How Can an Improved Understanding of Coastal Carbon Cycling Help Us Plan For The Future?
From mammoths to muskox: Large herbivores as keys to resilience in a warming world
About the Riser Lecture
This annual series celebrates the legacy of founding director Nathan “Doc” Riser, and connects our community with innovative voices in the environmental sciences.
Once thought to be on the brink of extinction, sea stars along Oregon’s coast are having a baby boom. Tide pools are clogged with juvenile sea stars that stretch the size of a few pennies, chowing down on the mussels and urchins that had overtaken these environments during their absence.
It’s a promising sign. Starting in 2013, sea stars on the West Coast began dying from what came to be known as sea star wasting disease. The illness caused sea stars to curl up, lose limbs and even melt into a pile of goo.
Within a decade, sea star wasting disease had decimated 90% of the West Coast’s sea star population, crippling marine ecosystems that depend on the voracious predators to keep certain other species in check. But after a decade of death, scientists have started to notice that the marine creatures are making a comeback.
Read more at Northeastern Global News
Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Sea Grant program has announced $1.6 million in funding for four new coastal research projects — and Northeastern University’s Coastal Sustainability Institute & Marine Science Center has strong representation among the recipients.
Jennifer Bowen, a researcher at the Marine Science Center, is co-leading one of the four funded projects, Keeping Clams Clean: Tracking microbial contamination of clam flats. Working alongside Wayne Castonguay of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, Bowen’s team will investigate the sources and turnover time of bacterial contamination threatening soft-shell clam harvests in Plum Island Sound — an area whose annual clam harvest was more than halved in 2023 following an unusually wet year that triggered repeated shellfish bed closures. The project will bring together molecular techniques, community science-led sampling, public databases, and machine learning to develop more efficient and information-rich methods of shellfish sanitation monitoring.
Two additional funded projects are led by alumni of the Marine Science Center & Coastal Sustainability Institute. Sarah Donelan, now at UMass Dartmouth, and Sarah Gignoux-Wolfsohn, now at UMass Lowell, are co-leading Winter is Changing: Enhancing oyster overwintering practices, which will examine the impacts of winter conditions and husbandry decisions on oyster growth, survival, and disease — providing growers with actionable data to better protect their stock through New England’s challenging winters.
The full slate of WHOI Sea Grant awards supports research on Massachusetts’ aquaculture and fisheries industries, including work on black sea bass population dynamics and oyster reef restoration using soundscape ecology. More information on all four projects is available at seagrant.whoi.edu.
Photo by David Kimbro / Northeastern University
Integrative Approaches to Sustained Ecosystem Monitoring in the Gulf of Maine
Hurricanes & Wildfires: The Complex Relationship Between Sampling & High-Energy Events
My current project is focused on identifying sociopolitical factors that, in conjunction with hydrologic, ecological, and economic data, signal community readiness to nature-based solutions for flood-risk mitigation. I conduct research that centers community-led adaptation and hazard mitigation to better understand how people assess risk and adapt to disasters.
I received my Ph.D. from Northeastern University in the Marine and Environmental Sciences program, working under the supervision of Dr. Damon Hall . My dissertation examined the social, technical, and ecological factors impacted by increased flood events along the Missouri River to identify comprehensive and stakeholder-centered strategies for flood resiliency planning and policymaking. My work is motivated by my experiences of the tangible, cumulative effects of frequent floods in my previous home of New Orleans.
Previously, I was a research social scientist at the Missouri Department of Conservation working to understand how to connect conservation management and environmental education with Missouri communities. I was the 2024 Coastal Sustainability Fellow at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) of Massachusetts in partnership with Northeastern University’s Coastal Resilience Institute, where I supported the Coastal team in engaging with living shorelines practitioners to advance the practice in New England.