SERC Report X spring 2006

Friends of SERC Turning the Tide on Harmful Algae Geometry of the Landscape

S Ι E Ι R Ι C

Smithsonian Environmental Research Center Spring 2006

The The ShapeShape of an of an

EcosystemEcosystem

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William R. Sweeney, Jr., Chairperson Vice President, Global Government Affairs, Electronic Data Systems, Washington, DC. Barbara Bedford, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate, Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Frank Chaney, CEO, Chaney Enterprises, Lothian, MD. Diane Ebert-May, Ph.D., Professor, Depart-ment of Plant Biology, and Director, Assess-ment in Science Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. Marlin Fitzwater: Writer and lecturer, former White House Press Secretary 1983-1992, Deale, MD. Scott Nixon, Ph.D., Professor of Oceanogra-phy, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI. Midgett S. Parker, Jr., Esq., Attorney and Partner, Linowes and Blocher, LLP, Annapolis, MD. Wayne Rogers, Chairman, Synergics Compa-nies, Annapolis, MD. Charles G. Rose, Former North Carolina Congressman, Westminster, VA. Robert B. Whitlatch, Professor, Department of Marine Sciences, University of Connecticut, Groton, CT.

666 Form and Function Jess Parker Explores the Forests.

7 7 7 Field Notes ♦ Landscape Geometry ♦ Against the Tide

Eye on Education: Annual Open House and the Friends of SERC Launching NexGen: News from our internship and fellowship program

Sightings: Selected media coverage of SERC Strength in Numbers: New grants and awards Meetings and Presentations Publications

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Smithsonian Environmental Research Center Advisory Board

Cover photo: Intern Rehanna Chaudhri uses the pedestrian laser designed by Jess Parker to generate images of forest structure (story page 4).

New to the Board: Robert B. Whitlatch is a Professor of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut. He

served as Head of the Department of Marine Sciences from 1987-2002. During this period, he helped to build a strong multidisciplinary graduate program, increased the faculty and assisted in the initiation of an under-

graduate major in Coastal Sciences. He has served on scientific review panels for a number of federal agen-cies (e.g., NSF, NOAA, EPA) and is regularly asked to review manuscripts for a variety of scientific journals. He was a founding President of the Northeast and Great Lakes Associa-tion of Marine Laboratories and a founding member of the Board of Directors for the Long Island Sound Foundation. He has also served on

the Board of Directors for the Connecticut Chapter of the Nature Conservancy and National Association of Marine Laboratories. Most recently he served on the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council committee which assessed potential economic and environmental impacts associated with the proposed introduc-tion of a non-native oyster into Chesa-peake Bay.

In This IssueIn This IssueIn This Issue

Focus On ScienceFocus On ScienceFocus On Science

SERC NewsSERC NewsSERC News

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JOIN US FOR science demonstrations

boat rides canoe tours

crane lifts into the forest canopy

NEW THIS YEAR! Blue Grass Jam

Rhode River Wade-in with Bernie Fowler

9th ANNUAL  OPEN HOUSE FOR NATURE May 13th  9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. 

NEW Friends of SERC Membership Program NEW Friends of SERC Membership Program

With this year’s Open House, we’re reaching out to the local community and, for the first time, opening a channel for individuals, families and businesses to directly support our education, outreach and research projects. The new Friends of SERC membership program will help us bring exciting environmental science programs to the local community and continue fostering the next generation of environmental scientists and managers through our internship and fellowship program.

Friends of SERC will also provide hands-on assistance at programs and special events.

Members may also choose to support specific research projects.

Members receive notification of upcoming events, invitations to “Friends-Only” events, the SERC

quarterly newsletter, and the satisfaction of supporting world-

class research and environmental education to sustain and restore ecosystems of the Chesapeake Bay and coastal zones around the world.

Eye on Education . . Eye on Education . . . .

3 SERC Report X spring 2006

For Information on Open House or to join Friends of SERC, visit us on the web at www.serc.si.edu

4 SERC Report X spring 2006

spaces between the branches while others are denser. Parker wonders how that structure impacts their function. For example, open spaces like the holes in Swiss cheese may provide better places for bats to hunt than denser areas. But accurately assessing the organization of the for-est and how this influences functions has been an evolving process that has only recently become possible for forest ecologists.

"When I first started, we climbed individual trees," Parker said, "but we could only measure close to the trunk. We couldn't see the open spaces, the air spaces be-tween trees."

Their measurements were essentially two-dimensional. "But forests are fundamentally three-dimensional,” he said. “Every little bit is different and we need away to ac-count for these different bits and the way they function based on what we can measure."

To do that, forest ecologists like Parker have had to get inside forests in ways no one had done before. For the past 15 years, he and his colleagues have been literally building their ladder higher and deeper into the spaces within the forest. The development of three new tools in particular has provided them with the important rungs they've needed to really get at the nature of how forests work.

Canopy Cranes: When Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientist Alan Smith first used a construction crane to access the forest canopy in Panama, Parker knew right away that a new door had opened. "It became clear that the way we looked at forests before, just walking around the forest floor, was really a small part of the picture,” he said. That was in 1990. Now canopy cranes are used to access all levels of forests throughout the world. Eddy Flux Monitoring Networks: Forest canopies play an important role in the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the release of

by Kimbra Cutlip

Form and FunctionForm and FunctionForm and Function

As the first tentative leaves of early April succumb to the lengthening of

days with their annual verdant explosion of life, the forests at SERC announce the indisputable arrival of spring. The energy in the woods is palpable beyond the twittering of young birds and the dancing of dappled sunlight. It is the energy of an enormous giant stretching and yawning itself awake in the early hours of the morning.

Like large breathing organisms, forests are complex and elegant living systems. They house an amazing diver-sity of plants and animals, providing food, shelter and se-curity. They interact with the atmosphere, effectively "inhaling" carbon dioxide and "exhaling" oxygen. Forests reflect sunlight and heat into the spaces above them, while shading and cooling the spaces below them during the day. At night, the forest canopy insulates the space below it, trapping heat like a protective blanket. The trees of a forest exchange nutrients and carbon with the soil, and channel rainwater through the delicate weave of leaves that form their canopies.

Understanding how these complex and intricate sys-tems function is critical to understanding some of the most important questions facing humanity today—questions about the role of forests in providing refuge for the world's biodiversity and their capacity to serve as sinks for the excess carbon dioxide human activity is pumping into the atmosphere.

Building the Tool Box: SERC researcher Jess Parker is trying to understand for-ests in all their complexity. Much of his work is focused on the relationship between the physical shape of a forest and the way it functions. "I want to know how the struc-ture of the forest impacts the balance of energy and mate-rial exchange with the atmosphere, how it affects the mi-croclimates inside the forest and the diversity of habitats," Parker said.

"How many kinds of places are there in the forest?" he wonders, explaining that some forests contain lots of open

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competition with one another. An older forest will have gaps where trees have fallen and younger ones have started to fill in. This mixture of young and old trees creates a bumpier canopy surface. Parker has introduced the term rugosity to describe the bumpiness of a canopy surface.

The rugosity of a canopy surface and the height of the trees tell Parker the forest's stage of development, which leads him to conclusions about how rapidly it's growing and how much biomass it contains. From this knowledge, Parker can calculate the net exchange of carbon dioxide between the forest and the atmosphere. He hopes to soon be able to calculate growth rate and make inferences about a forest's complexity with these same measurements. Parker is testing the limits of what these simple measure-ments can be used for.

Rugosity-Shaping a Bigger Question Rugosity reveals more to Parker than the age of the forest, however. When he and his colleagues compared measure-ments of heat reflected from forests with lidar-based meas-urements of rugosity and forest service maps of old-growth and young forests, he found that higher rugosity, old-

growth forests reflected 10 percent less of the sun's heat energy. And if it's not reflecting that energy, it must be absorb-ing it. What his measurements don't tell him is where that energy is going? What is that old forest doing with that extra 10 percent? Parker would like to find out. "The energy you keep is the basis of the food web," he said. "The more energy ab-sorbed, the bigger energy base for the system in an old-growth forest." He sug-gests that the extra energy is like getting a 10 percent raise in salary. "What would you be able to do with the extra re-

sources? If you had more salary, you could pay debts or ward against crises, maybe fend off stressors and pres-sures." Parker said he doesn't know if that's how old forests are using the extra energy they absorb. But now that he knows they're doing it, he wants to know why.

As May matures into June in the SERC forest, the en-ergy of spring awakening will calm into the steady pace of humid mid-Atlantic summer. Leaves will thicken and turn dark green and shadow will fall on the forest floor. Jess Parker will be there, walking among them, looking for the extra energy among the old growth, and trying to under-stand the meaning of spaces.

water vapor. Advances in technology have provided re-searchers with affordable and reliable tools to make very rapid real-time measurements of the rates of these ex-changes. With these tools mounted on the research tower at SERC, Parker is able to create a detailed and accurate pic-ture of what's happening throughout the forest as a whole. With eddy flux monitoring stations now established around the world, forest ecologists have developed a network for creating a global picture of the exchange of heat, CO2 and water vapor between forests and the atmosphere. Remote Sensing: Only a few decades ago, remote sensing meant simply aerial photography. For forest ecologists, that meant pictures of the top of the canopy. Although useful, such photos were limited in terms of the information they provided. Today, remote sensing tools are penetrating surfaces with radar and lidar technology. With the advent of lidar (light detec-tion and ranging) technology ecologists were able to visual-ize the interior structures within a forest. But Parker was interested in seeing more detail than what aerial lidar could achieve. The limitations of scale and cost of aerial lidar in-spired him to develop a portable lidar system. With his new tool, Parker can walk through the for-est scanning the spaces from be-low to create a three-dimensional picture with details to the scale of one meter. His tool has been de-scribed as a sort of CAT-scan for an organism hundreds of feet tall by many acres wide. Now he can get inside the structure of the forest and answer questions he's been curious about for a long time. The Meaning of Shape Years of looking for relationships between shape and func-tion have led Parker to an understanding of a few remarka-bly simple concepts that belie the complexity of the science behind them. He's using those concepts to push the limits of what we know about forests.

"By measuring the shape of the canopy and height of the forest, we can estimate a great deal about its function," he said. A canopy's shape is determined in part by the type of forest it is, but also by its age and stage of development. All the trees in a young forest tend to be the same height because they are similar ages and are all growing rapidly in

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technique that accounts for the arrangement of various components within the landscape and the potential flow of nutrients from source to water.

Their new method excludes riparian areas that are not explicitly linked with both uphill sources and downhill streams, and areas not contiguous with stream channels. In their model, only buffer zones with the potential to actu-ally filter materials are accounted for. Additionally, they describe a method of estimating how different local activities combine to influence whole-watershed processes.

According to Weller, these new ana-lytical tools are more appropriate for assessing buffer effectiveness across broad regions. This work offers the potential for understanding how land cover patterns influence water quality, and may allow for more informed and targeted management actions.

Against the Tide Amnesia, paralysis, difficulty breath-ing—these are all possible outcomes of an uncontrolled harmful algal bloom. HABs, as they’re called, can wreak havoc on wildlife, human life and com-merce. Stopping them is an elusive endeavor Mario Sengco has been working on for ten years.

HABs are increases in populations of algae that either produce a toxin or occur in such densities that they have a physical impact on their environment. Some of the most insidious algal blooms do both.

The Florida red tide, caused by Karenia brevis, is just such a bloom. During a red tide, Karenia brevis becomes so dense that the water takes on the color of the organism, thus lending the name to the phenomenon. The neuro-toxin it produces causes massive fish kills and accumulates in filter-feeders,

Landscape Geometry For years scientists have known that areas of relatively undisturbed vege-tation such as forests or wetlands can act as filters for the landscape, inter-cepting nutrients and pollutants from human sources as they make their way downhill through a watershed. However, translating that knowledge into a real-world understanding of the significance of streamside riparian buffer zones has been tricky business.

Models designed to assess the effectiveness of riparian buffers on large systems such as whole water-sheds are based on statistical analyses that compare nutrient discharge to percent of land cover and percent of riparian forest or wetland within a certain distance from a stream. This type of analysis doesn’t consider whether any of the riparian area is actually functioning as a buffer.

“To function as a buffer for mate-rial discharge, a riparian system must be in between the stream and some nutrient source area, such as agricul-tural lands,” said SERC alumnus Matthew Baker (now at Utah State University). “There is no guarantee that all forests within a fixed distance of streams function as riparian buff-ers or that all riparian filters fall within any specified distance of streams.” In a recent study to be pub-lished in Landscape Ecology*, Baker and SERC scientists Don Weller and Tom Jordan describe a new method of estimating the impacts of land use and riparian buffer zones on whole watersheds, one that provides a more meaningful way to model the filter-ing ability of wetland ecosystems.

Using publicly available geographic data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Geo-logical Survey, the team studied 503 watersheds within the Chesapeake Bay drainage basin, analyzing eleva-tion, stream channels and land cover. By incorporating their understanding of landscape function in their assess-ment, they developed a modeling

Mario Sengco will discuss the state of scientific understanding on preven-tion, control and mitigation of Florida Red Tide from July 17– 20 during a symposium and public forum. For more information, visit our website in the next few weeks. www.serc.si.edu

Field Notes:Field Notes:Field Notes:

forcing shellfish industries to close. Wave action can even aerosolize the toxin and cause respiratory illness in people living downwind of a bloom.

According to Sengco, the number and variety of HABs reported around the world has increased dramatically over the last 30 years. In the eastern United States alone, the New England shellfish industry shut down for months in 2005 as a toxic bloom lin-gered. A persistent red tide in south-western Florida caused fish and mana-tee kills throughout the area.

Sengco is studying the potential for using clay to manage HABs and has been focusing much of his energy on the Florida red tide. “In these methods, a certain kind of clay is diluted into a slurry mixture and sprayed onto the water,” Sengco explained. The clay sticks to the algal cells and causes them to clump and sink to the bottom. As the clumps sink, they capture more cells along the way. In East Asia, com-mercial fish farmers have been using clay for ten years, but according to Sengco, much more needs to be known about their impact, especially on the creatures living on the ocean floor.

It’s a fairly effective method under conditions of calm, low-flow water, but it’s just those conditions that may cause the clay to accumulate on the bottom. “I want to know what their impact is on the environment,” Sengco said.

“One colleague from Korea has said they must have dumped the equivalent of a small mountain into the ocean after using clay to mitigate ten years’ worth of harmful blooms.” Sengco is conducting lab experiments and small field studies to establish the most effective methods of using clays and to try to determine their impact on bottom communities.

*Landscape Ecology is Published by Springer Science and Business Media.

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SIGHTINGS

The blue crab enhancement project was featured in the February issue of Chesapeake Bay Magazine which in-cluded photographs from SERC and an interview with Tuck Hines. Mario Sengco was featured in the second of two interviews on the radio program “Earth and Sky” regarding the potential of the parasitic dinoflagellate, Amoebophrya sp., to control the harmful algal species, Alexandrium tama-rense. The first interview was aired last quarter and focused on the use of clays for mitigating impacts of harmful algal blooms. Greg Ruiz was featured in an article in the Tampa Tribune about the transport of invasive marine organisms in bal-last water titled Repelling Invisible Invasions. Denise Breitburg was featured in an article for an online magazine GURL.COM for young girls. http://www.gurl.com/showoff/spotlight/qa/0,15753,654702_686921,00.html Bert Drake was interviewed for a story that aired on Channel 13, CBS Eye Witness News, regarding a recent paper on the impacts of climate change on the virulence of a fungus that is killing many species of frogs in South America. Bert was interviewed for supporting information as an expert on global climate change. Patrick Megonigal was featured in a radio story on National Public Radio's All Things Considered discussing the value of natural wetlands over artificial wetlands such as rainwater retention ponds. The large-scale monitoring program partnership between the National Estuarine Research Reserve, the National Marine Sanctuary Program and SERC was featured in the December 22 issue of The Homer News, in Homer, AK.

NEXGEN Fostering the future of environmental science

Earth Day Every Day On Earth Day, SERC celebrated the completion of the rain garden and wet-land bog habitat outside of the new dormitory. Visitors from the local com-munity joined Tuck Hines and Dennis Whigham for a tour of the dorm and a discussion of rain gardens and green building applications. With guidance from the rain garden designer and fa-cilitator Keith Underwood and Steve Barry, local children also helped plant cranberry bushes in the bog.

With the completion of the rain gar-den, SERC marks another step forward toward leadership in energy and envi-ronmental design within the Smith-sonian community. Recreating a native habitat that is quickly disappearing in Maryland, the new landscaping serves as a rainwater management tool. The

created wetland captures runoff from the building and pulls pollutants and nutrients from rainwater as it makes its way down to the catchment pond. The construction of the dorm itself

marked one of our first steps in this direction with its passive solar orienta-tion, extra insulation, energy-efficient appliances and lighting, and renewable construction materials. SERC intends to continue guiding all future building pro-jects in this direction, and hopes to break ground on a new wastewater treatment plan this year. The plan cur-rently under design will convert our sep-tic fields into a tertiary treatment facility that will remove nitrogen, phosporous and much of the bacteria from waste-water before returning nearly clean wa-ter to the drain fields.

Kudos During the December graduation ceremonies at University of Maryland College Park, two of three Ph.D. de-grees awarded in Biology and one of the two Ph.D. degrees awarded in Marine, Estuarine & Environmental Science went to students who com-pleted their dissertation research at SERC laboratories. Two graduate students receiving a Master of Sci-ence degree in Marine, Estuarine & Environmental Science also con-ducted their work in SERC laborato-ries. Jessica Hines, a University of Mary-land College Park Ph.D. student working on CO2 effects on salt marsh food webs with Bert Drake’s lab, received a three-year fellowship from the EPA “STAR” program.

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Civil Science

Strength in Numbers Denise Breitburg received $84,600 from the University of Michigan for “Watershed-estuary-species nutrient sus-ceptibility,” and $4,000 from the U.S. Department of Commerce for “The potential role of small inlets as reactor vessels for gelatinous zooplankton in Chesapeake Bay.” Wayne Coats and Mario Sengco along with Donald Anderson from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute received a grant for $486,794 from US DOC/NOAA for the project “Role of parasitism on HAB dynamics: Amoebophrya sp. ex Alexandrium tamarense”. Cindy Gilmour received $180,000 from the South Florida Water Management District for “MAP for RECOVER Sec-tion 3.6.4.4: Supporting research for South Florida mercury bioaccumulation,” $48,000 from the State of Mary-land for “Assessment of mercury cycling in a coupled estuarine/terrestrial ecosystem, and development of a long-term ecosystem-level mercury monitoring site at SERC”, and $43,000 of a grant for $179,000 from South Florida Water Management District for “Supporting research for South Florida mercury accumulation.” Patrick Megonigal received the following awards: $102,233 from Northern Arizona University for “Enrichment of a scrub-oak woodland: a test of the progressive nitrogen limitation paradigm,” $90,090 from the U.S. Department of the Interior for the SERC CO2 Project, and $6,000 from Chesapeake Research Consortium for collaborative Re-search on “Plant regulation of competition between methanogens and iron reducing bacteria in freshwater wet-lands.” Patrick Neale received $91,000 from National Institutes of Standards and Technology to continue joint NIST-SI UV monitoring network over the next year. Richard Osman received $17,000 from the State of Connecticut for “The control and economics of aquatic inva-sive species in marine aquaculture.” Gerhardt Riedel received $62,845 from the Academy of Natural Sciences for Kenilworth/Beaver Dam Creek toxics monitoring. Gregory Ruiz received $538,916 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for “Ballast water management and delivery patterns for the United States,” $15,535 from the State of Oregon for “Pre-departure Surveys of the Point Loma & Florence at Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet,” $14,500 from the International Joint Commission for NIS-base-Projects Node Development, and $89,616 from the Government of New Zealand for “Verification of mid-ocean ballast water exchange by commercial ships arriving to New Zealand.” Donald Weller received $142,559 from Chesapeake Research Consortium for “A strategic planning tool for tar-geted buffer restoration and enhanced coastal stewardship.”

SERC researchers presented 31 public talks to audiences at universities, high schools, and citi-zens' advisory councils, throughout the country from Alaska, Oregon and California to Maine, Vir-ginia, and Maryland. Candy Feller assisted Senator and Mrs. Carl Levin (D-Michigan) on a recent trip to Belize, arrang-ing a site visit to the Smithsonian Marine Station at Carrie Bow Cay where they learned of the long-term research conducted at the station. Whitman Miller participated in the Global Conference on Disaster Prevention and Mitigation at Harvard’s School of Public Health where he addressed the topic of unintended consequences of maritime activities, in particular, risks associated with ballast water discharge.

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Minutes: scientific and professional meetings and presentations by SERC staff

SERC hosted a Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee to the Chesapeake Bay Program work-shop titled “Land Use Projections & Alternative Future Scenarios.” Among the objectives of the work-shop were to provide background on tools to develop land use projec-tions and alternative future scenar-ios and to discuss the input to the urban growth (such as impervious cover, population and employment forecasts).

The following SERC researchers presented talks at the Annual Meet-ing of the Blue Crab Advanced Research Consortium at the Center of Marine Biotechnology in Balti-more, MD: Anson Hines “Field assessment of stock enhancement linked to migratory corridors for upper Bay blue crabs: Seasonal and inter-annual variation in survival and production,” Kathryn Chop “Assessing population dynamics of blue crabs in a subestuary of upper Chesapeake Bay: A cooperative field study with local watermen,” Eric Johnson “Optimizing enhan-cement strategies: Predicting growth and survival of hatchery-reared blue crabs under varying release scenarios” and Alicia Young-Williams “Experimental comparisons of performance be-tween hatchery and wild juvenile blue crabs.”

Robert Aguilar presented “Long-term spatio-temporal varia-tion of a nearshore fish community in an upper Chesapeake Bay subes-tuary” at the Benthic Ecology Meet-ings in Quebec City, Canada.

Former Post-doctoral researcher Matthew Baker presented the talk “Watershed-scale thresholds in the potential effectiveness of riparian buffers” based on his work at SERC.

Denise Breitburg, Thomas Jordan and Don Weller partici-pated in a two-day workshop on Modeling in the Chesapeake Bay Program: 2010 and Beyond. It was sponsored by the Chesapeake Bay

Program which was looking for recommendations on future efforts to model the watershed and estu-ary.

Denise Breitburg attended the Joint Subcommittee on Ocean Sci-ence and Technology Ocean Re-search Priorities Plan Workshop in Denver, Colorado. Breitburg has been appointed to the National Research Council Committee re-viewing the plan. As the follow-up activity of the Ocean Commission Report, the goal of the Plan is to formulate priorities for science and technology initiatives in the oceans, coastal waters and Great Lakes over the next five to ten years across the wide scope of societal interests.

Breitburg also presented “Benthic suspension feeder model-ing at the Living Resources Analy-sis Workgroup of the Chesapeake Bay Program, and a talk titled “Settlement of Crossostrea ariakensis larvae under conditions found in the Chesapeake Bay” at the Na-tional Shellfish Association Meet-ings in Monterey, CA.

Catherine deRivera attended the Green Crab Technical Meeting and presented the talk “Spread and Impacts of Carcinus maenas.” deRivera also presented the talks “Coastal Marine Nonindigenous Species” at the Oregon Invasive Species Council meeting, and “Spatial patterns of nonindigenous invertebrates in west coast Reserves & Sanctuaries” for the Department of Environmental Science & Resources at Portland State University.

Bert Drake gave an invited lecture for the 5th Annual McGroddy Frontiers in Science Seminar, “How plants and ecosys-tems will respond to rising atmos-pheric CO2 and climate change” at St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia.

Chuck Gallegos was an invited visiting scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmos-pheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand where he conducted field

work on light penetration in optically unique lakes on the South Island. While there, he presented three talks in Christchurch, Welling-ton and Hamilton: “Radiative Transfer Modelling for Remote Sensing and Water Quality Manage-ment,” “The Utility of Optical Monitoring for Modelling Primary Productivity in Shallow Coastal Waters” and “Linking Land Use and Light Penetration in Small Estuarine Segments.”

Anson Hines was a member of the site review team for the Puerto Rico Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation training program for minority students in sciences and engineering.

Hines presented the following lectures and presentations: “Patterns of species invasions in coastal marine ecosystems of North America,” at Portland State Univer-sity, OR; “Overview of crab aqua-culture activities in Southeast Asia,” “Stock enhancement of Chesapeake Bay blue crab” and “Cultivation and mass hatchery rearing of juve-nile blue crabs” at the Alaska Crab Enhancement and Rehabilitation workshop, University of Alaska; and “Cumulative spatial impacts of aquaculture in Chesapeake Bay: Implications for management,” at the Science and Technology Advi-sory Committee, Chesapeake Bay Program.

Eric Johnson presented “A stochastic seasonal growth model estimated from hatchery releases of juvenile blue crabs in the wild” at the Benthic Ecology Meetings in Quebec City, Canada.

Thomas Jordan served on an expert panel to evaluate the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Chesapeake Bay Small Watershed Grants Program.

Melissa McCormick gave a talk entitled “Where’s the fungus?: a critical ingredient for orchid recruit-ment” at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras.

Patrick Megonigal participated

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NEW PUBLICATIONS Jewett, E.B., Hines, A.H., Ruiz, G.M., 2005, Epifaunal disturbance by periodic low dissolved oxygen: native versus in-vader response. Marine Ecology Progress Series 304:31-44. Langley, J.A., Johnson, N.C., Koch, G.W., 2005, Mycorrhizal status influences the rate but not the temperature sensitivity of soil respiration. Plant and Soil 277:335–344. Murphy, K.R., Ruiz, G.M., Dunsmuir, T.M., Waite, T.D., 2006, Optimized Parameters for Fluorescence-Based Verifica-tion of Ballast Water Exchange by Ships. Environmental Science and Technology 40, 2357-2362. O'Sullivan, D.W., Neale, P.J., Coffin, R.B., Boyd, T.J., Osburn, C.L., 2005, Photochemical production of hydrogen perox-ide and methylhydroperoxide in coastal waters. Mar. Chem. 97: 14-33. Saunders, C.J., Megonigal, J.P., and Reynolds, J.F., 2006, Comparison of belowground biomass in C3- and C4-dominated mixed communities in a Chesapeake Bay brackish marsh. Plant and Soil 280:305-322. Li, X., Meixner, T., Sickman, J.O., Miller, A.E., Schimel, J.P., Melack, J.M., 2006, Decadal-scale Dynamics of Water, Carbon and Nitrogen in a California Chaparral Ecosystem: DAYCENT Modeling Results. Biogeochemistry 77(2): 217-245. Weiss, J.V., Emerson, D., and Megonigal, J.P., 2005, Rhizosphere Iron(III) Deposition and Reduction in a Juncus effusus L.-Dominated Wetland. Soil Science Society of America Journal 69(6):1861-1870.

Smithsonian Environmental Research Center PO Box 28 /647 Contees Wharf Road

Edgewater, Maryland 21037

For information about The SERC Report, contact: Kimbra Cutlip

443-482-2325 / cutlipk@si.edu

The SERC Report is published quarterly by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

in a workshop convened by the Nicholas Institute of Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University on “Methane and Water Trade-offs: Implications for Terrestrial Sinks.” The purpose was to discuss the sci-ence and policy implications of two recently published high-profile pa-pers. Megonigal presented his views on the paper “Methane Emissions from Terrestrial Plants Under Aerobic Conditions” authored by Keppler, Hamilton, Brass and Rock-mann in Nature, 439. The outcome will be a white paper for circulation on Capital Hill.

Pat Neale recently returned from a 45-day Antarctic research cruise to the Ross Sea, for which he was the

co-chief scientist. Researchers con-ducted several studies in the Ross Sea Polynya region during the early spring period when phytoplankton growth is initiating at the same time UVB can be enhanced during pas-sage of the “ozone hole.” Neale and his colleagues were investigat-ing UV effects on phytoplankton and bacteria in the context of verti-cal mixing (collectively, the Mixing and Ultraviolet Radiation in the Ross Sea or MIXURS project).

Mario Sengco has been selected to serve on a steering committee planning a scientific workshop and public forum on red tides that will take place in July in Sarasota, FL. The purpose of the workshop is to de-

termine the current state of the research and the needs and direc-tions of future research on Florida red tides and then relay this informa-tion to the concerned public.

Dennis Whigham gave a lecture titled “Chesapeake Bay Linkages–watersheds, land use, and subes-tuaries” at the Back Bay Forum 2006 organized by the Back Bay Restoration Foundation in Virginia Beach, VA. Whigham also gave the talk “Landscape linkages in Chesa-peake Bay” at the Smithsonian Ma-rine Station at Fort Pierce.

Xuyong (Yong) Li attended the STAC workshop “Ecological processes for spatial management” in Annapolis, MD.

Minutes: Cont’d