently missing, however, is a framework for linking specific ecosystem processes to social or economic outcomes. This becomes really important if you want to effectively manage resource use; ecosystems perceived as being more socially and economically valuable (i.e. providing more ecosystem services), for example, might warrant more nuanced management.
Ecosystem services are most useful when we can consider their distribution in space and time. However, linking ecosystem services to specific places and times is methodologically challenging. One way to do this is to use expert elicitations via the matrix method. In this approach a collection of experts is formally interviewed in a consistent, scripted fashion to identify “consensus” estimates of service supply from specific ecological units. This approach is typically applied to landscapes, where the ecological units are geographically fixed (think about a mosaic of forest and grassland, each providing different services, but fixed in space).
But what about the marine environment? Certain ecological features, such as a shoal, gyre, or recurrent eddy can be geographically fixed, but away from such features the marine environment is a fluid mosaic that is not fixed in time or space. We decided to try an approach that was agnostic to location, and instead elicited expert opinions of service supply from the seascape units derived from an objective analysis of macronutrients, chlorophyll, temperature, and salinity in Bowman et al., 2018.
For our group of experts we tapped the investigators of the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project (many thanks to all of you!). It was quite a challenge to reconcile the divergent methods – when we conducted the interviews we hadn’t worked out all the details of the seascape unit classification system – but we got there in the end. The approach could use some further refinement before it’s ready to produce a data product for resource managers, however, we hope the proof-of-concept will stimulate further effort at LTERs and elsewhere in the marine environment!
From the tropics to the Arctic… I spent last week in Tromsø , Norway helping prepare the German icebreaker Polarstern for the MOSAiC year-long polar drift expedition. As I’ve written in past posts, I’ve been waiting for this moment since 2012 and it’s hard to believe it’s finally here. MOSAiC is a true coupled ocean-ice-atmosphere study, and the first such study of its scope or scale. There have been modern overwintering expeditions in the Arctic before – most notably the SHEBA expedition of the late 1990’s – but none have approached the breadth or scale of MOSAiC.
The basic idea behind MOSAiC is to drive Polarstern into the Laptev Sea and tether the ship to an (increasingly rare) large floe of multiyear sea ice. As we move toward winter, the floe and Polarstern will become encased in newly forming sea ice. The ship will drift with this ice through the full cycle of seasons, allowing a rare opportunity to study the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of sea ice through its full progression of growth and decay.
But MOSAiC is about more than sea ice. Sea ice is – for now – a dominant ecological feature of the central Arctic, and it exerts a strong influence on both the atmosphere and the upper ocean. Better predicting the consequences of reduced sea ice cover on these environments is a major goal of the expedition.
With support from the National Science Foundation, for our own little piece of MOSAiC PhD student Emelia Chamberlain and I are collaborating with Brice Loose and postdoctoral researcher Alessandra D’Angelo at the University of Rhode Island, along with colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. We’ll be looking at how the structure of prokaryotic and eukaryotic communities in sea ice and the upper ocean influence the oxidation of methane (a potent greenhouse gas), and the production and uptake of CO2. I’m looking forward to joining Polarstern in late January for a long, cold stint at the end of the polar night!
Natalia Erazo and I are on our way back from an amazing week of sampling in the Cayapas-Mataje Ecological Reserve in northern Ecuador. We first visited the reserve in 2017 and have been anxious to return ever since. Our objectives on this trip were to collect water column and sediment samples to test hypotheses about how shrimp aquaculture impacts mangrove forest health and biogeochemical cycling in mangrove-dominated estuaries. Cayapas-Mataje is an ideal place for this study. The reserve is the largest of its kind along the Pacific Coast of Latin America. The presence of the reserve has prevented the large-scale conversion of mangrove forest to shrimp aquaculture (as has happened further south in Muisne and other parts of the country), however, there are a number of facilities – some quite large – that existed prior to the establishment of the reserve. Thus relatively “pristine” forest can be found immediately adjacent highly impacted forest.
Congratulations to Natalia for receiving a National Geographic Young Explorer award to make this trip a reality! Here are a few choice pictures from the week.
