Part of a series on pollinators.

Spring is the time of year when things start growing and blooming. It’s also when pollinators like bees come out and get to work.

An awareness campaign called “No Mow May” is urging people not to mow their lawns this month, or even this whole season, as a way to help make sure that these pollinators have enough to eat. Many of the small flowers that pop up in the spring can provide a critical food source for bees. Mowing these blooms robs the bees of this potential sustenance.

Bees are critical to the health of our ecosystems, but they are also in trouble.

Wild bee populations have experienced substantial declines due to factors including urbanization, pesticides and undiversified agriculture. Increased urbanization has led to the fragmentation of pollinator habitat — a widening in the space between areas where bees can find food or live. Without bees, our food system would never be the same.

“(When) we think of habitat loss, we think of forests being logged and things being plowed and built on,” said Matthew Shepherd, director of outreach and education for the Xerces Society of Invertebrate Conservation. “But then, every acre of featureless grass is just as much loss of habitat as anything else.”

History of the Green Lawn

The American attachment to the perfectly trimmed green lawn aesthetic has a history rooted in settler colonialism. Americans modeled their landscaping after wealthy European elites, who used a pure grass lawn as a way to signal their wealth.

This thing that originated as a status symbol is now a hallmark of the American backyard. Despite that it is an extremely common sight now, most green turf grasses are not native to the United States. Therefore, they can require a lot of upkeep — excessive water, pesticides — to keep them going.

Covering 40 million acres across the country, grass is now the biggest irrigated “crop” in the U.S. — surpassing even corn. And yet, it gives little to nothing back to native ecosystems.

No Mow May

Green grass lawns, in effect, extend the fragmentation of pollinator habitat. That’s why Plantlife in the United Kingdom started the awareness campaign, No Mow May. This movement has also taken hold in the U.S. The idea is that not mowing your lawn for even a month can allow for the growth of things like clover that bees can use for food.

Of course, not mowing your lawn can present issues, such as enforcement of local ordinances, or even just the local status quo. There are homeowner associations bylaws and legal prohibitions on any deferred lawn maintenance that could be characterized as overgrowth.

Related: Celebrate pollinators Saturday during World Bee Day

Facing ordinances like this, some U.S. residents have challenged the idea of what a yard should look like. In Maryland, one couple pushed back on an HOA requirement and it resulted in legislation that prohibits unreasonable restrictions on low-impact landscaping such as a pollinator-friendly yard.

Beyond May

Ultimately, said Shepherd, No Mow May should ideally serve as a springboard for a more comprehensive conversation about making spaces pollinator friendly all year round. Shepherd said there are three things you can focus on: creating nesting areas, flowers for food, and quitting pesticides.

If all you’re doing is not mowing your lawn for a few weeks, said Shepherd, you’re not achieving any long-term benefit. Because if you don’t have any blooming flowers in your lawn, you’re just growing long, green grass. And if you do, teaching bees that there’s a food source in your yard and then taking it away can be harmful. So ultimately, true support for pollinators has to go beyond the campaign.

“The real benefit from (No Mow May) is that people are talking about lawns — they’re talking about the bad things of lawns, how the lawns could be, what the changes can be,” Shepherd said. “And we’re seeing a much broader conversation about pollinator conservation in our neighborhoods, and what we really should be doing to support the bees.”

Advocates say focusing on native, flowering plants is also a good idea, as is spreading awareness to other people in your community and beyond. Critically important is eliminating things from your yard, like grass, that might require regular pesticide applications.

“Anything we can do to bring habitat back into our neighborhoods, our towns, our farmland and so on, is going to be beneficial,” Shepherd said.

After May wraps up, June is National Pollinators Month. Follow along for more in this series about pollinators.

On Feb. 21, 1918, the world’s last Carolina parakeet died at the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio. The bird, named Incas, was preceded in death by his mate called Lady Jane.

At one time, the Carolina parakeet had a range that spanned the Midwest and the Southeastern Seaboard — including coastal North Carolina. Not actually a true parakeet but a parrot, its plumage was bright green with yellow and red on its head, making it quite a sight when these birds would fly together in flocks from tree to tree.

It was also what made their feathers such desirable adornments for women’s hats in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Called the “plume boom,” different species of colorful birds were hunted at unsustainable rates, contributing to drive some like the Carolina parakeet, the United States’ only native parrot, to extinction.

The plume boom led to the passing of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, one of the United States’ first federal laws geared toward conservation. It was part of a growing awareness that wildlife was not an unlimited resource. Acts like this paved the way for even more groundbreaking legislation, such as the 1973 Endangered Species Act, which turns 50 years old this year.

“The Codex of the Endangered Species Act: Volume 1, The First Fifty Years” is a more-than-700-page volume detailing the context for and first 50 years of one of the most pivotal pieces of wildlife legislation in the country’s history.

In this book, author Lowell E. Baier, an environmental attorney and historian, explains the pitfalls, the successes, the lawsuits and the collaborations that have defined this chapter of the act, and then offers an insightful look into what the future could be, all with the hope of preventing more casualties like the Carolina parakeet.

“There are many other species at risk, just like those that have gone extinct,” Baier said. “And if we lose those species which are protected by the Act, we will be forever remorseful.”

Context for the act and its first 50 years

Today’s understanding of conservation in the U.S. was largely informed by a realization that grew in the late 1800s that wildlife could disappear from the planet forever. During westward Colonial expansion, it became more clear than ever that wildlife was not simply an unlimited resource. The American bison, for example, once roamed the west in numbers of 50 to 60 million. After western expansion and colonization, those numbers would drop to fewer than 100.

As this and other predicaments became more apparent, momentum was starting to coalesce in elite hunting clubs and sporting publications. Game hunters had an understanding that some kind of legislation was needed to prevent widespread catastrophe. The first of these laws began emerging in the early 1900s.

The next several decades informed the need for widespread legal protection of species. The Endangered Species Act was preceded by legislation in 1966 and 1969 that didn’t achieve what lawmakers had hoped. When the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, it was a threshold piece of legislation the likes of which and breadth of which had not been seen before.

Between 1973 and 2023, the Endangered Species Act would experience several notable growing pains. Though it has not seen any significant amendments since 1988, it has been a consistent source of tension between environmental groups and industry.

“When the ESA was first written and enforced, for the first 10 or 15, 20 years, it was very top-down in its approach to management of the species,” Baier said. This approach was largely informed by a militaristic mentality of protection through control. While the intention behind this was to save as many species as possible, one of the results of this approach was that the ESA was not made to be flexible over time.

“It was intended to be rigid,” Baier said. And as a result, the first 50 years of the endangered Species Act featured litigation and tension, but also evolutions and accomplishments.

Some of these issues and successes can be best understood by looking at wildlife issues in North Carolina.

Woodpeckers, Fort Bragg and the creation of Safe Harbor Agreements

The U.S. Army Fort Bragg base in North Carolina is situated in prime red-cockaded woodpecker habitat. In the 1990s, this interrupted military training substantially. In February 1990, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued an opinion citing that military training was posing a threat to red-cockaded woodpeckers on the base. For two years, training at Fort Bragg was severely abridged, causing units at the base to miss their training objectives in every way.

Ignoring the Fish and Wildlife Service opinion wasn’t an option — in 1992 at a base in Georgia, three Department of Defense employees were charged with harming red-cockaded woodpecker habitat, which carried with it lengthy prison sentences and fines of over half a million dollars. The charges were dropped, but it became clear that some kind of other compromise was necessary.

But as mentioned above, the Endangered Species Act was written to be rigid, not to compromise and it took about 20 years from its passing for the federal government to realize that the act would work better if it were more flexible. This transition was largely due to Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt under the Clinton administration. Babbitt came up with a 10-point plan to that end.

By 1995, a collaboration between Fish and Wildlife, the Department of Defense and the Environmental Defense Fund resulted in the creation of the first Safe Harbor Agreement, which is now an established tool used under the act. A Safe Harbor Agreement is an established plan that protects landowners from facing increased restrictions on their land as long as they fulfill agreed-upon requirements for preserving that habitat.

By 2017, there were 100 established Safe Harbor Agreements, and they have seen results. Those in the red-cockaded woodpecker’s habitat have resulted in a 20% increase in the bird’s population.

This new tool emerged because there was a need for it, but it hadn’t been written before. According to Baier, it is going to be very important for the future for the act to remain flexible to new ways to use it.

“I think it’s a great study that does demonstrate that humans can exist with species, provided that they give them room and don’t destroy their habitat,” Baier said. “It’s a wonderful example of how man has dealt with, in a very short period, a serious problem that engaged not only civilians but the military as well … That’s what really brought the military to recognize how much land they control that relates to species other than the cockaded woodpecker. And they become very, very involved in species conservation throughout America.”

Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, red wolf recovery

The eastern red wolf is a type of gray wolf whose historic range is in the Southeast. In 1967, these wolves were listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. In 1980, all remaining wild red wolves — only about 50 — were taken into captivity to increase the chance of species survival.

Over the years, eyes turned to the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina as an ideal place to begin species reintroduction to the wild, and in 1987, eight wolves were released onto the refuge. This was pivotal because this was only the third 10(j) rule ever issued under the ESA — the 10(j) rule allows for the designation of listed species as “experimental,” so populations can be established outside of present range to support long-term recovery. The population grew to 130 wolves but then dropped back down to as few as 14 in recent years. Conflict over how to manage red wolves means that their future remains unclear.

Red wolves in North Carolina and Tennessee also led to an important court case in 2000: Gibbs v. Babbitt. Counties and private entities contested the federal government’s ability to restrict takes of red wolves on private lands. And the court ruled that this was a fair exercise of federal power under the Commerce Clause.

“The Commerce Clause has been widely used to extend the reach of the Endangered Species Act,” Baier said. “And red wolves are just one of the species that it has touched upon.”

The Next 50 Years

Both volumes of the “Codex” will be available for purchase in August. The second volume will focus on the things that Baier said will shape the next 50 years, until 2073. 

“The link between the last 50 years and the next 50 years, the real key is twofold,” Baier said. “One is flexibility, and two is collaborative conservation — working together, rather than fighting.”

Flexibility, as shown by the creation of Safe Harbor Agreements in North Carolina, will be necessary to keep the Endangered Species Act relevant and working towards collective goals. Collaborative conservation is the idea that the most successful conservation occurs when issues are addressed holistically — when environmentalists, regulators, people who work the land, and all other interested groups can come together and figure out solutions.

Moreover, as a society, we have to overcome what Baier calls “shifting baseline syndrome.” In other words, people’s metric for how urgent an environmental is can only be compared to what they already know. For those today who never got a chance to see the Carolina parakeet, now over 100 years gone, it’s hard to react with urgency to what we don’t even realize we’ve lost.

A lot of the solutions to these issues have got to start at the local level, Baier said. With local conversations and local problem-solving about local issues.

“When enough of that occurs, perhaps America will wake up again.”

A study recently published in Nature Climate Change found that the global food sector alone, the way it is now, could add nearly 1 degree Celsius to global climate warming by the year 2100. But over half of this anticipated warming could be avoided if there were simultaneous changes made to production and food waste systems, the energy sector, as well as universal diet changes.

It is exceedingly hard to estimate warming associated with agriculture at the global level. One of the biggest reasons for this is that the agricultural sector emits multiple climate pollutants, things like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Often, to make it easier to estimate emissions, a strategy is used called “carbon dioxide equivalents.” This puts all emissions on the same comparable scale, making it easier to measure aggregate impact.

The downside of this method is that different pollutants spend varying amounts of time in the atmosphere and trap different amounts of heat. So when you only look at these emissions through the lens of carbon dioxide, you risk blurring the picture of what agricultural emissions actually look like, and what can be done to address them. This study aimed to paint a clearer image.

Previous research has shown that one of the biggest pollutants from the agriculture sector is methane, which stays in the atmosphere for a far shorter amount of time than carbon dioxide but has a stronger warming effect on the atmosphere per mass. So looking at a long-term timescale in carbon dioxide equivalents would really downplay the role of methane emissions in the agriculture industry.

In order to get a better idea of how different pollutants could impact warming by the year 2100, the researchers had to look at the emissions individually, not as an aggregate.

“It just made it very apparent that when people are doing lifecycle assessments and when they’re doing this kind of work, the need to report those emissions in the explicit gas emission rather than an aggregate it is really essential,” said Catherine Ivanovich, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and lead author on this study. “And the more that people can do this type of work can reduce future uncertainty.”

The researchers analyzed literature on the food sector including agriculture, fisheries, ranching and more. One of the findings of this study was that consumption of meat and dairy will be responsible for more than half of food-associated warming by the year 2030, and continuing through 2100.

The researchers explored four different possible arenas in which to mitigate anticipated warming: production, consumption, the energy sector and food loss/waste.

Optimizing agricultural production practices could contribute 25% of possible reductions by 2100. Decarbonizing the energy sector by 2050 would decrease the anticipated warming from the food sector by 17% by the end of the century.

A global diet shift based on health recommendations could decrease projected warming by 21%. Finally, if the world were able to cut consumer and retail food waste in half by the end of the century, it would decrease anticipated warming by 9%.

Changes to production, the energy sector and food loss/waste would all be largely structural or systemic changes, while changing the ways in which people consume food through diet is more of a behavioral shift. The limitation of this method is that making any kind of change on a global scale is very difficult and maybe unlikely. But the benefit is that taking a simplified approach allows people to see the full extent of what could be possible with these kinds of shifts.

“We can really just think of it as a very theoretical test of the rough magnitude these storyline scenarios might be expected to trigger,” Ivanovich said.

Regardless, Ivanovich says that both supply-side and consumer-side interventions, at multiple scales, are going to be critical to reduce anticipated warming in the food sector.

Questions about how to advance in the food sector are made even more complicated when moving beyond consideration of greenhouse gases. Other important factors to consider are how different food production techniques impact the environment and space use on the land and in the ocean.

“In order to make meaningful change in this sector, which is a really essential aspect of human life — supporting people, ensuring that we’re pursuing global food security and also sustaining economic livelihood for people who are producing our foods — we really need a multi-angle approach,” Ivanovich said. “We can really work towards increased food security, and providing people with nutritious diets, all the while working towards a more climate-safe future.”

According to the North Carolina Local Food Council, climate change poses a notable threat to the state’s food system. But a more resilient local food system focused on food waste recovery, local food infrastructure, better support for cultivators and addressing racial inequities in the food sector, among other things, would make the state less vulnerable in the face of pressures like climate change. There are resources on the Local Food Countil’s website toward that end.

There are also reasons to be optimistic, said Ivanovich. When you separate the different pollutants, you can see that nearly 60% of the warming by the end of the century is because of methane. And since methane is a short-lived emission, making rapid changes in that sector now could make a big difference in slowing down the rate of warming associated with the food sector.

It also underscores the urgency for action, according to Ivanovich.

“Everyone has to eat,” Ivanovich said. “We have to ensure that we can sustain our global population with nutritious food that supports people at a local scale. This is the problem that we can’t really shy away from.”

A new study out of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication investigated the differences in how Americans perceive the phrases “carbon pollution,” “carbon emissions” and “greenhouse gas emissions.”

Colloquially, these three phrases are often used interchangeably regarding climate change. The research, published in Environmental Communication, showed that “carbon emissions” and “carbon pollution” ranked similarly in terms of how they were perceived to impact human health, the environment and air quality. But the phrase “greenhouse gas emissions” was consistently perceived as less of a threat than the other two.

“It’s essential to understand what people think about these words, concepts, ideas — in order to best shape our efforts to educate, inform and motivate the public,” said Dr. Matthew Goldberg, associate research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and co-author of the paper.

The research team at Yale used a mixed methods survey to collect data from 2,859 participants. They recorded demographic data such as political background, gender and age. They asked each participant a series of open-ended and closed questions to determine how they perceived each term. This approach allowed the researchers to get at the specific thoughts that each term triggered for participants, while also capturing the spontaneous “top-of-mind” associations. This mixed-methods approach created a nuanced portrait of each phrase.

“Reality is complicated,” Goldberg said. “And we try to reflect it as best we can.”

The study intended to represent specifically how Americans respond to these terms.

“You want to have your research be as relevant as possible to the largest audience as possible,” Goldberg said. “But that also makes it difficult to understand sub-audiences more deeply.”

Still, the researchers had an opportunity to see some of the ways that things like political views impacted reception of each term. The differentiation between terms was fairly consistent across people who identified as either Republican or Democrat. Both parties saw “carbon pollution” and “carbon emissions” as more potent words than “greenhouse gas emissions.”

While the terms “carbon pollution” and “carbon emissions” appear to carry more weight in conveying the threat to human health, in some circumstances, “greenhouse gas emissions” is the more appropriate phrase. It’s the only term of the three that encompasses other emissions that lead to climate change, such as methane.

These insights can inform climate change communication, Goldberg said, as long as they aren’t taken within a vacuum. Larger context, the messenger and other factors also play a significant role.

“It’s just one important piece to a larger set of communication factors,” Goldberg said.

This research underscores the importance of language and wording when communicating a message.

From the archives: Signs Of Change Are Clear, If Language Is Not

“This phenomenon is called framing,” said Dr. K.C. Busch, assistant professor of STEM education at North Carolina State University. “It’s this concept of framing, which is that language matters. And language is not accidental. And that even though different words might refer to the same phenomena, we react differently to different words, because it elicits a different schema in our head as to what this issue is about, or who’s responsible.”

Busch has also conducted research examining how wording impacts climate change communication. In one project, she took a real school textbook and slightly altered the text. The original version conveyed high uncertainty about climate change and its causes, and the new text conveyed more certainty. For example, “not all scientists agree about the causes of global warming” became “97% of scientists agree about the causes of global warming.”

She found that middle school and high school students who read the different texts were affected by the implications from the wording differences, regardless of their prior knowledge or understanding of climate change. Many of the students, she found, took the credibility of the textbooks as a given, even though the altered text was more functionally correct than the original.

“I think my greater concern, especially with adults, is that they’re no longer subjected to school textbooks,” said Busch. “They’re subjected to the landscape of climate change rhetoric out there, which is even worse.”

As there is a never-ending stream of information out there on the internet, the best approach, said Busch, is to make sure people are equipped with the ability to discern both credible sources and the nuance of language.

“I don’t think it’s disingenuous or manipulative to be conscious of the language that you’re using with different audiences,” Busch said. “I just think it’s good communication. As long as it’s still truthful and honest information, I think word choice is just an act of being a good communicator.”

In September 2018, Hurricane Florence made landfall at Wrightsville Beach as a Category 1 hurricane. Tropical storms and Category 1 hurricanes are classified as “weak tropical cyclones,” and account for 70% of all tropical cyclones. Despite their name, weak tropical cyclones can still do a lot of damage — and their impact may be getting worse.

A recent study has shown that storms like this have been intensifying around the world from 1991 to 2020, something that scientists say is tied to global climate change.

The study, which was published in the journal Nature in November, included as a contributing author Dr. Wei Mei, assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Mei and the research team found that in all ocean basins, weak tropical cyclones have been intensifying by 15-21%.

Storm intensity is not an easy thing to measure. Traditionally, tropical cyclone strength has been measured using satellite images, a method called the Dvorak technique. But using satellite data to calculate intensity creates information gaps.

“It consists of several steps that can introduce uncertainties because of the inherent subjectiveness,” Mei said. “As a result, the intensity of a tropical cyclone estimated by different trained meteorologists based on the Dvorak method can be very different, resulting in large uncertainties in the analysis of tropical cyclone intensity.”

Theoretical and mathematical models indicate that tropical cyclones intensify as surface waters get warmer — and research has shown that the oceans have gotten warmer and continue to warm. Unfortunately, satellite imagery cannot support the hypothesis of storm intensification in weak tropical cyclones, due to the interference of things like clouds and ocean spray. To find out whether or not weak tropical cyclones were truly intensifying, the research team would need to approach analysis of intensification trends using a different method.

To do so, the research team took advantage of the close relationship between ocean currents and storms. They used highly accurate current measurements taken by floating devices called surface drifters. These drifters were deployed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and they provided data that was able to complement traditional satellite imagery in quantifying storm intensification. The drifters were equipped with “holy sock” drogues, things that help stabilize the drifters’ position in the water. The drifters record measurements like location and water temperature, communicating that data to a satellite. Using the Ekman Theory, which is the understanding that winds transfer energy to surface waters and drive currents, the research team was able to estimate wind speed at a 10-meter height after identifying near-surface current speed. In other words, the scientists used their data on the ocean currents to calculate wind speed, therefore generating a better understanding of the storm intensity.

This new approach helped the scientists overcome the challenges of satellite imagery and shows that weak tropical cyclones have been intensifying during the three-decade study period. These results can help inform tropical cyclone models and increase their accuracy, which in turn can help coastal communities be better prepared for these kinds of storms. It is important for accurate information about weak tropical cyclones to be included in projections and models since weak tropical cyclones make up the vast majority of tropical cyclones.

It also helps scientists understand tropical cyclones in remote areas. And as more surface drifter data becomes available over time, the method used by these researchers can provide a much fuller picture of storm intensity and evolution.

According to Mei, there’s a link between this demonstrated storm intensification and climate change.

“Under global warming, the surface ocean gets warmer, providing more energy for tropical cyclones to develop and intensify,” Mei said. “Our earlier research has identified positive connections between ocean warming and storm intensification rate, particularly in ocean areas that are warming faster than other areas.”

What this means for coastal communities is that as the climate warms, tropical cyclones are expected to get stronger. Storms that may not have caused a lot of damage several decades ago are going to have a greater impact. This can make a critical difference for ecological communities — as shown in another recent study that theorizes that otherwise-resilient estuarine fish might have a harder time recovering from stronger storms — and human communities along the coast.

“The coastal communities need to be better prepared,” Mei said.

Fish that live in the seagrass meadows of North Carolina’s Back Sound seem to recover quickly from tropical cyclones, demonstrating a capacity for resilience in the face of disruptive shocks, reports a study published last month in Plos One.

The study, which used data collected over the course of 10 years, found that there was no significant difference in the fish communities before and after a storm, or during hurricane years and years with no hurricane. Dr. Y. Stacy Zhang, assistant professor in the Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University and lead author on the study, hypothesizes that the resilience of the fish communities is tied to the integrity of the seagrass habitats that they depend on.

“Do they have a home to come back to, in the same way where if humans evacuate for a storm, do they have a home to come back to afterwards?” Zhang said. “That’d be changing the numbers.”

The study used data from a long-term trawl survey run by Dr. Joel Fodrie at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and consisting of two-minute trawls through seagrass meadows in Back Sound in Carteret County. They trawled monthly, randomly selecting a few sites to trawl each time and documenting how many fish came up and what types. The frequency and longevity of this sampling allowed the researchers to look for short-term trends — within three weeks of impact — as well as seasonal shifts.

“The fact that this project used 10 years of data and looked at multiple different storms, I think is a really beneficial approach to take,” Zhang said. “Because we are trying to capture some of that variability that you wouldn’t get if you looked at a single storm alone.”

The seagrass data was not from one standing data set, but sourced from multiple monitoring projects that had occurred in the area. These seagrass surveys indicated that the seagrass meadows were principally undamaged by storms.

Fish population dynamics are highly variable, and so are estuarine ecosystems. To document storm-related effects in spite of this variability, Zhang and her team ran multiple analyses on their data, examining things like fish community structure, tropical cyclone intensity and the difference between storm years and years without storms.

“(Estuaries) are such dynamic systems, they’re so variable just on a daily basis, it leads us to think that most of the fishes, the seagrasses, the oysters — all of those organisms are adapted in some way, shape, or form to withstand and live in this highly dynamic system,” Zhang said.

Dr. Christopher Patrick is the lead principal investigator at the Hurricane Ecosystem Response Synthesis Network, or HERS, a National Science Foundation-funded Research Coordination Network based out of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences with co-principal investigators based at the University of New Hampshire, Florida International University and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. HERS brings together specialists of different disciplines to develop a comprehensive understanding of ecosystem responses to tropical cyclones.

“Globally, the frequency of extreme events is increasing to the point where they’re not really extreme in a lot of cases anymore — they’re something that we should be expecting,” Patrick said. “We need to understand what the consequences of those changes in disturbance intensities, frequencies and distributions are for coastal systems so that we can plan accordingly.”

While these analyses didn’t show storms having strong overall impacts on fish communities, the figures do indicate that effects increase with storm strength. This suggests that a really severe storm would have a stronger impact.

“That’s the kind of thing that we may be seeing more of with warming waters,” Patrick said.

Because climate change implies more intense storms, Zhang said this could impact how resilient fish communities are in the face of these types of stressors in the future.

“We see that the fish communities and the seagrasses are pretty resistant to these pulse disturbances,” Zhang said. “But if, as it’s predicted that hurricanes are going to become more intense with climate change, is that going to actually start shifting the dynamic of whether or not these communities are resistant to the storms?”

How seagrass-associated fish communities will respond to the combined stressors of climate change, habitat changes and storms in the future remains an ongoing question. But, according to Zhang, there’s hope.

“The communities are pretty similar, regardless of whether it’s a hurricane year, or a nonhurricane year, or before or after the storm,” Zhang said. “There’s seasonality in the communities, but there’s no massive shift to the system as a result of the hurricane itself.”

Blue whales off the coast of California may be consuming as many as 10 million pieces of microplastics per day, finds a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

More research is needed to determine the extent of the problem for whales off the East Coast and beyond, where previous studies have identified microplastics in the ocean food chain.

These tiny pieces of plastic material have been commercially produced or are the breakdown of larger pieces of plastic like water bottles, children’s toys and disposable containers. Because of their small size, less than 5 millimeters, microplastics can be hard to detect, but when they enter the environment are a hazardous pollutant.

A group of California scientists decided to investigate the extent to which whales off the coast of California might be exposed to microplastics pollution.

“They’re really big animals that strongly affect the ecosystem if they’re going to be faced with other stressors,” said Dr. Shirel Kahane-Rapport, postdoctoral scholar at California State University, Fullerton, and lead author on the study.

Kahane-Rapport and her team used data collected by 191 tag deployments on baleen whales off the coast of California. The tags are noninvasive monitoring devices that attach to the whale via suction cups. The data collected by the tags helps the scientists record things like where the whales are, when they are feeding and how often they are feeding.

They were able to juxtapose this tag data with published works detailing the microplastics concentrations in both the water column and the prey species that the whales target.

Microplastics are likely primarily passed through the food web, and the scientists predict that the exposure to microplastics corresponds to the number of organisms the whales are eating.

Therefore, blue whales that go after many small krill are consuming much higher levels of microplastics than a humpback whale, which goes after smaller numbers of bigger fish. Blue whales off the coast of California could be consuming about 10 million pieces of microplastics per day, whereas humpback whales may be consuming 200,000 pieces per day.

Even though microplastics are small, plastic consumption at this volume is substantial. According to Kahane-Rapport, the size and weight of microplastics vary.

“You may have a piece of cellophane, or you may have a piece of more dense plastic, like the top of a water bottle — those of course weigh differently,” Kahane-Rapport said. “So people generally, in this work, have been counting pieces and not weight.”

But, Kahane-Rapport said, it could mean that baleen whales are consuming an average of 20 kilograms of plastic per day. That weighs roughly the same amount as a 5-gallon bucket of water.

According to Kahane-Rapport, quantifying the exposure of this human-caused pollution on whales is not just important for the health of the animals, but the rest of the ecosystem, too.

“It could seem like just a sad story about whales,” Kahane-Rapport said. “But it’s also a story about humans.” Humans eat many of the same fish species as whales, making us part of the same food web. “It’s all part of our ecosystem. And if that part of our ecosystem is damaged, it will affect us too. It’s not really just a story about whales, it’s also about us.”

Now that they’ve quantified exposure, Kahane-Rapport will continue studying the effects that microplastics have on whales, in terms of how it moves through the whale’s system.

The other aspect of this work is to examine this issue in other locations. Whales like the North Atlantic right whale, which depend on habitat off the coast of North Carolina, are already critically endangered, and yet nothing is truly known about their exposure to microplastics.

This is not just an issue in California, Kahane-Rapport explained, but in ocean waters across the world.

“Solving microplastic pollution is going to be a global project,” Kahane-Rapport said.

Fifty years ago, in October 1972, the United States passed the Clean Water Act. This game-changing legislation regulates the discharge of pollutants into the country’s waterways, and establishes surface water quality standards. Part of the goal was to make waters fishable and swimmable by the 1980s.

“We know in retrospect that we’ve come a really long way,” said Samantha Krop, Neuse Riverkeeper for Sound Rivers. “But also, the Clean Water Act hasn’t yet delivered on that promise.”

Beginning in the Piedmont and emptying into the Pamlico Sound, the Neuse River is the longest that runs in its entirety through North Carolina. This month, three riverkeepers paddled over half of the river’s total distance to bring attention to the Neuse’s wonders and plights. At just shy of 150 miles in 11 days, the paddlers saw ample wildlife, a hurricane, sources of pollution and the most incredible sunsets.

Along with Krop, the paddlers were Pamlico-Tar Riverkeeper Jill Howell and Emily Bowes, the Rogue Riverkeeper from southern Oregon. Just as important are their dogs Miller and Charlie Girl. Keep reading to follow along on their journey.

Paddling Through the Let’Lones

Day 1 started with sunny weather from the put-in point at Smithfield Town Commons Park. The paddlers had about 15 miles to go through a stretch of the Neuse that is largely undeveloped and unpopulated — with people, that is. Though the paddlers didn’t see any other humans on the river, they did see a lot of river creatures, including deer, otters, and possibly even a marmot. The Neuse River derives its name from the Neusiok Tribe, and it means “peace” — something the paddlers would resonate with multiple times throughout their journey.

This section of the Neuse is known colloquially as the “Let’Lones,” a nod to the fact that this area is home to snakes and formerly a hub for illegal alcohol traders, two groups “best left alone.”

After spending their first night camping on a sandbar, Day 2 was another 15-mile stretch through the Let’Lones. On this day, in addition to witnessing many of the wonderful things about this section of the river — kingfishers, hawks and turtles — the paddlers also made note of the undercut banks along the river, a symptom of erosion.

Nearby development can increase erosion in a river like the Neuse. The addition of impermeable surfaces like pavement increases stormwater runoff, causing the riverbanks to collapse. This causes issues for the river like poorer water quality, which can harm the plants and creatures that call the river home. The paddlers saw evidence of locals trying to combat the erosion — concrete bags or cinder blocks along the shoreline — but these things aren’t real solutions.

The paddlers pulled their kayaks out of the river at the Richardson Bridge wildlife boat ramp. Instead of camping, they packed into an Airbnb — the beautiful weather had given way to the heavy rain of Hurricane Ian.

Waiting Out the Hurricane

As the rain came down on Day 3, the paddlers opted to stay off the river for safety. Fortunately, this did not set them behind schedule, as they had always planned to take a day off at some point during the paddle.

While North Carolina avoided the extensive damage by Hurricane Ian that states like Florida saw, intense rain and wind blew through the state, and five people lost their lives in storm-related incidents. What it means for the paddlers is that when they get back on the river the following day, there will be a lot more water in the river. This is actually something the paddlers had in mind when they named their trip “Neuse River Rising.”

“We really wanted something that symbolized the power of communities along the Neuse to be advocates for and active participants in the watershed,” Krop said. “There’s also obviously a nod to climate change, and sea level rise and flooding, and the fact that this is something in our future.”

The Coal Ash Catastrophe

On Day 4, the paddlers set out on a very different river than the one they left two days before. The water is much higher and therefore much faster. In developed areas, big flushes of rain like this tend to wash pollutants into the river. These inputs can cause problems like algal blooms and fish kills.

They are joined by Alan Capps, a Sound Rivers ally and owner of Down East Kayak Outfitter. Their first stop is in Goldsboro, site of Duke Energy’s HF Lee plant, and an environmental catastrophe that occurred after Hurricane Florence four years ago. Heavy rains flooded the coal ash storage ponds, which held approximately 1 million tons of coal ash, resulting in disastrous pollution for the river.

Coal ash pollution has long been a concern in North Carolina, and in the early days of 2020, the issue came to a head. A landmark settlement forced Duke Energy to remove all their coal ash ponds across the state. The company is in the process of excavating them.

“One thing that we’ve learned is that it’s not safe to store coal ash alongside our waterways, especially in areas that could flood and have flooded before,” Krop said. “But we don’t want to forget. So as we go by this location it’s important for us to remember what can happen if we’re not careful about how we store toxic waste, and if we’re not thoughtful about the way that our rivers change with increased flooding and climate change.”

After 19 miles, the team camped out on a friend’s property.

How are Forever Chemicals Affecting the Neuse?

On Day 5, the paddlers made their way past a park for all-terrain vehicles and Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. The paddlers took the time to examine how some of these different land uses impact the river.

According to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, there should be a 50-foot riparian buffer between the Neuse River and activities that disturb the land. These rules help filter stormwater runoff before it can reach the river, and mitigate the effects of erosion. Paddling by the Busco Beach ATV Park, the team observed ATV tracks going all the way down to the river.

“This is one of those things where we would advocate for recreation in a responsible way,” Krop said.

At the Air Force base, the paddlers stopped to collect a water sample. They’re testing for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS. Because they take such a long time to break down, PFAS are sometimes colloquially referred to as “forever chemicals.” PFAS are ubiquitous — they’re found in water, air and soils across the world, and detected in human blood. It is suspected that they are associated with detrimental health effects. The Environmental Protection Agency has been aware of PFAS since 1998, but many environmental advocates find the agency’s regulations for PFAS, which are still evolving, unsatisfactory. The paddlers collected a water sample in the vicinity of the air force base because a common source of PFAS is firefighting foam.

Locations like this are a stark reminder for the paddlers that it is the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act.

“I feel like when you’re celebrating anniversaries, it’s sort of like you’re celebrating this static thing,” Howell said. “When in fact, the Clean Water Act has changed over time.”

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could decrease the amount of power the EPA has to regulate the discharge that goes into wetlands. This comes just months after the Supreme Court ruled to limit the EPA’s ability to curb emissions under the Clean Air Act.

“It’s a huge deal in terms of defining the scope of what types of waterways and wetlands are protected under the Clean Water Act and what are not,” Howell said.

After 10 miles, the paddlers camped at the Highway 581 boat ramp.

Community Along the River

Day 6 featured a magnificent paddle past Cliffs of the Neuse State Park — this is a 90-foot-tall cliff formation that took shape millions of years ago when the combined forces of a shifting fault in the Earth’s crust and the carving power of the river left exposed layers of sand, shale, clay and more. For the paddlers, this was one of the highlights of the trip.

After a cold and windy 15 miles, the paddlers pulled off the river in the small town of Seven Springs, where they were warmed up by a home-cooked meal courtesy of Ronda and Robert Hughes. Since Ronda is the mayor of Seven Springs and Robert is one of the town’s commissioners, the paddlers were able to learn a lot about the history of the town and its future. Seven Springs is known for its history of offering spring mineral baths (though there are actually nine springs, not seven), causing the town to become a hub for physical and mental rejuvenation. Seven Springs is in its own process of rejuvenation now, as they continue to address damage caused by Hurricane Matthew in 2016. After talking about flood resilience and what the town has to offer, the paddlers left Seven Springs with a lot of appreciation for the area.

Paddling Past Hog Farms

The 17 miles on the river for Day 7 were bright and sunny. The paddlers passed some hog farms on this stretch of the river. Many North Carolina hog operations store swine waste in large open pits, which can flood during hurricanes. Even with a riparian buffer, this waste can result in pollution to the river during floods. Not only are the fecal bacteria a health risk, large nitrogen inputs can increase the frequency and intensity of algal blooms.

As they floated by, the paddlers talked about the swine farm buyout program, a North Carolina state program that will compensate CAFO, or concentrated animal feeding operation, farmers to remove their operation from the floodplain, in order to keep hog waste out of the river. No funding was allocated to this program this year.

In the evening, the paddlers spent the evening with their friend Bob Griffin, just upstream of Kinston. The next morning, they set out on Day 8 — only 7 miles. While Capps had left them in Seven Springs, they are joined by another friend, Kelsey Curtis, owner of Knee Deep Adventures, an outfitter in Greenville.

The paddlers have been seeing evidence of beavers along the river — something that Bowes noticed immediately, being from Oregon, also known as the Beaver State. This is the third year that Sound Rivers has done a paddle like this, but this is the first time that they’ve had a riverkeeper from across the country joining them. According to Krop, it’s been a great learning experience for the three riverkeepers to compare notes.

“It’s amazing how many of the same issues that we deal with out here in North Carolina, Emily’s dealing with in Oregon,” Krop said. “And then also, because of the geographical differences and the differences in the members themselves, there’s also a lot of unique struggles.”

After a full week on the river, the paddlers saw another kayaker for the first time. They had a lighthearted conversation with the stranger, but also recognized that they wished that more people were recreating responsibly on the river.

They spent the evening in Kinston at Neuseway Nature Park, and rounded out the evening with a trip to Mother Earth Brewing.

A Sound Rivers Investigation

Day 9 featured the longest distance paddled at once by the team — 25 miles through a beautiful stretch of river, with cypress trees, flowers and wildlife. Along the way, there were two notable stops:

First, they paddled past Adkin Branch, a stream that flows through Kinston and drains into the Neuse. Adkin Branch faces a lot of issues with pollution, but a local group called Kinston Cares recently received a large grant aimed toward research and engagement with Adkin Branch.

Then, the team also stopped at the spot where Contentnea Creek meets the Neuse. Contentnea Creek flows through several towns on the way to the Neuse, and is a popular spot for recreation. But it’s also a spot that Sound Rivers has been monitoring with extra focus lately. As those who are familiar with Sound Rivers are aware, the organization engages in not just advocacy and education but also investigations and monitoring.

During a routine flyover monitoring excursion in August, the riverkeepers noticed that the waste lagoon at a swine CAFO biogas facility near Fremont didn’t look quite right. After digging into public records, Sound Rivers discovered that in May the lagoon — where the facility was storing swine waste, decomposing food and hog carcasses — had overflowed and 3,000,000 gallons of this harmful material had spilled out when the digester cover ruptured. Sound Rivers is continuing to investigate the extent of the pollution, and what effects it will have on the ecosystem.

After this long-haul paddle, the kayakers paddled into the sunset and spent the night at the Maple Cypress Wilderness boat launch. They ate a fresh fish fry, courtesy of friend and Sound Rivers member Pat Griffin.

The Final Stretch

Day 10 was the team’s last full day on the river. Hotter than the previous days, through the course of 11 miles the paddlers got to watch the water transform from a swamp-like environment into a more estuarine river as they got nearer to the coast.

They made camp at Cow Pen Landing boat ramp, accepting dinner from some generous locals.

The next morning, the team got out paddling in time to see a mind-blowing sunrise, as well as make a few important stops along this stretch of river. First up was West Craven Middle School, which partnered with Sound Rivers to install a green stormwater project. This is part of Sound Rivers’ Campus Stormwater Initiative, which works with schools to figure out what kind of stormwater management system works best for them. Having seen many of the effects of stormwater runoff on the river in the preceding days, the paddlers felt really proud as they passed West Craven Middle School.

They also passed the International Paper Co. plant. Paper companies use various chemicals to transform wood into paper, some of which end up back in waterways because of a special permit that allows for waste discharge as long as that waste doesn’t exceed certain levels of things like nitrogen and phosphorus.

Passing by the paper plant, the paddlers once again worried about the impact of PFAS, which are not yet as thoroughly regulated as some other chemicals. It’s a reminder that for all the victories of the Clean Water Act in the last half century, the issues continue to evolve.

“There’s a lot to celebrate, and a lot more to do,” Howell said.

By the time the paddlers reached Glenburnie Park in New Bern, they encountered choppy waters and opted to forgo the last few miles of the paddle out of safety. With 150 miles in the bag, the paddlers blogged after their final day:

“The Neuse River sure wore us out, but it also filled us up. Walking away from this adventure of a lifetime, each of us are in awe of the impeccable beauty of the Neuse River and inspired by the many, many opportunities for exploration that it offers. We are also inspired to take action to protect it, and have a not-so-short list of the many next steps we plan to take to address pollution and advocate for the river and all who rely on it.”

Tired but also content, the team will be back on the river sometime soon.

“I can’t wait to get back out here and explore so many of the tributaries that we passed,” Krop said. “There is so much opportunity for getting out on the water and having all kinds of adventures, and this is just the beginning.”

In an undergraduate classroom at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 2017, a group of students sat in front of a plate of sushi from a local restaurant. But it wasn’t lunchtime — the students were attempting to quantify how common the mislabeling of red snapper was across North Carolina. 

By analyzing the DNA from 43 fish samples they’d collected from seafood markets, grocery stores and restaurants across 10 counties, they found that a whopping 90.7% were mislabeled as red snapper. Most often, the substitutions were tilapia or vermillion snapper. 

“It’s really hard to know where the mislabeling is happening, obviously, because a lot of seafood goes through a number of steps; it changes hands like five to seven times,” said Dr. John Bruno, instructor and creator of the class. “So it’s hard to know who’s doing it.”

Bruno was asked by the university to create an undergraduate course that gave first-year students real research experience. The idea was to engage students in science early on, and increase retention and diversity in STEM, or science, technology, engineering and math.

“They’re students that have never held a pipette. They’ve never asked a question, never developed a hypothesis,” Bruno said. “The idea was to develop a question that’s applied, that’s meaningful to them, that they can grasp, and then use that question to teach the basic research techniques.”

According to Bruno, mislabeling — essentially committing fraud — is rampant in the food industry. So diving into the mislabeling of local seafood was something Bruno felt the students could investigate.

Why is mislabeling so widespread? “I think there’s clearly a lack of enforcement and a lack of testing,” Bruno said.

Mislabeling rampant

Based on customer demand, certain fish can be sold for more than others. And this may tempt producers into mislabeling their fish when the desired product is out of season or low in availability.

“There’s obviously a big economic incentive to mislabel,” Bruno said.

Red snapper is a great example. It’s been overfished in the Gulf of Mexico and the southeastern Atlantic. 

“So there’s very little of it available … yet the public demands it year round just because it’s something we’re familiar with,” Bruno said. “It’s not necessarily spectacularly better than other fish. It’s just culturally in demand.”

There are some fishing operations that allow you to buy seafood straight from the fishers who caught it. But often, seafood found in restaurants and grocery stores has a much longer chain of production. It’s easy for information to get changed along the way, but harder to pin down exactly where the deception is occurring.

In Bruno’s course, students went out to restaurants and grocery stores and collected samples of seafood. The students then extracted the DNA and amplified it using PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, a testing method also used for COVID-19. A commercial lab then did the sequencing. Once the students had the genetic code back from the lab, they used online tools to determine what they were looking at.

This isn’t the only evidence of the mislabeling trend. Two other in-state examples include shrimp sold in North Carolina that were mislabeled as “local” when they weren’t, and a corporate officer with a Pamlico County-based company that sold crab meat marked as a “Product of USA” when it was, in fact, imported, who was convicted two years ago. 

In one of the published papers based on work in Bruno’s classes, the students found that in talking to people, many were not aware of the issue, but once it was brought to their attention, it concerned them.

“Once people realize that this mislabeling is there, I think they can pretty quickly get the sense for the impacts it might have on their health and their pocketbook, but also on the environment,” Bruno said. 

People trying to make informed decisions about what they’re eating, both for their health and the environment, may be getting foiled by the issue of mislabeling. Though sometimes, said Bruno, a more sustainable species is being substituted for an unsustainable one. An example is again red snapper. Sometimes fish marketed as red snapper in grocery stores is actually tilapia, which is lower in the food web and therefore has less of an impact on the environment when it is farmed. 

“I’d rather train people to just buy tilapia and be aware of what it is rather than paying red snapper prices for it,” Bruno said.

Choice experiment

By extension, creating more consumer demand for fish species that can be sustainably farmed or harvested has the power to direct the industry, and decrease the motivation for mislabeling.

Jane Harrison, coastal economics specialist for North Carolina Sea Grant, was one of the authors of a report detailing trends in consumer demand for North Carolina seafood.

The authors sought to find out how often respondents ate seafood at home and at restaurants, where they got it from, how interested consumers are in knowing where their seafood comes from, and how their perception of that seafood changes based on certain attributes such as product safety and environmental concerns.

Across 1,400 respondents, Harrison and her team conducted a “choice experiment,” wherein people are given several options for seafood from different countries and asked to make decisions.

The results indicated that North Carolina residents would prefer to buy state-sourced seafood over options from foreign countries and even over other states on the East Coast. 

“Most of the time, people aren’t thinking about just one thing when they’re in the grocery store (or) in the restaurant,” said Harrison. “But certainly that local sourcing does have a significant impact on willingness to pay.”

North Carolinians want the money they spend on seafood to support the livelihoods of local commercial fishermen. The respondents valued the flavorful, healthy options from the local market, the local variety and safe handling practices.

“You think about any product, there’s really a series of attributes that are going to affect the price and people’s willingness to pay,” Harrison said. Adding, look at a car, for example. People will pay based on the gas mileage, the color, the make and model. “There’s a variety of attributes that affect your choice, just like seafood.”

That said, the most common factor that would sway respondents from buying local seafood was cost. State-sourced seafood tends to cost more, and that’s a deciding factor for many people.

This makes sense, but starts to fall apart if the fish you are buying is inappropriately labeled from the start. Even if all labels were accurate, there is no one labeling certification that addresses all aspects of environmental sustainability and social responsibility. That’s why some organizations advocate buyers move away from a labels-based approach toward a values-based approach. There are resources online for helping people bypass mislabeling issues and buy direct from fishermen, such as the Local Catch Seafood Finder and Carteret Catch.

The future of food

In a future where the seafood industry is socially sustainable, more direct communication and exchange between consumers and fishermen would likely help a lot. But the industry also has to be viable for those doing the fishing or cultivation.

North Carolina has long been a hot spot for oysters, and various government actions and research have supported this industry. The state joined the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Shellfish Initiative in 2018 with several goals, one being to create stable jobs. Scientists at all the major universities in the state contribute to research helping farmers grow oysters successfully. But making oyster cultivation an economically viable job is still a work in progress. This summer, changes made to the state’s Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program, or NAP, can help oyster farmers in case of emergency. 

The changes increase the payout per oyster in the event of a crisis like a mass mortality or a hurricane to more accurately reflect market value of the oyster, and the size that is in demand. 

“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Chris Matteo, acting president of the North Carolina Shellfish Growers Association and owner of Chadwick Creek Oysters. “It underpins the industry more effectively.”

Matteo says that going forward, he’s hopeful that NAP payouts will more accurately reflect the market value, and could even be adjusted year to year. This would make the oyster cultivation industry more economically secure for farmers in the state.

The goal of USDA programs like NAP, and of these changes, said Matteo, is to make sure growers stay in business.

All of these things will be essential to creating a socially sustainable seafood industry for the future.

This semester, UNC’s John Bruno is co-teaching a new course entitled The Future of Food. There’s a lot, he said, that he wants to cover. No one is unaffected by food.

“It’s the basis of our family lives,” Bruno said. “It’s so important in our cultures, it defines so many cultures and religious practices, and our relationship with nature now is so much just defined by food.”

This is last in a series examining the role and sustainability of seafood in a healthy diet and is published in collaboration with North Carolina Health News.

For Debbie Callaway, life is inextricable from the seafood industry. Her grandfather was a clammer on the North River and a cook for a menhaden operation. But throughout her life, she’s watched the environment and landscape be altered by forces such as population changes, development and pollution. It feels as though access to fishable waters has become increasingly encroached upon.

“I’ve lived here in Beaufort my whole life,” Callaway said. “And the changes are just unbelievable.” 

Callaway is on the board of directors for Walking Fish, a wild-caught, community-supported fishery that distributes in Raleigh and Durham. This cooperative model is based on a common concept from land-based farming called “community supported agriculture.” The idea is that consumers buy shares of a seasonal harvest, which they pick up weekly or biweekly from a designated location. 

People who sign up get whatever is seasonally available that the fishermen catch that week — clams, oysters, flounder, shrimp, monkfish and more.

“We’re increasing the availability of seafood to people living in the Triangle, who have limited access to fresh, local seafood — delivering the seafood directly from the fishermen to the consumer,” Callaway said.

The idea behind Walking Fish is the “triple-bottom line” — that in order for something to be sustainable, it must recognize the interconnected nature of sociocultural, economic and ecological systems. The goal is to harvest only what is available seasonally, to protect the environment and use an economic model that makes the business viable for the fishermen and worthwhile for the consumer.

The environmental impact of the seafood industry is a complex issue. Overfishing has been recognized as a problem associated with large-scale commercial fishing. National Geographic reports that it emerged as an issue for the first time in the late 1800s, and through the mid-1900s affected regional fisheries poignantly. But by the end of the 20th century it was clear that the ocean, not the unlimited food resource some had thought, was approaching its breaking point. Many species, such as Atlantic cod and herring had been pushed to the edge of extinction. The pressure on biodiversity and ecosystem function grew and kept growing. 

Aquaculture — the practice of farming seafood in the ocean as an alternative to fishing — has been offered up as a partial solution to the problem. Aquaculture is not new, but has been practiced sustainably in various forms for thousands of years. But if not scaled correctly, aquaculture faces many of the same obstacles as does land-based agriculture — pollution, ecosystem disturbance, and landscape degradation — making it hardly a panacea solution.

Ryan Nebeker is a research and policy analyst at Foodprint. Foodprint is an organization dedicated to helping people learn where their food comes from and how it impacts both social and environmental systems. One of Nebeker’s recent reports for Foodprint was a comprehensive analysis of the environmental impact of aquaculture — particularly the large-scale enterprises that he calls “Big Aquaculture.”

Aquaculture has been around for a long time, Nebeker said, and comes in many forms. But when it comes to the idea that aquaculture is a blanket solution for feeding the world, Nebeker has serious doubts.

“When you peel back the hood on how aquaculture really runs, you really run into this idea that it faces a lot of limits,” Nebeker said. “The idea that the ocean is kind of this magical freebie where you can just grow fish doesn’t really work.”

A lot of this has to do with understanding that aquaculture is not a uniform practice — there are a lot of different ways to farm seafood, and it’s important to differentiate among them. According to Nebeker, many of the species that consumers demand are considered “high input” and therefore “high impact.”

These terms refer to where a fish is in the food web. For example, Atlantic salmon is a highly valued commercial fish. But it’s high up in the food chain, meaning that in order to farm it, you have to feed it other fish. The production of fish food is something that drastically increases the environmental impact of farming Atlantic salmon.

“As a result, you end up feeding them quite a bit more than you get back in terms of usable meat,” Nebeker said.

Consuming wild-caught fish that are lower on the food chain, like sardines and anchovies, can help reduce impact. As can farming other species that have positive environmental impacts, such as seaweed and bivalves. Oysters, with their natural capacity for water filtration, give something back to the environment they grow in.

“Just get friendlier with clams, mussels, oysters — they’re so easy to cook,” Nebeker said. “Most people don’t realize they have that really light impact on the environment. And they are delicious.”

Supporting local fishing operations is another good way to reduce impact, Nebeker said, but he also recognizes that for most of the country, there’s no such thing as “local” seafood. In lieu of this, traceability is of high importance.

“One thing that has become a lot easier in the last few years is direct sales from fishermen and fishing cooperatives. Not everybody can walk down to the fish market, per se, but it’s gotten a lot easier to buy direct from fishermen. There’s a verified supply chain, you know they caught it, you know where they caught it.”

Some, like North Carolina’s Walking Fish, serve inland communities in their state. But others flash-freeze their supply and ship it to other parts of the country.

Thanks to the internet, that option is available to more of the country than it used to be. The downside, said Nebeker, is often the cost. But when the cost is low, he said, it may mean someone is cutting corners. Therefore, that cost may not manifest economically, but environmentally or socially.

In his report, Nebeker underscores the importance of viewing the ocean as a shared resource. 

“This is a resource that everyone should be able to use and access,” Nebeker said. “But they should not be able to use it in a way that damages it for other people.”

For regional fishing operations like Walking Fish, the understanding that environmental health is bound up in economic and social welfare is the basis of their business. After running for about 13 years, Walking Fish has a consistent member base that also shares these values.

“We have persevered, and have maintained a member base that benefits from the availability of fresh seafood in Raleigh-Durham but also provides a market for commercial fishermen,” said Callaway. “And for this, I’m very thankful.”

This is third in a series examining the role and sustainability of seafood in a healthy diet and is published in collaboration with North Carolina Health News.

Next in the series: What’s the economic cost of seafood and who can pay it? 

The term “sustainable seafood” gets used a lot with regard to the fishing and aquaculture industries — it’s a phrase that varies in meaning and is used everywhere from policy directives to marketing strategies. But what does it really mean? 

Colloquially, the term “sustainable” is often in reference to environmental impact, with regard to overfishing and making sure that meeting human demands doesn’t destroy ocean ecosystems. Commercial fisheries in the United States are regulated against overfishing, but that doesn’t mean it is not a problem — a growing demand for seafood coupled with climate change related pressures put a lot of strain on the ocean’s capacity to keep producing fish for people to consume.

Meanwhile, the world’s population continues to grow. It is currently at 8 billion and estimated to be 11.2 billion by the end of the century. This growth puts additional pressure on the ocean. Paired with limitations faced by land-based farming, researchers have pointed to the ocean as a possible venue for growable food in light of this trend. In 2020, the United Nations released a report saying that aquaculture had already improved food security globally. Still, this conversation is not without an important caveat — farming seafood is not a panacea solution, and there are many forms of aquaculture that can harm both the environment and local communities instead of benefiting them. 

When it comes to the human diet, the ocean is a potential resource for “good” food. We have long known about the health benefits associated with incorporating fish into your weekly diet — they are abundant in healthy fats, amino acids and other things that help our bodies function well. In the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ 2020 report of dietary recommendations, a document the agencies release every five years, there’s an emphasis on the importance of consuming high-quality seafood across age groups and demographic populations.

The trouble with that has long been that seafood remains one of the most difficult proteins to acquire at an affordable price point. Economically speaking, the wild-caught seafood industry provides North Carolina with 5,500 jobs and brings in $300 million in value to the state. But when we talk about this economic benefit, to the state and to the country beyond, which communities are being cut out of the picture due to economic or physical access? Who is inadvertently excluded from conversations about “sustainable seafood”?

One understanding of sustainability is that for something to be sustainable, it has to be supported by three pillars of economic, social and environmental strength. When we try to figure out if seafood has a place in a sustainable future, all three of those aspects must be evaluated. In this special series, which is a joint product of North Carolina Health News and Coastal Review, we will look at each of these pillars closely. 

Next, this series will examine the environmental impacts of both aquaculture and commercial fisheries, and how those industries may have to change or adapt in order to be practical in a changing world. We will also examine who can afford to eat seafood, and provides a mosaic look at North Carolina’s subsistence fishers. And finally, the series looks at the social mechanisms of supply and demand, education, labeling and representation. There will be overlap among these three stories, as the issues are impossible to truly extricate from each other. 

This series follows the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, held Sept. 28. The conference sought to investigate how to end hunger, reduce diet-related diseases and disparities and improve nutrition for the country. The only other time that this conference has been held was in 1969, more than 50 years ago. The ways that hunger and nutrition play out in American society have changed dramatically in the last half century. Conversations around climate, conservation, social equity and business have all evolved. 

Seafood, and the important role it plays in our diets and our economies is no exception. The remainder of this series will examine the role the seafood industry plays in North Carolina’s food supply, how it has evolved to this point, and what it will look like in the future.

This is second in a series examining the role and sustainability of seafood in a healthy diet and is published in collaboration with North Carolina Health News. Next in the series: The seafood footprint.

Essentially all marine life is vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

To develop adaptation strategies, a thorough understanding of how climate change impacts individual species and ecosystems is necessary. That’s why a group of researchers led by Dr. Daniel G. Boyce of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography developed an extensive index for evaluating the risks that climate change poses to marine life.

Their work, published Monday in Nature, looks at climate risk for marine life through two possible emissions trajectories, called shared socioeconomic pathways.

“These are basically scenarios for how human development will continue into the future — how our activities will affect our greenhouse gas emissions,” Boyce said.

Under the high-emissions future, wherein emissions continue to increase and raise the global temperature by about 5 degrees from preindustrial levels, the outlook is dire. Nearly 90% of the 24,975 studied are classified as at high or critical risk by the year 2100. However, the extreme mitigation pathway, a negative emissions scenario, reduces the risk across the board for 98.2% of species.

“We used the two most extreme scenarios to paint the two most extreme pictures of how climate risk for species would vary,” Boyce said.

When it comes to marine conservation and climate change management, the researchers hope this index can help prioritize vulnerable species and ecosystems.

Climate change spurs environmental changes and the loss of biodiversity. This, in turn, affects things like species health and food security for humans. Climate change vulnerability assessments are one of the ways in which humans can plan to adapt.

In the past, said Boyce, vulnerability assessments have not been thoroughly incorporated into policy and management. The researchers here attempted to create an index that was comprehensive and flexible enough to be applied to different conservation scenarios over time.

“I think that there’s been a limited uptake of the knowledge produced in those studies to conservation and management decision making,” Boyce said. “And that was sort of the gap that we were trying to remedy with this study.”

The researchers evaluated 24,975 marine species and ecosystems across the world. They focused primarily on what can be found in the upper 100 meters – roughly 330 feet — of the water column, since temperature changes will be felt most severely here. They assessed mostly animals, but also other marine life such as plants and bacteria.

The researchers used 12 climate change-related indices to calculate present-day risk, future exposure and future potential adaptability. This helped them generate an absolute risk score for each species.

Climate vulnerability varies substantially, both across species and from location to location. The highest vulnerability score that the researchers found belonged to the Chinese puffer, at a highly impacted nearshore site under the high emissions pathway. The Chinese puffer is already a species at risk because of high demand for it.

Higher risk areas for ecosystems include the tropics, some polar regions, and nearshore areas. They also found that top predators were at a greater risk because of climate change than those at the bottom of the food web. This suggests that climate change will destabilize ecosystem function and energy transfer. The data implies that the mitigation pathway will reduce the need for ecosystem restructuring.

“There are factors other than the projected future climate which contribute to the overall climate risk for species,” Boyce said. “If you have a species that has a very small geographic range, and its range is very fragmented, it’ll be much more susceptible or at risk to climate impacts, because it just can’t go anywhere else. It has to live in its narrow, small environment.”

The researchers took their framework a step further, and applied their index to commonly fished species to evaluate the relationship between climate risk and socioeconomic equity.

They found that low-income countries, with lower levels of food security and a high dependence on fisheries, will experience a systematically higher climate risk to their fisheries in the high-emissions pathway.

However, under the mitigation pathway, they also experience the greatest risk reduction. These are generally countries that contribute the least to global emissions, but are also among those impacted the most by climate change. Therefore, climate change threatens to deepen an already existing socioeconomic divide.

Low-income countries are already very poorly positioned to adapt to climate change, Boyce said. “And this is another stressor on top of that.”

These results show that the climate risk for marine life strongly corresponds to the level of future emissions. As the effects of climate change get worse, this index can help inform priority areas for conservation and other evidence-based policy. The researchers hope that the index can help reduce the number of extinctions, increase adaptability to climate change and thereby build resilience.

A recent study published in Nature has found sugar concentrations in the pore waters of sediments beneath Posidonia oceanica, a seagrass found in the Mediterranean Sea and commonly known as Mediterranean tapeweed or Neptune grass, to be about 80 times higher than previously observed. Posidonia oceanica secretes this sugar into the sediment beneath it.

It’s a finding that will help increase the understanding of what’s going on in the sediment below and around seagrass root systems, which in turn could help improve seagrass conservation approaches in the future.

“Sucrose is a sugar that we would use to sweeten our coffee in the mornings,” said Dr. Maggie Sogin, assistant professor in the Molecular Cell Biology Department at University of California, Merced, and lead author on the study. “One of the important things about sugar and sucrose itself is that microorganisms can gain a lot of energy and nutrition from that sugar molecule.”

Microbial colonies — organisms not visible to the naked eye that are critical to ecosystem function — often consume this sugar rapidly. In terrestrial environments, you would likely not detect sugar at such high concentrations because microbes are putting it to use. Therefore, Sogin was surprised to find so much sugar beneath seagrass.

The underground area beneath a plant where the root system interacts with the surrounding soil or sediment is called a “rhizosphere.” A lot less is known about these underwater rhizospheres in comparison to land-based rhizospheres.

A key difference is that oxygen is consumed very quickly by microbes in upper sediment layers in aquatic environments, so in much of the sediment there is no oxygen available. Sogin found during lab experiments that the microbial communities living in the rhizosphere do have the ability to break down sucrose, but they also have the ability to break down phenolics, a class of organic compounds. In the absence of oxygen, the presence of phenolics limits their capacity to break down the sugars.

Sogin’s ongoing work continues to investigate microbial communities in seagrass rhizospheres. She hypothesizes that since her team observed high sucrose levels under three other species of marine plants, the combination of a low-oxygen environment and plant-produced phenolics allows for things like sugar to amass in aquatic rhizospheres. Filling in the blanks of what’s going on in these rhizospheres can lead to improved management of seagrass meadows, a very valuable resource in aquatic ecosystems.

“If we can better understand the interactions that are occurring and how microbes help promote the health and metabolism and maintenance of seagrass meadows, then maybe we have a better way of thinking about how we can restore seagrass meadows or how we can protect them for future climate change scenarios,” Sogin said.

North Carolina has the most seagrass acreage on the Atlantic coast, but even these expansive meadows are not immune to long-term threats.

Dr. Jud Kenworthy worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for more than three decades. Retired from NOAA now, he continues to partner in a volunteer capacity with the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership, and is a adjunct member of the faculty at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Kenworthy was involved in the development of a submerged aquatic vegetation program in Beaufort through NOAA in the 1970s. He went on to work with seagrass for the majority of his career.

North Carolina, said Kenworthy, is a unique area when it comes to seagrass, but its role in the ecosystem is irreplaceable.

“It’s an incredible place because we have this mix of temperate and tropical species,” Kenworthy said.

North Carolina has a unique physical location with the Gulf Stream coming up from the south, and the Labrador Current flowing down from the north. As a result, you will find seagrasses at their northernmost and southernmost limits in North Carolina. From the standpoint of climate change, said Kenworthy, this makes North Carolina’s seagrass meadows a bit of a “living laboratory.”

Seagrass does a lot for the ecosystem. Its root systems hold sediment in place and protect the shoreline by preventing erosion. The structure it provides offers food and habitat to countless underwater species. Seagrass is a highly effective carbon sink, and helps improve water quality.

But seagrass also faces encroaching threats from pollution, climate change and urban development. APNEP research shows that between 2006 and 2013, total seagrass coverage decreased by about 5.6% in the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuary.

Kenworthy said it’s important to conserve seagrass because nothing else provides all the same ecosystem services to a comparable degree. There’s no equivalent substitute for it. And once it is gone, restoration has a really low rate of success.

“It’s hard and expensive to bring it back once we’ve lost it,” Kenworthy said. At their most effective, restoration efforts have a success rate of only 42%. “It’s not even as good as a flip of a coin.”

Researchers and shellfish growers say that this season has been rife with mass oyster die-offs.

Exact triggers for these oyster mortality events are highly variable and are the subject of ongoing research.

Bob Rheault, executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association, told Coastal Review these die-offs have been a longstanding issue in parts of the mid-Atlantic, with “lots of confounding clues” but no clear answers.

“Summer mortality,” the seasonal loss of oysters during the summer months, is a familiar phenomenon, but this year’s mortality events appear to be especially severe and widespread.

Mark Ciesielski, a doctoral candidate in the Noble Lab in the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, is part of a team of researchers from multiple universities investigating the complex factors behind oyster mortality events. He said this season had been brutal for farmed oysters, with big losses across the board at his North Carolina study sites. 

Ciesielski’s oyster mortality research with Dr. Rachel Noble is supported by the state Commercial Fishing Resource Fund and with new state funding effective in July, the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory.

The team is looking for causes, and not just for this year’s problem, but it’s likely a complex confluence of factors. 

Dr. Tal Ben-Horin is an aquatic pathologist and head of the North Carolina State University Center for Marine Sciences and Technology’s Shellfish Pathology Laboratory, one of the partners involved in the project. His lab in Morehead City studies pathogen and disease impacts on shellfish aquaculture and has been working to understand the root causes behind these mortality events, wherein seemingly healthy oysters suddenly die.

“Sometimes the oysters are fine one day and dead the next,” Ben-Horin said.

He has observed that one common characteristic of summer mortality is an effect on the oyster’s ability to regenerate cells in its gastrointestinal tract.

“Typically, oysters regenerate these cells,” Ben-Horin said. “What we see associated with these events is no regeneration.”

The result is that the oysters then starve to death. Not all of them show visible symptoms, but some of them are quite obviously affected.

“There’s just nothing left,” Ben-Horin said. “The animals are withered away.”

Also involved in the project are Ami Wilbur at UNC Wilmington and Jess Small and Corinne Audemard at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Widespread, similar timing

What was unique about this year, said Ben-Horin, is the geographic scope — and that across a large area, mortality events within individual estuaries all seemed to happen at the same time.

On May 23, several farm sites reported shellfish mortalities of varying severity, from as far south as Stump Sound in Onslow County to as far north as Nelson Bay in Carteret County, about 115 miles of coastline. Several of these events were extreme, with an industry partner’s site in Stump Sound losing up to 90% of its oysters.

When so many events happen at the same time, it suggests an environmental trigger. Ben-Horin suspects that the combination of hot temperatures and increased salinity might be the driving force behind these mortalities. At the same time, oysters are highly adaptable.

Instead of the environmental factors being a trigger for the oysters, Ben-Horin is investigating whether the environmental factors are actually stressing out microbial communities in the water column, which are in turn infecting oyster hosts. Researchers are cataloging microbial communities before, during and after mortality events — not just accounting for what species are present, but what genes they have.

As far as this year goes, Ben-Horin is optimistic that the worst has passed. While the losses this season were monumental, the oysters that survived tend to be just fine.

“The remaining oysters do really well once you get past the event,” Ben-Horin said. During this past week’s visit to his most heavily impacted study site in Core Sound, he observed no new mortality.

Anecdotally, it seems as though these mortality events affect cultured oysters more than natural reefs. As Ben-Horin continues to investigate the microbial communities associated with these events, it may reveal helpful information for growers in the future.

The ultimate goal is to increase the understanding of why these events happen so that growers can have insight into how to make their oysters more resilient to mass mortality incidents.

“We really want to piece this story together,” Ben-Horin said.

Submerged aquatic vegetation, which scientists call SAV and most of us know as seagrass, is critical to the health of aquatic ecosystems. Not only does it provide habitat for fish and other species, but it prevents erosion and sequesters carbon.

Seagrass has also been shown to be an economically significant part of the environment. Even losing 5% of the state’s seagrass beds could cost North Carolina millions of dollars over the next 10 years.

Seagrass beds across the world are experiencing declines, and North Carolina’s are not immune to the threat. North Carolina has some of the most expansive seagrass meadows on the East Coast, with about 100,000 acres of growth. A report from the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership, or APNEP, revealed last year that between 2006 and 2013, seagrass beds in the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuary had decreased by 5.6%, a total of 5,686 acres. These findings could indicate that water quality in the estuaries is poorer than in previous years.

Seagrass is important environmentally and economically, but it depends on healthy waters to thrive and it is particularly sensitive to diminished water quality.

New research shows that the state’s current standards for water quality relative to chlorophyll-a and turbidity are insufficient in protecting seagrass in high-salinity environments.

Dr. Nathan Hall of the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences led the project on behalf of APNEP, looking specifically at how high turbidity and chlorophyll-a levels could reach before inhibiting the photosynthesis process for seagrass, and then, examining how those thresholds compare with the state’s water quality standards.

“If we look at the huge body of research that was done to establish what light levels the grasses need, and then we look at the current light levels that the grasses have in North Carolina waters, we’re either right on the edge of what they need, in most cases, or we’re already at the point where they don’t have what they need,” Hall said.

Chlorophyll-a is the green pigment in a plant, which is responsible for light absorption to supply energy for photosynthesis. In this study, it is an indicator of how much algae are in the water. The state’s current chlorophyll-a limit for slow-moving bodies of water is 40 micrograms per liter. At this concentration, the water is likely visibly green.

Turbidity evaluates how much nonalgal particulate is in the water. This may be mineral sediment or detritus. This is material that might be kicked up by disturbances like storms, erosion or development.

The reason these two factors pose a threat to seagrass is because SAV needs access to sunlight to photosynthesize. Growing underwater, this means that water must be clear enough for sunlight to make it through to the seagrass beds. Seagrass can handle some time with restricted sunlight availability, but continual deprivation will cause it to die off.

Both turbidity and algae affect the clarity of the water, and that’s why it is important for seagrass — and by extension, the entire estuarine ecosystem — that those things stay at manageable levels for photosynthesis to take place.

To investigate this issue, Hall used a previously established bio-optical model, an equation to help determine the water quality thresholds that allow seagrass enough light to photosynthesize. The bio-optical model was originally calibrated for the North River, which is high in salinity but not strongly linked to the rest of the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine System. Before the model could be used across the study area, it needed to be evaluated to see if it would work in different types of waters. Hall found that the model was not compatible with low-salinity waters.

But the model showed that in high-salinity waters, by the time that water quality was poor enough to put a body of water on the state list of imperiled waters, the federal Clean Water Act Section 303(d) list, seagrass would already be existing in a threatening environment where it is not getting enough sunlight to survive.

This information could be useful for the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and other managers as they consider how to adjust water quality standards or their evaluation to better protect seagrass.

An upcoming priority is to recalibrate the model to make it accurate for low-salinity waters as well. One of the biggest needs to address is a data gap — to accurately monitor water quality and seagrass, more extensive sampling must take place.

“A lot of areas where seagrass beds exist, we don’t have routine monitoring of water quality,” Hall said.

Second in a series. Read part 1.

Students in Carteret Community College’s Aquaculture Technology program accumulate hands-on experiences in the wide-ranging industry that is aquaculture. The program’s lab space, which includes countless tanks and an oyster lease, sits on the Bogue Sound in Morehead City. 

The program teaches students how to be part of an industry that is constantly changing. David Cerino is the program chair. Day-to-day, climate change doesn’t factor into their work, he said. But zooming out, it impacts their future.

“You have to look on a larger scale, I think, to see it,” Cerino said.

For example, research shows that ocean acidification may impact shellfish development. Lower pH levels in the ocean could hinder shell growth for larval clams and oysters in some parts of the world. It’s not yet a big problem for East Coast hatcheries, but he believes that someday it could be.

Changing water temperatures are another example, Cerino said. Some of the clams they work with are at the northern edge of their range in North Carolina. Warmer temperatures could eventually change that.

“It certainly can go into some of the planning of what are the next species you should be looking at,” Cerino said. “If we can expect that in the future the water’s going to be warmer, there may be some more southern species that we can grow effectively here in North Carolina.”

Growing the industry

In North Carolina, an important aspect of aquaculture is shellfish farming. In 2018, the state launched a state shellfish plan, modeled after NOAA’s National Shellfish Initiative.

The National Shellfish Initiative aims to grow the shellfish aquaculture industry through restoration activities and sustainable commercial development. North Carolina’s participation specifically prioritizes job creation, sustainable management, water quality and shellfish health. This move acknowledges that shellfish farming is an important part of culture and identity for the region.

It also shows that moving forward, the state’s environmental health and economy are intrinsically linked. Research shows that for every $1 invested in oyster restoration, the state receives benefits equivalent to $4.05. In 2017, shellfish aquaculture in North Carolina had a farmgate value of $2.6 million.

North Carolina wants to be the “Napa Valley of Oysters.” Consistent and intentional action will be necessary to grow an industry like marine aquaculture in a way that is both economically sustainable and climate resilient. 

Mass mortality

Next door to Carteret Community College is the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences. Doctoral candidate Mark Ciesielski’s research project is looking to unveil the causes behind oyster mass mortality events.

Oyster mortality events — when large amounts of oysters die off — present a great risk to the shellfish industry. There has been an increase in the frequency of these events over the last decade. Recent research has highlighted the problem up and down the coast. In North Carolina, the trend is in anecdotal occurrences. The state’s Oyster Blueprint keeps close documentation on the state of the oyster over time. 

“If there’s that significant of an economic loss, it’s not going to inspire a lot of confidence in the industry,” Ciesielski said.

These events have often been attributed to a single pathogen, but the truth is probably a little more complicated than that, says Ciesielski. Evidence suggests there are likely many contributing factors derived from the effects of climate change that might favor a myriad of pathogens working in concert. Ciesielski hopes to identify these drivers.

Four teams of scientists in North Carolina and Virginia are working with local shellfishermen to regularly monitor oysters across multiple sites throughout the coming year, starting in March of 2022. They’ll be monitoring several environmental factors such as salinity, dissolved oxygen and temperature, and using these field observations in conjunction with advanced molecular workflows and histological data. The idea is to address a complex issue holistically.

“We’re not looking at just one thing, we want to hit it from all angles, and just be as smart about it as possible,” Ciesielski said.

The future stability of aquaculture in North Carolina depends on research like this.

For Rebekah Williams of Bekah’s Bay Oysters in Morehead City, being an oyster farmer fits like a glove. The nights when she’s bartending at Southern Salt tend to be the busiest, said one of her coworkers. People come for her, and they come for her oysters on the half shell. Despite the ubiquitous threats to the industry, this is where she belongs.

“I love the water. And I love it here,” Williams said. “People are like, ‘are you ever going to leave?’ Probably not…my roots are definitely going to be here.”

If this project can help unveil the triggers behind oyster mortality, it can increase the environmental and economic resiliency of the oyster industry for the future.

“It has a lot of importance in terms of the local community — people are very interested in making sure that they can make a living off of this,” Ciesielski said.  “And so we’re trying to support them as much as possible, and just give them answers to questions, and what the limitations are. That’s an important thing if we’re going to continue to grow moving forward.”

First in a two-part series.

The sun warms the docks in Morehead City as Rebekah Williams stands on the back deck of Southern Salt, a restaurant on Morehead City’s waterfront that serves fresh seafood.

Before her on a table is a heap of oysters from her farm, Bekah’s Bay Oysters, sorted into two piles. The pile of bigger oysters will go inside and be served to guests that evening on the half shell. The others will go back into a floating oyster bag at her lease in a tidal bay near Cape Lookout.

Oyster farming is one of the United States’ most prominent forms of marine aquaculture, and Williams is one of many shellfish farmers in North Carolina. Aquaculture is an expansive industry that encompasses a lot of things — farming fish and shellfish for food is prominent among them. 

New research out of the University of British Columbia in Canada has indicated that while the marine aquaculture industry has huge potential for feeding a growing world population, a significant amount of that potential will be curbed due to climate change if we stay on our current carbon emissions pathway. 

An economically and culturally important industry in North Carolina, aquaculture has the potential to help us adapt to a changing world. But as things like warmer ocean temperatures, storms and landscape changes become more pressing factors, the industry will have to adapt as well.

Room to grow

Previous research indicates that marine aquaculture has tremendous potential when it comes to feeding the growing world population, which is expected to hit 10.9 billion by the end of the century. But whether that potential ever comes into being is another thing altogether.

Many capture fisheries around the world are either at their maximum yield or are close to overextending their capacities. This means there isn’t much room for that industry to grow in order to feed a higher world population.

Dr. Muhammed Oyinlola, lead author of the study published in Global Change Biology, said that while that food pathway is close to maxed out, the marine aquaculture industry is expanding.

“My recent research looked into marine aquaculture, because marine aquaculture production has been increasing over time,” Oyinlola said. “And most people are seeing it as the panacea for (the) decline of fisheries, particularly from the marine environment — how we’re going to increase food production.”

Oyinlola used modeling techniques to project into the future of marine aquaculture. He modeled two main pathways to see how the industry could be impacted by a suite of environmental and socioeconomic factors.

His results indicated that by the end of this century, climate change will be the driving factor influencing the production potential of the industry.

Under the more pressing of the two scenarios, Oyinlola found that global marine aquaculture production could decrease by up to 16% by the year 2090. This projected decrease was mostly driven by factors like warming ocean temperatures and changes in what areas are suitable for aquaculture.

What he found is that the future of the industry, globally, has vastly different possible trajectories. This study highlights the need for strong carbon emission mitigation measures in order to ensure a climate-resilient and economically sustainable future for marine aquaculture.

Climate extremes

The growing global aquaculture industry includes Williams, who jump-started a career in oyster farming about seven years ago. After a bit of trial and error, she started her own business and never looked back. Now, you can find Bekah’s Bay Oysters on the Southern Salt menu as well as with several regional distributors. It’s also not uncommon to see Williams driving around Morehead City in her truck, making dock to door deliveries herself.

Climate change is not part of Williams’ day-to-day train of thought. Between bar shifts at Southern Salt, tending to her oysters on her lease, and renovating homes for Airbnb on the side, Williams has a full schedule. But that’s not to say climate extremes haven’t affected her.

A few years into her business, Williams, like so many others in North Carolina, had to quickly pivot when Hurricane Florence made landfall in 2018.

“You don’t get a big heads-up on a storm,” Williams said. When she realized Florence was going to impact her oysters, she had to act fast.

She went out to her lease and gathered all of the baby oysters, leaving the more mature ones in place. She used a refrigerated trailer to bring them into the restaurant. It was a risk to bring them in, because reintroducing them to the water later on could cause them to die. 

“You’re taking a chance on bringing them in,” Williams said. But then, she didn’t have a lot of other options. “So we were like, ‘well, we’ll try it.’”

Many of the mature oysters she left at her lease did not survive the storm. But her baby oysters did.

“It’s a lot of work. You’re out there in the sun, no power … and you’re doing all this work to save the oysters, and luckily we did and we didn’t have any huge issues.” 

Others weren’t so lucky. In 2018, Hurricane Florence and Tropical Storm Michael caused nearly $10 million in damage to North Carolina’s shellfish industry.

The storm caused damage to gear, and leases were hit with an onslaught of freshwater, which decreased both salinity and dissolved oxygen. For many oyster farmers, it was a huge loss.

Research has shown that, while hurricanes are not new, climate change results in a heightened risk for more intense and more frequent storms. For Williams and many other small business farmers, these storms threaten catastrophic losses. They are a direct threat to the industry’s stability and security.

“It’s tough if you don’t have the resources,” Williams said. “But luckily, having the restaurant and coolers and refrigerators and stuff, we were able to try it and do it. And it did work. So, at least we know now.”

Next in the series: Seeding a future for North Carolina’s shellfish aquaculture industry

Coral reefs are living records of climate history in the world’s tropical regions.

The chemistry within a coral skeleton core sample can tell things like temperature, salinity and pH through time. The oldest records go back hundreds of thousands of years.

Investigating the climatic history of the ocean can help predict future climate patterns.

A research project out of the Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences Department at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is using a technique inspired by seismology in an attempt to increase the accuracy of climate information that can be gleaned from coral samples.

Doctoral candidate Hunter Hughes is leading teams across three institutions to use this method he developed called SMITE. SMITE stands for Scleractinian Multivariate Isotope and Trace Element. Scleractinian refers to hard corals, and isotope and trace element are the two types of chemical signatures that Hughes is working with to get a full picture.

Preliminary results indicate that SMITE is outperforming conventional methods for reconstructing past climates using corals.

As a kid, Hughes said he was lucky to get to spend time exploring coral reefs through scuba diving.

“They left a very deep impression on me, and a really huge appreciation for the marine ecosystem,” Hughes said.

When he got older, that appreciation evolved into a research interest. In a college class, he learned that corals are great record keepers of climate history.

“I just pretty much haven’t looked back since,” Hughes said.

Corals sometimes get likened to tree rings. If you look at the cross section of a tree, you’ll see rings that represent time. Learning how to read the patterns in the rings can reveal a lot about the conditions in which the tree grew.

A similar phenomenon takes place when looking at a coral skeleton. If you know how to extract climate information from coral chemistry, you can gather information about things like ocean pH, temperature and salinity.

“These are all really, really important climate variables when we’re trying to understand how global climate functions,” Hughes said.

When talking about climate change, the North and South poles get a lot of attention, because they are areas where seeing drastic change is being seen. But the tropics, the area around the center of the Earth where most corals grow, are critical, also.

The tropics are the part of the world that receives the most solar heat. So understanding the conditions of tropical environments is very important to understanding climate.

Corals have been used to reconstruct climate from hundreds of thousands of years ago. But more consistently, it is possible to create reconstructions from the last 10,000 years.

Hughes likes to use the phrase “past is prologue” when it comes to understanding coral climate records.

“In order to understand where Earth’s climate is going, we really have to get a good understanding of where it’s been in the past,” Hughes said.

Scientists who study climate history in “proxies” like coral and tree rings are called paleoclimatologists. And as fruitful as their discoveries can be, they frequently have to deal with “noisy” data. That is, climate patterns mixed in with biological processes. Sorting through different data can be difficult.

Seismologists, or scientists who study earthquakes, are always dealing with “noisy” data and have to discern between the signal they want and the rest.

Hughes is borrowing from this concept and applying it to his research. The new method he developed, SMITE, aims to cut through the noise like a seismologist and get higher quality climate data.

“That is sort of the heart of the method, really being able to maximize the signal that we’re getting amidst the noise,” Hughes said.

Hughes is essentially working with more variables in the coral than conventional methods usually take into account. By using more measurements of the chemical aspects of the coral skeleton, he can use all of that information in concert to generate a more accurate estimate of past temperatures. 

So far, SMITE has been able to consistently outperform conventional coral reading methods. Hughes is getting more accurate temperature data going back in time, and can better isolate the biological processes of coral from climate-influenced ones.

Hughes presented this method to the larger scientific community for the first time on March 1 at the Ocean Sciences Meeting. He is currently pursuing publication.

“Because SMITE has so much information to work with, it can tell us about those things, and give us sort of new windows into these processes that we didn’t have before,” Hughes said.

The information that Hughes is gathering can also be useful for learning how to better preserve coral reefs, which are themselves under threat because of climate change. Maintaining the health of coral reefs is very important to Hughes.

“The information in them is very valuable,” Hughes said. “But also of course, they as a species are potentially even more valuable.”

A tall and looming reed grass, nonnative phragmites now extends pervasively into North Carolina’s marshes and shorelines.

Likely introduced to North America in the 18th or 19th century, it hasn’t taken long for Phragmites australis — more commonly known as phragmites or even casually referred to as “phrag” — to thoroughly establish its foothold in the U.S.

Phragmites has a tendency to take over wetlands, pushing out native marsh grasses. The toll of its dominance is significant. It can negatively impact the biodiversity of an area, and endanger other species that depend on native habitats. A leading example is the diamondback terrapin, a turtle native to tidal marshes in the eastern U.S. When phragmites encroaches their habitat, it becomes harder to find places to nest and lay eggs.

Phragmites has been studied for decades. Many people try to get rid of it, but eradication is not easy, said Tracy Skrabal, coastal scientist with the North Carolina Coastal Federation in Wrightsville Beach. The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

“It’s difficult to eradicate it,” Skrabal said. “The traditional techniques for eradicating involve using some pretty nasty chemicals.” 

In Skrabal’s past work addressing phragmites, she had some success with the eradication approach in a small, isolated patch. If you catch it early, you may get rid of it. But once it has taken hold, you are likely out of luck. The success rate of long-term eradication attempts is low. Continued — and often costly — action is needed to keep phragmites away once it has become established.

The chemicals used in eradication have been tied to adverse effects on ecosystems and human health. 

In the last several years, the phragmites discourse has started to evolve in a way that takes climate change into consideration more than before. A new wave of research has indicated that, while there are significant perils associated with phragmites, the reed can also help ecosystems adapt to some of the effects of climate change. This complicates the equation.

“As a scientist, it is not clear cut,” Skrabal said.

Potential benefits include protection against erosion due to phragmites’ extensive root systems, and effective carbon sequestration – the storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Both are things that make an environment more resilient to climate change.

In 2017, the Coastal Federation hosted a workshop about phragmites, bringing together leading researchers and managers from across the country to speak on the issue. The intention was to more comprehensively understand the plant and its effects on the ecosystem and discuss management options.

More recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration held several webinars about phragmites, with numerous researchers explaining the multiple facets of the phragmites issue. 

Mollie Yacano is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences based in Morehead City, and she was one of the presenters during the NOAA seminar series. Her research, which was recently published in Estuaries and Coasts, looks at the nitrogen removal capacity of microbes in the soil beneath phragmites in comparison to native grasses in salt marshes.

Salt marshes around the world can be responsible for removing or retaining between 20% and 50% of excess nitrogen. This is a very valuable service, because nitrogen pollution contributes to algal blooms and fish kills.

Yacano found that in her marine tidal marsh study areas, phragmites were better at denitrification than native grasses. In the brackish marsh study areas, all grasses performed equally. What this means is that, in this context, phragmites is just as good or better at denitrification than native grasses.

“So even that, when you’re thinking about it big picture,” Yacano said. “Is it worth killing this plant?”

This makes phragmites management complicated. It is impossible to overlook the downsides of phragmites, but it is becoming equally important to recognize its potential value, especially as marsh ecosystems are threatened by factors associated with climate change.

On the positive side, researchers like Yacano may be able to help inform management practices moving forward.

“I think one of the really cool things (about) being part of that NOAA group was seeing how many other people are interested in trying to understand how we can use all of this different research to put together resources on best management practices,” Yacano said. “How can we understand better what we’re doing, and then make decisions better based on that.”

Spot, a favorite catch for many recreational anglers, gets its name from the dark marking behind both gills. It’s a fish with a relatively short lifespan that spawns in the ocean but spends much of its life in estuarine waters, and spot can be found as far north as the Gulf of Maine to as far south as Florida.

In general, commercial harvests of spot have been on the decline since 2001, with recreational catch totals fluctuating throughout the years.

Spot is managed as a coastwide species because it is found far beyond the boundaries of any one state. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, or the ASMFC, oversees multistate management of spot from Delaware to Florida. The ASMFC makes the ultimate management decisions, and then it is up to the individual states to meet the prescribed requirements.

Morgan Paris is the spot and Atlantic croaker species lead at the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries. When a fish has a multistate range like spot, collaboration across boundaries is necessary, Paris recently told Coastal Review.

“I wouldn’t say it’s hard,” Paris said. “It’s more just requiring collaboration between states and making sure that you have the open line of data transfer communication, so everyone can get what they need and can process the material correctly.”

The ASMFC’s first spot management plan was implemented in 1987. Since then, the plan has been amended a few times, and in 2014, the plan was altered to include a management technique called the Traffic Light Approach. This technique was updated again in 2020.

The Traffic Light Approach uses harvest and abundance metrics to identify thresholds that trigger certain management actions.

The 2020 Traffic Light Analysis Review of spot triggered at the 30% threshold. This is categorized as “moderate concern.” The harvest and abundance indices that the Traffic Light Analysis uses were above 30% for two of the previous three years. This triggered two specific management actions.

At a minimum, states have to reduce commercial harvest by 1% of the average state commercial harvest for the previous 10 years, and institute a 50-fish bag limit in the recreational sector. North Carolina’s bag limit is in place, and there’s a commercial season closure in effect from Dec. 10, 2021, through April 4. Management actions are required to be in place for a minimum of two years. According to the ASMFC, work on the next coastwide stock assessment will likely begin next year and be completed in 2024.

“States can still choose to have more strenuous measures in place, but at the bare minimum, you have to follow what ASMFC guidance is putting out,” Paris said.

Related: Analysis: Why NC imposed new limits on spot, croaker

Fortunately for commercial fishermen, the winter months are not the typical time for harvesting spot anyway. This was an intentional decision, said Paris. They wanted the imposed restriction to help the species without negatively impacting fishermen.

“When we did all the crunching of the numbers, we looked at when the effort was concentrated and what time of year will be the best for the actual fishermen,” Paris said.

As to what influence these trends, that’s a little harder to define, said Paris. Research on how different environmental factors may be influencing spot recruitment, or how many young are produced and survive to become juveniles, year over year is something that the ASMFC has listed as a research need.

“The environmental side of it is not a new one, but definitely one that’s becoming more relevant,” Paris said.

Dr. Troy Tuckey, senior research scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, is particularly interested in what influences population abundance for juvenile fish. For more than a decade, he has been an author on the Juvenile Fish and Blue Crab Trawl Survey, an assessment that helps keep track of fish populations in Chesapeake Bay.

It’s a fisheries-independent survey that goes out every month of the year to take assessments on population abundance of as many fish as possible. The researchers also test location-specific water temperatures, dissolved oxygen, and salinity conditions.

This survey has been conducted regularly since the 1950s, and standardized in terms of methodology since 1988.

“We don’t target any species, we just use the same gear, the same methodology year after year, and assess, measure, identify and count everything that we catch,” Tuckey said.

They use nets with a small mesh in order to help focus on juvenile fish and survey throughout the year to keep track of young populations at different points in time.

Tuckey said they have surveyed spot in areas that recorded average dissolved oxygen, temperature and salinity. This shows that spot tend to gravitate toward conditions that are not too polarized.

Year over year, spot recruitment varies because they spawn in the coastal ocean, which is that area between shore and the continental shelf, and because changes in current or wind may influence how many juveniles end up in the estuaries.

According to Tuckey, it’s not unusual to see big boom-or-bust fluctuations in a species like spot, because of how short their lifespans are. The conditions year to year will directly impact population levels.

Beyond that, there’s still a lot that is unknown about how environmental factors influence spot populations.

It’s really important, said Tuckey, to know how fish respond to environmental factors.

“We need to understand those external factors so that we can manage them better, to make sure that the populations are sustainable for future years,” Tuckey said.

A new study reports that baleen whales may eat significantly more than previously estimated. This greater understanding of the eating habits of baleen whales helps illustrate a clearer picture of the true impact that baleen whales have on marine ecosystems.

The study, “Baleen whale consumption based on high-resolution foraging measurements,” was published in Nature in November. Lead author Dr. Matthew Savoca was drawn to studying whales because he is fascinated by what marine animals can tell us about marine environments. And considering how much people like whales, he said, it’s surprising how much we still don’t know about them.

“It’s been great fun to work with whales,” Savoca said. “Not just because they’re so awesome and charismatic, but also, because there’s so much mystery around them.”

Savoca works out of the Hopkins Marine Station at Stanford University, and found that extensive data had already been collected on baleen whale prey consumption. With the help of an international team of researchers, Savoca was able to organize that data in order to better understand baleen whale prey consumption.

Baleen whales include several well-known species of whales such as humpback and blue whales. Many previous estimates of their eating habits depended largely on bioenergetic models based on estimated metabolic rates that were ultimately not backed by direct observations.

Another method for estimating prey consumption rates was to do autopsies on dead whales and measure their stomach contents, though this method also has significant drawbacks. What you might find in a whale’s stomach after their death isn’t necessarily reflective of what they eat every day.

This study drew data from 321 tags deployed on whales of seven baleen species. The tags are about the size of half of a grapefruit, but similar in functionality to smartphones, and attach to the whales using suction cups. In conjunction with the tags, the researchers used acoustic measurements of prey populations in areas where the whales were located.

Dr. David Johnston is an associate professor of the practice of marine conservation ecology at Duke University. He is also the director of the Duke Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab, a part of the university’s marine lab based in Beaufort, and a co-author of this study.

The lab deployed the drones used for this research. The drones measured the altitude of the drone over each whale, which, along with the details of the drone’s camera, allowed the researchers to calculate the length of the whales. The length of the whale is important because it helped the researchers estimate the gulp size of the whales.

A whale’s gulp shows up as a unique physical signature on the tags. This helps the researchers keep track of how many times a whale eats during a day.

“What happens when an animal feeds like that is it accelerates really quickly,” Johnston said. “And then when it opens its mouth, it’s like a big parachute. And that slows the animal down really quickly. And that is a very distinctive signature in the accelerometer data that’s on the tag.”

The gulp size calculations along with the number of gulps and the prey availability assessments allowed the researchers to get a good idea of how much each whale was eating.

They found that median daily prey consumption was between 5-30% of a whale’s body mass. This is ecologically meaningful because of the great numbers of whales that used to swim in our oceans just 100 years ago.

It is estimated that the whaling industry was responsible for the deaths of nearly 3 million whales in the 20th century. Even in the half century since the U.S. banned commercial whaling, whales as a whole have not been able to bounce back to what they once were.

“I think a lot of people — because this happened before any of us were born — don’t realize how common whales were in coastal ecosystems a couple hundred years ago,” Savoca said.

Today, whales are still routinely threatened by ship strikes and the risk of getting tangled in commercial fishing lines.

Often, when a predator’s population decreases, their direct prey sees an increase in population. But that has not been the case with krill, one of baleen whales’ main food sources. In fact, the researchers estimate that krill populations have decreased instead of increasing.

This is indicative of the far-reaching impact that whales have on marine ecosystems. Whales eat large amounts, and then excrete large amounts in turn. In doing so, they deposit huge inputs of iron into the ocean environment. In other words, whale poop gives oceans the nutrients it needs in order to grow things like phytoplankton, the base of the ocean food web.

This means that more whales probably made for a more “productive” ocean environment. There would be more phytoplankton, meaning there would be more krill, and therefore more food for baleen whales.

And that could be why krill numbers have actually gone down instead of up — their biggest predator is also responsible for fertilizing the basis of the food web.

All of this indicates that whales have a huge impact on marine environments, and hints at what is lost when whale populations are low or threatened. But it’s more than that, too, Savoca said. People like whales and want them around.

“I think it’s almost undeniable that these are animals that we want on the planet with us,” Savoca said.

Environmental nonprofit Sound Rivers recently premiered its 40th anniversary documentary, “A Sound River,” a look back at the origins of the organization that monitors the health of the Tar-Pamlico and Neuse river basins.

Virtual audience members were able to see what has changed over the last four decades during the Nov. 30 premiere, and what issues Sound Rivers is working on today. The screening concluded with a Q&A panel.

The Neuse River Foundation was established in 1980 and the Pamlico-Tar River Foundation was started in 1981. In 2015, these two groups joined forces and became Sound Rivers.

Sound Rivers Executive Director Heather Deck said the idea to make a short documentary to celebrate the 40th anniversary was a few years in the making. Deck has been with Sound Rivers for nearly 20 years, first as a riverkeeper and now as executive director of the organization.

“The main thing, too, is not only (to) honor the work of all the people that have been involved, and all the stories through the years,” Deck said. “But then also to think about, how do we use this as a tool to create energy and excitement and passion to help more folks join the cause for a clean water future?”

The documentary also looks at current and future priorities.

“It’s a combination of stories, but it’s also showcasing probably the biggest fight that we have now and on the horizon, which is related to climate change, and the impact that climate change is already having on our rivers and communities, and the work that needs to happen for us to become more resilient and better prepared and to ensure that that is done in an equitable manner,” Deck said.

Sound Rivers brought two-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker Rain Bennett into the project late last year, and he started filming in the spring. Bennett was born in Washington, North Carolina, and so Deck felt he was the right person to bring a personal connection to the documentary. After the screening, the panel members acknowledged what they perceived as passion for the region in the beauty of the cinematography.

“He grew up on the Pamlico River. And so (Bennett) had that intimate knowledge of the area and the region,” Deck said.

The documentary, which is about 20 minutes long, includes interviews with current and past Sound Rivers employees, as well as people who have worked with the organization over the years. Together, they tell some of the stories that have made Sound Rivers what it is today. They talk about threats to water quality such as the Nutrien phosphate mine in Aurora and the Duke Energy coal ash spill.

The documentary also tells of Sound Rivers’ continuing priorities of addressing climate change and prioritizing helping communities that are disproportionately affected by things like pollution.

Bennett remarked after the film that despite having grown up in eastern North Carolina, he was not aware of the extent of Sound Rivers’ work and that he learned a lot while making the documentary. He added that he believes in the power of storytelling as a way to stand up to polluters.

“That’s how humans connect,” Bennett said during the panel discussion. 

Lower Neuse Riverkeeper for Sound Rivers Katy Hunt says in the documentary that riverkeepers are the voice for the river as well as the people of the river.

“We’re scientists, we’re advocates, we’re educators,” Hunt said. “Some days we’re all three and then some.”

But in addition, Hunt added that people should view riverkeepers as a resource when something seems amiss. She said people can call with questions or concerns.

“If they see something that looks like pollution, they can call us, we can go out and investigate,” Hunt said.  

According to Hunt, being a riverkeeper can sometimes feel like an uphill battle, considering how many threats there are to the health of rivers. But she feels inspired looking back on the history of Sounds Rivers.

“It’s really great to look back to the history and where we started,” Hunt said. “And to see how far we’ve come and to remind ourselves why it’s so important to continue doing what we do every day.”

Pamlico-Tar Riverkeeper Jill Howell agreed.

“I think it’s pretty important to remember how we started and why we started, if nothing else, because it was just a small group of people concerned about what was going on in their neck of the woods that came together and started this organization,” Howell said. “So, I think when we are frustrated, or maybe not moving as quickly as we’d like to towards clean water outcomes, I think remembering how a small group of people started what we are now today, and all the progress that has been made is really important.”

After the screening, audience members got to ask questions in a panel that included Down East Coal Ash Environmental and Social Justice Coalition President Bobby Jones, University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences professor Dr. Hans Paerl, Howell and Bennett.

Since the premiere took place on “Giving Tuesday,” Sound Rivers put forth a challenge to raise $10,000 during the screening. By the end of the night, they had raised more than $12,300.

Some viewers wanted to know how they could get involved with the work that Sound Rivers does. Deck recommends referring to the Sound Rivers website, which has resources for simple things that community members can do to protect the health of the rivers in the region.

Those that missed the premiere will likely get a second chance to view the documentary in the spring. Deck says that COVID-19 permitting, they want to host in-person screenings throughout the region where people can view the film and talk about how to keep the rivers clean and healthy now and for future generations.

As Sound Rivers board President JoSeth Bocooke remarked at the beginning of the premiere, “Where there is water, there is life.”

North Carolina’s state fish is the red drum, an Atlantic fish with a copper body that is a favorite of coastal anglers. But as recreational fishers might tell you, the number of red drum available to catch each year varies tremendously. Until recently, no one had formally studied what causes this variation.

A recent study out of the University of North Carolina Wilmington and published in Fisheries Oceanography examined how environmental factors impact red drum recruitment. That is, how do things like wind and water temperature affect how many juvenile red drum are present in nearshore areas every year?

Fisheries scientist and lead author on the study Danielle Goldberg first noticed the variation in red drum recruitment when looking at data from the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries. The division has been surveying the red drum juvenile population every year since 1991. At the time that Goldberg began her research, this gave her 26 solid years of data on red drum recruitment.

She decided to focus on three environmental factors: wind, water temperature and productivity. Productivity can be understood as the amount of phytoplankton in nearshore areas, which serves as an indicator of the amount of prey available to juvenile red drum. Goldberg could have focused on other environmental factors, but felt that these three were most likely to have a direct effect on red drum recruitment.

“The best way I can describe taking on this project was looking for a needle in a haystack, when we don’t really even know what the needle is,” Goldberg said.

Goldberg drew from the longstanding datasets on wind and water temperature. Productivity was measured using satellite images of chlorophyll-a. There were fewer years available for productivity analysis, which meant that it couldn’t be modeled alongside the other two factors. But wind and water temperature were modeled together using generalized additive models, or GAMs.

Generalized additive models allow you to look at all the factors at one time, Goldberg said. “So that is why we chose this type of model, just to see if there’s any interactive effects that would be shown that we either didn’t see or just would also confirm what we did see when looking at them on an individual basis.”

Goldberg broke the red drum juvenile abundance data into smaller segments of biweekly and monthly periods as well as the seasonal average. By dividing the season into these increments, she was able to look for more precise trends on how red drum recruitment was affected by environmental factors.

Prior research shows that recruitment will be more strongly affected by environmental factors at the bounds of the population range. North Carolina happens to be near the northern boundary of the red drum’s range.

Goldberg and her co-researchers found that when north and northeast winds occurred in August, as opposed to later, there was an increase in red drum recruitment. This indicates that wind plays an important role in transporting larval-stage red drum to nearshore areas. They also found that higher nearshore water temperatures early in the spawning season occurred during years with high recruitment.

Knowing this can help red drum fisheries managers forecast what years will facilitate high recruitment, and can help managers understand what is happening during years with low recruitment. This information also contributes to a greater understanding of the relationship between fisheries and environmental factors. Because Goldberg worked with the Division of Marine Fisheries to do this research, this information goes directly into the hands of fisheries managers.

Lee Paramore, marine biologist with the division, was a co-author of the study. He also conducted the survey data collection that Goldberg used for the research. According to Paramore, red drum is managed by the division as a bycatch fishery when it comes to commercial fishing. Recreational catch and release fishing for red drum is exceedingly popular and represents the majority of red drum that are caught. There are strict bag limits in place to reduce harvest of red drum and increase the population.

“For the last 15 or 20 years, we have been meeting our management targets for red drum,” Paramore said. “So, the stock is considered to be doing well.”

Paramore said the insight from Goldberg’s research can be used to improve red drum management in the future.

Goldberg said future research could look more closely at productivity. Since there were years missing from their data for chlorophyll-a, it was difficult to get a complete picture of how productivity affects red drum recruitment. For a future study, researchers might use a different method for measuring productivity.

Another interesting avenue for study, said Goldberg, will be how climate change affects fisheries. Since Goldberg’s paper indicates a relationship between winds and water temperature and red drum recruitment, it is reasonable to suspect that climate change will impact red drum.

“There’s a lot of variation that could happen with climate change,” Goldberg said. “I definitely think it’s going to affect red drum.”

The United States Department of Energy has awarded Duke University a $7.5 million grant to research the impact that offshore wind development can have on wildlife and marine life.

The grant announced Oct. 13 is part of a larger sustainable energy development award package of $13.5 million by the Energy Department. The department distributed the funds among four different projects, all focused on wildlife and offshore wind.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced a goal of creating tens of thousands of jobs while deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by the year 2030. Meeting this goal can put the U.S. on a path to achieve 110 gigawatts by 2050. The ultimate intention is to create jobs while also creating opportunities for renewable energy, without endangering ecosystems as they currently exist.

To put these plans in motion, more offshore wind construction off the Atlantic coast will be beginning in the next several years. But there is uncertainty as to how offshore wind may affect fish, whales, birds and other marine life. Duke University’s project, Wildlife and Offshore Wind, or WOW, aims to answer some of these questions.

“There’s a fair few number of moving parts, and we’re going to try to figure out how to get those moving parts to move in harmony,” said Dr. Douglas Nowacek, a Repass-Rodgers University Distinguished Professor of Conservation Technology at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort. Nowacek will be leading WOW along with other researchers at Duke University. However, the consortium of researchers involved in the project will span 15 different institutions.

One of the first steps, said Nowacek, is to aggregate all the data that already exists in one place. This data comes from academic researchers, government agencies, as well as some of Europe’s experience with offshore wind. They also have letters of commitment from several wind energy developers, stating that they will share wildlife data with WOW.

“The next step then is going to be to create some tools, some models, (and) some frameworks to utilize those data,” Nowacek said.

The first year of this project will be focused on data aggregation, as well as creating frameworks, synthesis tools and data standards. After assessing what’s already out there, the team can identify gaps in knowledge and potential lines of inquiry. The following years will be spent deploying research efforts to address the questions identified in the first year.

Nowacek said that even though coordination across so many contributors is difficult, the collective expertise across institutions is likely the reason that they were selected for the grant in the first place. Formally, WOW has been in the works since January, when Nowacek and others started compiling their grant proposal. However, Nowacek said that the relationship building that goes into an expansive project like this has been in the works for years.

Dr. Patrick Halpin, director of Duke’s Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, will take the lead on the data synthesis component of the project. Halpin said the timing of the grant is especially important. As offshore wind is in the early stages of development in the region, beginning WOW work now means that they can do critical initial assessments before construction of turbines begins. This will be key later on, in that the researchers will have pre-construction data to refer to. Having pre- and post construction data will make it easier to evaluate how offshore wind interacts with marine wildlife. This project could set the stage for long-term, conscientious management of sustainable energy with regard to marine species.

“A big portion of this project is really to come up with a common framework for assessment, which will allow us to help develop monitoring protocols (and) help us be able to look at the interactions for many different taxa,” Halpin said, referring to biological groupings of species. “And then doing that at a regional scale so that the lessons learned can be applied across this rapidly developing field right now.”

Different wildlife may be affected at different stages of the process, said Halpin. Marine mammals, like the endangered North Atlantic right whale, may be most impacted during the noisy construction stage. Whereas avian interactions or displacement could occur after the turbines are built.

“I think people think about it as interactions are going to be one thing — a monolithic kind of issue,” Halpin said. “But really, interactions for different species are going to be very, very different in space and time.”

In addition to Duke University, the other partners on WOW include the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Rutgers University, the University of St. Andrews, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Syracuse University, the Pacific Northwest National Lab, TetraTech, Scientific Innovations, the New England Aquarium, Florida State University, the Biodiversity Research Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Southall Environmental Associates, and Cornell University.

This is the first in an effort to provide regular water quality updates based on data collected by Dr. Nathan Hall and the Neuse River Estuary Modeling and Monitoring Project, or ModMon, a collaborative effort between the University of North Carolina and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.

River flows remained low in the Neuse River as of last week. Low flows are indications of long stretches of dry weather, where there’s little to no rain contributing to the river.

One of the potential consequences of low-flow conditions is that it can help facilitate the development of freshwater algal blooms, which are otherwise rare in the river because the water usually moves too quickly for blooms to develop. Low-flow conditions give the algae more time to actualize. One of these blooms recently emerged at the N.C. 43 Streets Ferry Bridge near New Bern.

One way to measure algal blooms like this is by measuring the amount of chlorophyll-a that is present. Chlorophyll-a is the component of plants and algae that makes them green. ModMon researchers detected about 35 micrograms per liter, which is unusually high. For reference, North Carolina’s water quality standards dictate that chlorophyll-a levels should not exceed 40 micrograms per liter in slow-moving waters like sounds and estuaries.

After looking at a sample of the algae under a microscope, ModMon researchers believe that the bloom was caused by a Planktothrix, a cyanobacteria that grows in filaments and produces toxins like microcystins. Humans or other animals that drink this water could become severely ill and experience problems including liver damage.

ModMon plans to continue to monitor this potentially harmful bloom.

Salinity in the Neuse also remained at high levels. This is due to a salt wedge that is reaching upstream from New Bern. A salt wedge is a bottom layer of salt water that intrudes into fresh water. Because salt water is denser than fresh water, the bottom layer stays intact and doesn’t mix well with the upper layer. This occurs because tidal motion in estuaries is especially low, and without something to churn the layers together, they can remain separated. ModMon researchers found that the vertical stratification of these two layers near the mouth of the river was moderate.

At the tip of the salt wedge at Station 20 — see map — there began a zone of hypoxic water that stretches downstream to station 70. Hypoxic water has low oxygen levels, and can sometimes lead to fish kills.

ModMon detected another algae bloom at stations 60 and 70. However, this one was caused by a phytoplankton that is not known to be toxic or problematic for the ecosystem.

The Paerl Lab at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City collects surface and bottom water from sampling stations 0-180 on a biweekly basis throughout the year. Samples are also collected monthly in Pamlico Sound from stations 1-9.

Two Sound Rivers employees recently embarked on a five-day kayaking trip down the Pamlico River, a reconnaissance mission to document environmental conditions that started Oct. 17 in Washington and ended in Swan Quarter.

Over the course of these 70 river miles, the paddlers would observe the beauty of the river and note any issues they noticed along the way.

Sound Rivers is a nonprofit advocacy group that aims to protect the health of the Tar-Pamlico and Neuse River basins.

Last year, after canceling many of their normal community events because of the pandemic, they tried out a kayaking adventure down the Tar River. They documented their journey on social media to engage the community.

This year, they’re at it again, this time exploring a different section of their designated waters. The paddlers are Pamlico-Tar Riverkeeper Jill Howell and Environmental Projects Coordinator Clay Barber. A nonpaddling, but still participatory passenger is Miller, Howell’s 53-pound puppy.

As a riverkeeper, Howell’s eyes were fixed on the environmental issues she noticed along the way. Barber’s passion is accessibility to watersports and to the river itself. As they paddled down the Pamlico, both hoped to learn a little bit more about the resource that they steward, and share that information with the community.

Day 1

Howell and Barber’s journey was preempted by a supportive send-off from the Havens Garden Kayak Launch in Washington. A handful of folks from the community came out to participate in a trash cleanup at the site and watch the paddlers embark on their journey. A few friends joined the paddle for a while before exiting the river as the travelers went on their way.

This first day included 8 miles of paddling through a residential stretch along the Pamlico’s shores. Then they traveled up Broad Creek, passing marshy banks and cypress trees with hanging moss along the way. Though sunny and warm, the wind picked up and Howell and Barber encountered choppy waters. Barber, paddling in a sea kayak, kept getting splashed from behind. On days like this, he said, a spray skirt is a helpful piece of gear that can protect you from getting damp.

Howell and Barber also paddled through an expansive fish kill on the first day. Fish kills can be caused by algal blooms or oxygen depletion in the water. Nutrient pollution can be a contributor to the problem, which happens frequently this time of year. While they weren’t surprised to see fish kills on their trip, Howell said they’re a major problem plaguing the river.

“They’re a sign that the waters are in distress,” Howell said.

Since fish kills occur so often, Howell said it’s not uncommon for people to feel a little desensitized to them. But she hopes that people will report them to Sound Rivers or the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality each time they see one, regardless of size. Howell noted that underreporting is a concern and it’s important to have observational data for understanding the magnitude of the problem.

The paddlers arrived early at the Hindsley Platform, a reservable campsite that is 16 by 32 feet and surrounded in part by mesh netting. Accessible only by water, it’s located about 2 miles up Broad Creek from the Pamlico.

Miller, the pup who was perhaps less enthused about sitting in a kayak all day, was excited to run around and explore the swampy terrain. He quickly found and chased nutria living near the site. Nutria are a nonnative, semiaquatic rodent species from South America first introduced to the United States in 1889.

This first night, Howell and Barber slept in hammocks. They brought bug netting to cover themselves just in case any critters were to make it inside the enclosure. Dinner was macaroni and cheese with chili.

Day 2

A chilly night with a low of 44 degrees broke into a beautiful, sunny day at the Hindsley Platform.

“The best thing you can do for cold weather is to have multiple layers of clothing,” Barber said.

The type of material also matters, added Barber. Cotton is OK for a short outing in dry conditions. But for a multiday trip, he recommended polyester, spandex or other synthetic fibers that dry quickly and keep you warm.

“Choose your materials wisely,” Barber said.

Barber stayed warm despite the cool night temperatures thanks to a $4 sleeping bag from Goodwill. Barber’s passion for accessibility includes overcoming financial barriers to recreation.

“Don’t let anybody tell you you’ve got to spend a whole ton of money on camping gear,” Barber said. “Just be smart about what you’re buying.”

The second day was another short paddle, only about 9 miles. They paddled down Broad Creek and across the Pamlico River to Blounts Bay and a little bit up Blounts Creek, which is where they planned to stay the night. Midday was hot and the paddlers broke out the sunscreen – there was no shade. It was windy and choppy, which Barber’s sea kayak handled well, but the waves were more difficult to maneuver in Howell’s 12-foot, sit-on-top kayak. Fortunately, the wind died down as they made it into Blounts Bay, making for easier paddling.

That night, they were met at the dock by Sound Rivers member Bob Daw. Daw has been fishing the area for long enough to elaborate on depths and fishing conditions in every part of Blounts Creek.

Blounts Creek is a bit of a deviation from the route to Swan Quarter, but Barber and Howell intentionally wrote this stop into their itinerary. Sound Rivers is a party to ongoing litigation that started about eight years ago when the group and others, including Coastal Review’s publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation, challenged a permit for a new 649-acre limestone mine to discharge 12 million gallons of water per day into the creek.

Blounts Creek is a brackish environment, slightly salty. Adding substantial amounts of freshwater will completely change the ecosystem, said Howell. Sound Rivers’ objection isn’t to the mine itself, but to the discharge into Blounts Creek and the changes that could occur in the environment as a result.

All of this could go away, Daw said, looking around.

The paddlers feasted on a fresh fish dinner with Daw and friends. Daw’s fish fries are famous in the area. Someone broke out a guitar, and everyone enjoyed the opportunity for live music.

Howell and Barber stayed the night at Chocowinity’s Cotton Patch Landing on Blounts Creek, The RV campground is neatly maintained and features a boat ramp and a shop where you can purchase supplies and rent kayaks and other gear. They don’t typically allow tent camping but made an exception for the Sound Rivers crew.

“We know that we couldn’t do our work generally without people, but we especially couldn’t do something like this paddle trip if we were on our own and didn’t have people offering all sorts of support along the way,” Howell said.

Before calling it a night, Barber walked down to the dock. He watched the vibrant fish activity before turning in. Longer distances were anticipated for the next few days, so the paddlers planned for an early start.

Day 3

On the third day, the paddlers embarked on a 13-mile trip back to and across the Pamlico and then up Bath Creek.

The first two days’ paddles were difficult because of the chop, but the wind subsided on Day 3 and the river was smooth as glass. Even with two stops, the paddlers maintained a speed of better than 2 mph, according to Barber’s GPS device.

“It was a dreamy paddle day,” Barber said.

They passed Goose Creek State Park, which Barber praised for its camping area, swimming beach and a boardwalk through the swampy parts.

The birdwatching was excellent all day with bald eagles, egrets and kingfishers making appearances. But there was also more dead fish.

The paddlers had thought the previous day would mark the end of the fish kills they’d seen earlier in the trip. Day 3 proved them wrong.

“It was the worst that we’ve seen it,” Howell said.

They saw numerous dead and decaying menhaden and other fish, sputtering around with sores, clearly close to death.

“These are not supposed to be happening,” Howell said.

Estimating the number of dead fish they’d seen so far was hard to do, said Howell, but it had to be at least tens of thousands.

They’d seemingly paddled out of the fish kill by the time they made it to their next camping spot. On Night 3, they slept on a sandy beach on Bath Creek — perfect for camping. They planned to get up bright and early the next morning to set off for the Pungo River — about 20 miles — their longest paddle yet.

Day 4

Howell and Barber awoke to find dead fish washing up on their beach — the fish kill had followed them downriver. There were more dead fish ahead during the first half of their day.

“The fish kill has been with us this whole time,” Howell said.

On this morning they also passed the Nutrien phosphate mine in Aurora. The mine was big enough and close enough it was visible from their kayaks. Phosphate mining only occurs in a handful of states, but the U.S. is one of the world’s largest producers. Most mined phosphate is used to make fertilizer but it’s used in all kinds of household and industrial products.

“There are many concerns with having a giant phosphate mine so close to the river, but especially as it relates to weather and hurricanes and flooding,” Howell said.

About 10 miles into Day 4’s paddle down the Pamlico, the group met up with colleagues to discuss what they’d seen. They spent this night at a member’s house on the Pungo River. Howell and Barber said they were lucky to have found accommodations through their Sound Rivers connections — places to stay are few and far between in this section of river. Most shorelines in this stretch are privately owned.

“It’s lacking the guaranteed public access that I would love to see on this section of the river,” Barber said, observing that they were the only kayaks they’d seen in 10 miles. “I think it would just be different if there was more public access.”

Miller fell off the boat on Day 4, but he was fine.

Staying with a Sound Rivers member meant they could shower and eat well — allowing them to properly prepare for their fifth and final day. Reports indicated the wind would pick up substantially, so they needed to decide at the end of the Pungo whether they could continue. They slept on the member’s porch under a big orange moon.

Day 5

Howell and Barber woke up in time to watch the sunrise.

They wanted an early start — their river journey would culminate with a stretch of about 18 miles. They had worried about the wind, but it didn’t seem to be too bad when the paddlers first set out. The open section of the Pamlico is the only potentially questionable part of Day 5’s paddle, and after that they moved into a more protected section before reaching their destination, Swan Quarter.

This section of the river is more undeveloped than previous. The difference is noticeable.

“Immediately, you can see how much better these marsh grasses do dissipating the wave action that comes in,” Barber said. It made for smoother paddling.

The grasses act as a natural buffer, effectively reducing erosion.

The paddlers made it to the boat ramp at Swan Quarter after a windy afternoon. They had wind at their side, making it extremely choppy.

“I feel like I just went through the dishwasher,” Barber said.

Miller was relieved to be onshore.

The wind continued forcefully as Howell and Barber debrief at the boat ramp. This year’s paddle is done, but they plan to continue exploring how to best protect rivers like the Pamlico.

Sound Rivers has one more event this year. The premiere of a documentary called “A Sound River” is set for Nov. 30. The documentary details the beauty of and issues affecting North Carolina’s coastal rivers — much like Howell and Barber’s five-day trip.

To virtually attend the premiere free of charge, RSVP via the Sound Rivers website.

University of North Carolina Wilmington alumnus Joe Oliver and his colleagues at the Bahamas-based Coral Vita have won a prestigious award for their work restoring coral reefs. The prize, along with global recognition, comes with about $1.3 million.

The Earthshot Prize is an award given by the Royal Fund of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to initiatives that are doing important environmental work. Every year for the next 10 years there will be five, $1.3 million prizes awarded, providing at least 50 solutions to the world’s greatest environmental problems by 2030, according to the Earthshot Prize website.

Coral Vita, the Revive Our Oceans winner, and four other winners were announced Oct. 17 in London. The five are the first-ever winners of Prince William’s Earthshot Prize.

Oliver was born in Wilmington, and said that marine biology called to him from an early age. He grew up playing in the water — always fishing, boogie boarding, and the like. As a preteen, he participated in UNCW’s MarineQuest program, a youth outreach initiative that provides young people with the chance to explore and become immersed in the marine environment. This experience solidified his track.

“I’m actually proof that a proper outreach education program works,” Oliver said.

Oliver graduated from UNCW in 2006 with a degree in marine biology, and went on to become an instructor for the MarineQuest program. A particular interest in coral reefs and a connection through a friend is what led him to Coral Vita, a company dedicated to regrowing the world’s dying coral reefs. He accepted a job as director of restoration operations, relocated to the Bahamas and got to work.

“I couldn’t let the opportunity to run this type of facility pass me by,” Oliver said.

Coral reefs are made from colonies of coral polyps that are fixed together by something called calcium carbonate, the hard material that gives reefs their structure. As a whole, coral reefs encapsulate an entire underwater ecosystem, and are critical to the health of the ocean. It is estimated that as much as 25% of the ocean’s species depend on coral reefs during at least some portion of their life cycle. This makes coral reefs one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, not just in the ocean.

But factors such as ocean warming, ocean acidification, overfishing and pollution pose imminent threats to the health of coral reefs. According to the Coral Vita website, these factors have contributed to the loss of 50% of the world’s reefs within the last few decades. Without intervention, that number will rise to more than 90% by 2050.

Enter Coral Vita. Oliver and his teammates work with aquaculture farms to regrow coral. One of the main practices they use is called micro-fragmentation. They can take a broken piece of coral and break it into smaller pieces consisting of just a few polyps apiece. They begin growing the coral fragments individually in aquaculture raceways. Then, they integrate them into plates where they can grow back together cohesively. Normally, coral grows very slowly. But the separation that occurs during micro-fragmentation stimulates growth for the coral. In this environment, they can speed up a process that normally takes much longer.

“What would take 100 years, we can hopefully do in 10,” Oliver said. “Maybe even less.”

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Some corals of different species do not grow harmoniously together and will try to outcompete each other for resources. But as long as the coral is of the same species, they’ll grow back together happily. Oliver and his team are also experimenting to find out what combinations of species can grow together without conflict.

And then they can transplant the cultivated coral back to the ocean. They use ocean-friendly concrete to make the transplant, but are experimenting with other methods of securing the farmed coral in place to make sure the impact to the ocean environment is minimal.

An important part of this process, said Oliver, is to increase the adaptability of the coral before they put it back in the ocean. Using special treatments at their aquaculture facility, they can get the farmed coral used to harsher conditions than coral can normally handle. Once they are back in the ocean, the idea is that they won’t be as prone to succumbing to the hazards that currently kill coral.

Currently, Coral Vita’s success rate is high — a 50 to 70% survival rate for transplanted coral. They aim to get it even higher.

The monetary prize will go to continuing Coral Vita’s work and expanding outreach, said Oliver. The win was important for Coral Vita, but ultimately extends beyond them as well.

“We didn’t win it just for us, we won it for everybody that does coral restoration,” Oliver said. “And for me, what I hope to be (a) secondary benefit in the future, is that more people will be paying attention to these problems and looking at how to be a part of the solution.”

The other organizations to win the 2021 Earthshot prize were:

• Build a Waste-Free World Winner: Milan, Italy. The city came up with an initiative that redistributes food that would have been discarded to those who need it, thereby reducing waste and feeding the hungry.
• Clean Our Air Winner: Vidyut Mohan of India. Takachar is a technology that converts polluting agricultural outputs into usable biofuel and fertilizer that can ultimately be resold.
• Fix Our Climate Winner: Enapter Project. This technology converts renewable electricity into hydrogen gas that is free of emissions.
• Protect and Restore Nature Winner: Costa Rica. This nation developed a policy that pays citizens to plant trees in an effort to preserve the rainforest.

The YMCA Wrightsville Beach Sprint Triathlon’s swim portion was canceled after state recreational water quality officials detected abnormally high levels of bacteria in the area.

The bacteria exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s standards for what is safe for recreation, and warnings were posted that cautioned against swimming at multiple locations along the Banks Channel, where the swim portion of the triathlon was to take place.

The YMCA Wrightsville Beach Sprint Triathlon was established in 1979, making it the longest-running triathlon on the East Coast. Canceling or abridging the event because of bacteria levels has never happened in the triathlon’s 42-year history.

A triathlon is a three part endurance event consisting of running, cycling and swimming portions. Instead of canceling the Sept. 25 event completely, race officials gave participants the option to either postpone their registration until next year’s triathlon, or to participate in a duathlon — just the running and cycling legs of the race. The revised event itinerary included a 2.4 mile run, leading into an 11.5 mile bike ride, and culminating in a 5K run, about 3.1 miles.

Race Director and owner of Without Limits Tom Clifford said that the changes to the event happened at the last minute.

“We decided it two hours before packet pick-up,” Clifford said.

He was informed of the high bacteria levels the day before the race, and had to decide whether or not to cancel the swim portion. If he hadn’t canceled it, participants would run the risk of getting sick after the race.

“That’s just not worth it,” Clifford said.

This year’s event had about 1,100 athletes signed up to participate, one of the highest registration rates the triathlon has had in almost a decade. Clifford estimates that around 800-900 people participated in the revised event.

The bacteria group detected was enterococci, which is present in the intestines of humans and animals. Enterococci are indicator bacteria. That means that their presence demonstrates a likelihood that other, more harmful bacteria are also present. Because of this indicative relationship, high levels of enterococci can result in posted advisories that caution against swimming.

According to Erin Bryan-Millush, environmental program supervisor in the Division of Marine Fisheries within the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, enterococci is recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency as the best thing to test for in areas like the Banks Channel because of salinity levels.

“Enterococci live longer in the areas with higher salinities so it’s a better indicator of public health,” Bryan-Millush said.

High-use recreational waters like the Banks Channel get tested for bacteria once per week to make sure the levels are still within an acceptable range. After an exceptionally high test, recreational water quality officials will revisit the site for another test.

The weekly tests are used to calculate a “logarithmic average,” which indicates how the waters are trending. The average needs to be within an acceptable range before the NCDEQ will lift the advisory.

“That logarithmic average tells a story,” Bryan-Millush said.

Bryan-Millush believes that the high levels of enterococci were caused by heavy rainfall that passed over the area in the week leading up to the triathlon. Rainfall causes water to collect over impermeable surfaces like pavement, roads and sidewalks, and wash contaminants into water sources.

However, these are the first advisories that the NCDEQ has had to issue in the Banks Channel since 2016. Before 2016, they averaged five to 10 advisories per year during the swimming season, which runs from April through October. Bryan-Millush attributes the difference to pretreatment measures that the town of Wrightsville Beach has taken to ease the effects of stormwater on local waters.

“They’re one of the few beach communities that have taken the steps to remediation,” Bryan-Millush said.

The YMCA Wrightsville Beach Sprint Triathlon has never come up against high bacteria levels before, though Clifford is used to adapting the event at the last minute. After Hurricane Florence in 2018, the only portion of the event that was still doable was a short running segment. And last year, a fallen telephone pole required a last-minute redirection of traffic.

For Clifford, situations like these are a community lesson in adaptability and grace.

“There’s always a risk with an outdoor event,” Clifford said. “We’ve got to use the cards we’re dealt.”

Australia’s 2019-2020 fire season garnered international attention as an environmental catastrophe.

The ecological implications of these fires were many: over 18 million hectares burned, and researchers estimate that nearly three billion animals either died in the fires or were driven from their habitats. The smoke and ash would linger after the last fires were extinguished. It is estimated that 830 million tons of carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere during the fires.

But the impact of the wildfires was not just evident in the land and the air. Australia’s massive wildfires also affected the ocean.

A study led by Duke University called “Widespread phytoplankton blooms triggered by 2019-2020 Australian fires” is the first research to conclusively connect iron aerosol deposits from wildfires to a large-scale marine response.

The study, which was published in Nature earlier this week, concluded that iron particles that were airborne in smoke and ash from the wildfires fertilized algal blooms in the Southern Ocean. And not just on a small scale — the expanse of these algal blooms was unprecedented for the area. While this is a significant phenomenon, the long-term implications of fire-fertilized algal blooms are unclear.

“I think it’s too early to tell whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing,” said Dr. Nicolas Cassar, professor of biogeochemistry at Duke University and corresponding author on this study.

Phytoplankton is a type of algae that sits suspended in the water near the surface. It can make water hard to see through and often gives it a greenish appearance, thanks to the presence of chlorophyll-a. Some algal blooms produce toxins or deplete oxygen in a body of water, and these are considered harmful. But many occurrences of phytoplankton are positive. Algae is a building block of the marine ecosystem, and is a very important part of the food web.

This research focused on iron levels. The Southern Ocean is poor in iron. This means that the area has the potential for more algae growth, but was missing sufficient iron to make it happen. By contrast, the aerosols deposited by the wildfires had high iron levels.

“Pyrogenic” aerosols are produced when things like trees and plants burn. These particles were tiny enough to be transported by the wind, and by the time they made contact with the sea, it was a perfect recipe for an algal bloom.

The blooms occurred between December 2019 and March 2020. But they did not appear right off the coast of Australia. Instead, these expansive blooms occurred thousands of kilometers downwind and to the east. The aerosol outputs of the Australian wildfires traveled a significant distance before causing algae blooms in the ocean.

The research team observed the algal blooms remotely in satellite images. To confirm the anomaly they saw in the satellite data, they referred to robotic ocean biogeochemistry floats. Biogeochemistry floats are ocean-borne vessels that drift through the ocean and collect measurements, sending them back to land via satellite. These technologies, partnered with atmospheric chemistry measurements and transport modeling, allowed the researchers to track the influence of the wildfires on the ocean thousands of kilometers away.

Algae has the ability to sequester carbon by taking it out of the atmosphere and using it as part of its growth process. Since the Australian wildfires were responsible for huge outputs of carbon dioxide, this raises questions about the sequestration potential of algae. Scientists are not sure how much of the carbon from Australia’s wildfires dropped to the ocean depths and is sequestered for good, and how much was respired back into the atmosphere.

“That’s the next question,” Cassar said. “This is really the holy grail, is to figure out if some of the carbon was exported to the depths.”

The relationship between wildfires and climate is complex, and therefore has not yet been satisfactorily reflected in climate models, according to Cassar. Future research on fire-fertilized algae blooms would allow scientists to understand more completely how the climate impacts wildfires, and how wildfires impact the climate.

“I think that what would help in the future is having a rapid response team on site on research vessels, to really understand the full gamut of biogeochemical impacts that these wildfires have on ocean ecosystems,” Cassar said.

The Australian wildfires and corresponding algal blooms both occurred thousands of miles away from the North Carolina coast. But that doesn’t mean this research is irrelevant to North Carolinians.

Wildfires are becoming a more frequent and severe problem due to climate change, and major wildfire disturbances are now an annual occurrence. While Australia’s 2019-2020 wildfires were unprecedented, the American West has seen more intense fire seasons in recent years, carrying smoke across the entire country. The fact that these algal blooms occurred far away from the wildfires themselves illustrates the far-reaching ecosystem impacts that large-scale fires can have.

“We understand how catastrophic these wildfires are for local ecosystems,” Cassar said. “But what our results show is that these wildfires can have an impact on ocean ecosystems thousands of kilometers away, through atmospheric aerosol transport. It just shows the magnitude of the impact.”

In 1987, the United Nations signed into being the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty an international treaty that targeted chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, for elimination — substances that threatened to diminish the Earth’s protective ozone layer.

Even in the nearly 35 years since the Montreal Protocol, research shows that the treaty was largely effective in protecting the ozone. The ozone shields the Earth from the sun. Depletion of the ozone would have taken away our protection from the sun and its ultraviolet rays, causing increases in skin cancer and other sun damage. According to atmospheric and climate scientist Dr. Paul Young of Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, the new normal would be the stuff of science fiction.

“It would be a catastrophic world,” Young said.

And even if the Montreal Protocol hadn’t help save us from incredible harm by the sun, research now indicates that the treaty had other beneficial effects.

Young is the lead author of a recent study published in Nature called “The Montreal Protocol protects the terrestrial carbon sink.” The study shows that in addition to protecting the ozone, the Montreal Protocol also prevented a significant loss of sequestered carbon. Without the treaty, higher levels of carbon dioxide would have remained in the atmosphere.

Across several modeled scenarios, Young and his team concluded that without the Montreal Protocol, there could have been 325-690 billion metric tons of additional carbon not sequestered by the end of this century. This unsequestered carbon could have resulted in 115-235 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This much added carbon dioxide would increase the Earth’s temperature by up to 1 degree Celsius, or about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit — a seemingly small but catastrophic amount.

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants grow — they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and use it as fuel. An output of this process is oxygen. Therefore, photosynthesis allows for carbon dioxide to be removed from the atmosphere and become “sequestered” in plant matter, or biomass. Since greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are a driving contributor to climate change, carbon sequestration is important.

But according to Young, increases in ultraviolet light result in decreases in plant biomass. In other words, plants don’t grow as much. If there had been no Montreal Protocol, the ozone could have been depleted and the Earth’s plants exposed to more ultraviolet light. This would not only hinder their ability to sequester carbon, but would result in less plant biomass over time, which further decreases the amount of photosynthesis that can occur.

“So, the photosynthesis itself takes up less carbon dioxide, but also as the plants get smaller, because they’re growing less, then there’s less of them as well to take up more carbon dioxide,” Young said. “You end up with this vicious cycle.”

Young and his team focused on two modeled scenarios. The first was the “world projected” scenario, which accounts for the Montreal Protocol and depicts its effects on the climate through the end of this century. The other was the “world avoided” scenario that essentially assumes that the Montreal Protocol never happened and that CFC levels continued to grow by 3% per year.

The results, said Young, are conservative. They did not model a situation wherein the plants die of exposure to ultraviolet light, as other researchers might have done. In their models, plants grow less and less productive with increased exposure. Additionally, they had to allow for some variability as they scaled up to the global level. The Earth’s surface is highly differentiated, and different ecosystems would likely be affected by ultraviolet light at varying rates.

Carbon cycling

Though the Montreal Protocol allowed us to dodge the world avoided scenario, sequestered carbon faces other climate change-related threats. Disturbances can release carbon from where it is stored and make it available for conversion back to carbon dioxide. According to Dr. Christopher Osburn, North Carolina State University professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, these disturbances are largely characterized by storms, sea level rise and land-use changes.

Big storms flush landscapes of carbon, transporting it through streams and rivers to slower-moving, receiving waters like estuaries. Estuaries have longer residence times. That means the water doesn’t turn over as quickly, allowing for organic carbon to be converted back to atmospheric carbon dioxide.

In 2019, Osburn published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters about this process by looking at how Hurricane Matthew affected carbon cycling in North Carolina. He estimated that in the two months following Hurricane Matthew, the Pamlico Sound and the Neuse River estuary released a combined 79,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. That is equivalent to the annual emissions of 17,000 cars.

While the effect of storms on carbon storage is significant, direct human activity also influences carbon storage in North Carolina.

“Long-term changes in land use, where we alter the hydrology, we alter the land cover, can also facilitate and may exacerbate these problems,” Osburn said.

‘A proven case’

Coincidentally, Young’s paper comes on the heels of the International Panel on Climate Change’s 2021 report, which contained a particularly dour assessment of the future of the climate. It is possible, said Young, to find a streak of hope in his Montreal Protocol paper: The treaty itself is a proven case of research and action on an international level, with results that effectively protected the ozone and battled climate change.

But, Young said, there is so much still to be done.

“The future can be different, the past could have been different,” Young said. “And that in itself, I think, is something we need to hold on to.”

This is the first in a multipart special reporting series on coastal water quality.

It’s a windy day in October, warm enough for just a T-shirt, and the Neuse River shimmers in the sunlight. As Katy Hunt approaches the bank, however, a foul smell hits her nostrils. And from the dock, she can see the cause: thousands upon thousands of dead, rotting fish.

A fish kill occurs when algae bloom and then die. The decomposition of the algae depletes oxygen levels in the water. Fish suffocate in their own habitat, and some will jump onto riverbanks in one last futile attempt to breathe. Most fish kills in the Neuse River last a few days at most. But October 2020 saw the area’s longest fish kill in decades, lasting an entire five weeks. For Hunt, the Lower Neuse Riverkeeper for Sound Rivers, the sight was disheartening. Every few days she’d walk out onto the dock to check. From there she saw thousands of pale fish floating by like a funeral procession.

“You’ll see lots of little whitish-silver things floating along the surface and washing up by the shores,” Hunt said.

The large algal blooms that cause these massive fish kills are a result of nutrient pollution. The pollution, said Hunt, is directly attributable to human activity.

Fish kills in the Neuse River are essentially an annual event. But waterways across the entire state are grappling with the consequences of excessive nutrient inputs. As North Carolina accommodates a growing population, the state’s waters are paying the price. North Carolina stands at a crossroads between finding ways to mitigate nutrient pollution damage, or seeing it get worse and worse.

‘Too much of a good thing’

The presence of nutrients in the water isn’t inherently bad. In fact, nutrient cycling is a normal part of ecosystem function. Nitrogen and phosphorus are essential contributors to plant growth and the entire food chain depends on these nutrients. But the Earth supplies its own nitrogen. Human activity has doubled the amount of usable nitrogen in the world, and this excess can wreak havoc on ecosystems.

“It sounds so strange, because nutrients are a good thing,” Hunt said. “Except we all know the old adage that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. And that’s very much the case for the Neuse River.”

Often, we see the results of this nutrient excess in the form of an algal bloom.

How many nutrients is too many? That, said Dr. Nathan Hall of the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences based in Morehead City, depends on what the water is used for.

“The cutoff point really depends on what you’re worried about,” Hall said. For example, seagrasses are especially sensitive to nutrient levels because the resulting algae will block their access to light. Without light, seagrass cannot grow. By contrast, recreational swimmers aren’t as sensitive to higher nutrient levels. “We’re not squeamish about swimming around in some water that’s a little bit green or brown — up to a point,” Hall said.

North Carolina does not have an official threshold for what constitutes too many nutrients. There is, however, a limit on how much chlorophyll-a is in the water. Chlorophyll-a is the pigment that gives algae its green color. Chlorophyll-a is essentially a measure of how much algae is in the water, which by extension, says something about nutrient levels in the water. The official level for North Carolina’s slow-moving waters like sounds and estuaries is 40 micrograms per liter.

“Forty is about where you can really start to notice the water’s green,” Hall said.

Waterways that contain more chlorophyll-a than this get placed on the state’s 303(d) list — the official record of all imperiled waters in the state. Once a body of water makes it onto this list, it sometimes stays there for decades.

Nutrient inputs into waterways, or “nutrient loading,” is regulated for waters that are considered nutrient-sensitive. Sensitivity is defined as being highly reactive to nutrient inputs. In other words, the physical conditions of the water facilitate a nice habitat for algae — things like slow water turnover and shallow depths. For example, the Neuse River is considered nutrient sensitive.

But where do the excess nutrients come from? In short, human activity. These inputs come from the fertilizer that people put on their lawns, as well as large-scale agricultural operations. They come from wastewater and sewage. A lot of these pollutants are carried into the watershed by stormwater runoff. That is, when it rains, the water washes pollutants across impervious surfaces and into watersheds. The ground is usually very good at filtering nutrients out of the water, but developed areas include high levels of impervious pavement, which don’t allow water to penetrate the ground. Impervious surfaces are things like roads, driveways and sidewalks. 

All of this is compounded by climate change. When storms get worse and rainfall increases, more nutrients are flushed into the watershed. If storms are followed by dry periods, water flow slows down and allows algae to prosper. Due to the influence of stormwater runoff on nutrient transport, nutrient pollution can be exacerbated by the number of people living in the watershed.

North Carolina’s total population has been increasing for decades. In 1990, the state population was 6.65 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2020, that number had climbed to 10.44 million. When compared to the rest of the country, North Carolina is the state with the ninth highest population.

Not every county in the state has experienced growth — some counties bear the increase in population more than others. For example, the five-weeklong fish kill in the Neuse River last October occurred just outside of New Bern in Craven County. The population of Craven County was 82,096 in 1990, and in 2020 it reached 101,233. That’s an increase of nearly 20,000 people.

And while not every coastal county experienced growth in the past three decades, Craven County wasn’t the only one to grow substantially. New Hanover County, for example, has increased by 115,649 people in 30 years, nearly doubling its population.

This information comes from Carolina Demography, an organization nested within the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. According to Melody Kramer, director of communications and business development, it’s hard to make predictions about the future of the state’s population. But projections from the department indicate that the state will gain about a million new residents every 10 years for the next few decades.

This could spell trouble when it comes to nutrient pollution.

“The more people you pack into a watershed, the more nutrients you release, and particularly for nitrogen that’s true,” said Dr. Hans Paerl of UNC IMS. “But depending on how aggressive management of those issues is, it can be attenuated.”

As North Carolina continues to see population increases and development, Paerl said that there is an opportunity to build in an effective way as opposed to a harmful way. It’s imperative to the health of the water, especially considering that many of the state’s waterways have seen aggressive nutrient inputs for several decades.

“Now, the thing to keep in mind about all aquatic ecosystems is that they don’t improve overnight,” Paerl said. “So the sooner we have an aggressive nutrient reduction management strategy the better.”

Paerl points to Lake Washington in Seattle as an example of how aggressive, proactive nutrient management plans can work. In the 1940s-1960s, Lake Washington began receiving increased amounts of secondary treated sewage as Seattle and its surrounding areas grew in population. This led to unprecedented levels of the nutrient phosphorus — 70 parts per billion in the 1960s.  And while phosphorus levels are impossible to see with the naked eye, the resulting eutrophication (algae blooms) were evidence of impending catastrophe.

Seattle began an aggressive plan to divert sewage away from the lake and through treatment plants. It was superbly expensive ($140 million in the 1960s) but also incredibly effective. The program was able to get phosphorus levels down to 16 parts per billion. Today, Lake Washington has infrequent problems with eutrophication, and water quality and clarity are high considering that the lake rests in the middle of the largest city in the Pacific Northwest.

Change has also shown itself to be possible in North Carolina. Last year’s five-week fish kill in the Neuse River was the longest one in decades. In the 1990s, however, there were a few of comparable length. This and other indicators of eutrophication alerted state officials to the need to decrease the levels of nutrient pollution into the river.

The Neuse Nutrient Strategy went into effect in 1997. It set up special rules and regulations to target nutrient sources like wastewater and agricultural runoff. This mandate was effective in decreasing the amount of inorganic nitrogen in the Neuse River.

“It has led to a reduction in nitrogen inputs from certain sources,” Paerl said. “But we’ve also seen changes in the watershed due to development and changes in agricultural activities and practices, urbanization, etc., that has led to an increase in organic nitrogen loading.”

While these regulations have made enormous strides in targeting some sources of nutrient pollution, there is still more work ahead.

“There’s still a lot of science that needs to be done in terms of understanding the linkage between where it’s coming from, and how reactive it is in our receiving waters,” Paerl said.

Paerl’s lab at UNC IMS operates the Neuse River Estuary Modeling and Monitoring Project, or MODMON, in partnership with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. 

MODMON has been recording water quality data in the Neuse River since 1994. One of the things MODMON seeks to monitor is the total maximum daily load, or TMDL, of nutrients in the Neuse River. The TMDL is equal to the level of nutrients the river can accommodate while still meeting water quality standards.

According to Dr. Dean Carpenter, program scientist for the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership, or APNEP, long-term water quality data sets are crucial for evaluating management decisions going forward. APNEP works with community partners to determine indicators of water quality within the river basins that feed into the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, including the Neuse River.

“I talk often about monitoring and assessment: two pieces of the puzzle,” Carpenter said. Monitoring data creates a baseline that helps evaluate the effectiveness of management strategies, and points the way toward optimal solutions for the future.

“When you’re instituting management actions to support a healthier, in our case, estuarine system, you want to be able to track the condition of that resource,” Carpenter said.

‘In our hands’

So far, there have been no reported fish kills in the Neuse River this year. But, said Katy Hunt, the season of vulnerability is still young. Last year’s five-week kill ran through October, and it’s only August. While Hunt is no longer surprised by fish kills and other harmful effects of algal blooms, she hesitates to call them inevitable. Humans cause them, and therefore they are in our hands.

“I think it is a kind of an unfortunate fact of life,” Hunt said. “But at the same time, we made it a fact. And we can change it.”

Evidence of the rising sea is visible along North Carolina’s coast.

Storms that are more intense and destructive, floods that reach further and run deeper, and marks of habitat shift such as ghost forests are indicators that every year the ocean sits just a little bit higher.

Sea level rise is a problem that affects coastal communities around the world, and thanks to a new study from researchers in the Netherlands, global sea level rise vulnerabilities are being mapped with unprecedented detail. Never before has elevation been mapped globally with such a high degree of accuracy.

According to the recent study, “Global LiDAR Land Elevation Data Reveal Greatest Sea-Level Rise Vulnerability in the Tropics,” published in Nature Communications, the brunt of this change will occur within the tropics.

This study is the first worldwide elevation model that used satellite Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, data. By taking a global approach, the researchers were able to evaluate what parts of the world are most vulnerable to sea level rise. They classified high vulnerability as coastal lowlands less than 2 meters, or about 6 feet, above sea level. They found that 62% of those areas are in the tropics, making this region particularly vulnerable to sea level rise. Around the world, 267 million people live in these vulnerable areas.

According to Dr. Aljosja Hooijer, primary author on the study, these results are conservative. Hooijer used a relative sea level rise projection of one meter by 2100. Even with such a moderate value, Hooijer found that by 2100, 410 million people could be living in those vulnerable areas.

While North Carolina is not in the tropics, much of the eastern part of the state is extremely vulnerable to sea level rise. Approximately 47% of the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula sits below 1 meter in elevation, and this region has already experienced significant changes because of sea level rise. Coastal forest habitats are being converted to salt-tolerant marshes and “ghost” forests, and releasing sequestered carbon into the atmosphere. Along the rest of the coast, sea level rise poses similar threats of habitat conversion, as well as erosion and flooding.

With quantifiable data, more parts of the world can better plan for rising seas.

“As long as there’s not really good data on the table, you cannot have a proper discussion about that,” Hooijer said. “But nowadays, data is there and the accuracy is so much higher.”

Hooijer used data from the ICESat-2, a NASA satellite using LiDAR that was launched in 2018. The ICESat-2 measures global land elevation, comparing it to the sea level. It offers essentially unprecedented accuracy, as well as a global data set — both things that allow researchers like Hooijer to ask targeted questions about worldwide sea level rise vulnerability. According to Hooijer, this study will be the jumping-off point for many more research questions.

LiDAR generates information about the physical characteristics of the Earth’s surface. It works by issuing laser pulses and timing how long they take to return to the origin point. The time the return takes creates a precise measure of elevation. NASA’s ICESat-2 issues 10,000 laser pulses every second, allowing for data with unprecedented detail. This data makes it easier to understand the current conditions as well as trends over time.

LiDAR technology has been around in some fashion since the 1960s. But in recent years, it has evolved significantly and is now much more accurate than before. Hooijer was able to use measurements of land elevation around the world with a much lower margin of error.

Previous Global Digital Elevation Models, or GDEMs, have relied on satellite radar, which has lower levels of accuracy. Radar at 0.05-degree resolution can only promise results within 0.5 meters of accuracy for 19.9% of land measured. By contrast, LiDAR from the ICESat-2 at a 0.05-degree resolution can achieve within 0.05 meters of accuracy for 85.2% of land.

One of the notable differences is that radar often has a hard time discerning vegetation from the ground. LiDAR can penetrate vegetation, allowing for more accurate measurements of land elevation. As GDEMs are often used for flood risk assessments, this data offers a much higher level of confidence in the results.

“It’s mind-boggling, this technology,” Hooijer said.

Until now, LiDAR data like this has only been used at smaller scales, for selected communities around the world. Hooijer’s study is the first global representation of this kind of information.

“Now that there’s better data, it’s almost an obligation for scientists and the policymakers to make better assessments that will lead to better planning,” Hooijer said.

In North Carolina, researchers at various institutions and universities use the latest developments in LiDAR data to ask targeted questions about environmental conditions in the state. Dr. Lindsey Smart, a research associate at North Carolina State University, has used non-satellite LiDAR data for several studies.

In 2020, Smart published a study called “Aboveground carbon loss associated with the spread of ghost forests as sea levels rise.” The paper used LiDAR data from 2001 to 2014 to map changing coastal landscapes over time. Smart was able to use this data to closely document habitat conversions that lead to aboveground carbon loss, demonstrating one critical way that sea level rise poses a threat to current coastal ecosystems.

Even in little more than a decade, Smart saw the capabilities of LiDAR technology evolve rapidly.

More accurate reads come from a higher laser point density — in other words, more lasers per area. Between the data Smart used in 2001 versus 2014, the laser point density increased 18-fold.

“The amount of detail that you can capture from data like that is amazing,” Smart said. “You have a whole wealth of research questions that you can ask that can be answered by these rich data sets.”

In recent years, LiDAR data has become more accessible to researchers. Not only is the data available, but it is obtainable without imposing a financial burden. According to Smart, the evolving capabilities and accessibility of LiDAR data allow researchers to more readily answer questions about these changing landscapes. This in turn helps states like North Carolina better predict what is to come.

“Organizations or state agencies can be proactive in terms of helping the communities adapt, or manage for future risks,” Smart said. “Some of those questions about where to do that can be answered by looking at LiDAR data and the changes in LiDAR data over time. And as time goes on, we’re getting more and more of that data.”

Submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, also referred to as seagrass, provides critical ecosystem services in coastal waters.

SAV protects against shoreline erosion, improves water quality and provides habitat for fish and waterfowl. It is critically important to the wellbeing of both estuarine ecosystems and coastal communities.

North Carolina is home to the highest seagrass acreage on the Atlantic seaboard. But within the state and around the world, SAV is under threat. Some estimates say that since 1980, the world has lost nearly a third of its total seagrass. The decline has accelerated in recent years due to human activity such as habitat destruction and pollution. The loss in SAV not only presents issues within the ecosystem, but comes with hefty economic costs.

A new report from Duke University and North Carolina State University details the economic losses associated with the decline of SAV in the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary. The report was prepared using funding from the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership, or APNEP. A conservative estimate from the study projects that losing 5% of submerged aquatic vegetation over the next 10 years could cost the state $8.6 million.

Poor water quality is one of the primary threats to SAV.

“SAV is critical to maintaining good water quality in the estuary,” said Dr. Timothy Ellis, quantitative ecologist for APNEP. “But it also requires good water quality to grow.”

If water is too polluted, sunlight cannot reach the seagrass on the ocean floor. This makes it harder for seagrass to grow. It becomes a destructive cycle, since one of the primary benefits of SAV is that it helps clean the water.

According to Ellis, this report attempts to translate ecological consequences such as these into economic terms. The hope is that in doing so, more people will be able to understand the significance of SAV declines.

“This is just another piece of the puzzle that we’re trying to put together to help convey the importance of this resource,” Ellis said.

Environmental economist Dr. Sara Sutherland of Duke University was a co-primary investigator for this report. While it is hard to completely monetize ecosystem benefits, she emphasizes the usefulness of economic terms when addressing natural resource issues. It is one of the clearest ways to convey to policymakers and other stakeholders how SAV declines will affect the economy.

“People rely on these ecosystem services without paying directly for them,” Sutherland said. “It’s important that we understand the value of our natural resources.”

Sutherland and the other researchers used transfer benefit methods in order to make their projections. In other words, they didn’t collect their own data, but drew from available studies. From there, they created as comprehensive of a picture as possible regarding the economic cost of SAV loss. They focused on four main categories: commercial fishing, recreational fishing, carbon sequestration and home values.

Using this data, they charted four possible SAV-loss scenarios for the next decade: 5% loss, 15% loss, 25% loss and 50% loss. If SAV in the estuary declines by 5% in the next 10 years, the midpoint estimate for the total cost is $8.6 million in 2019 dollars. If SAV declines by 50%, the cost is projected to be $88.8 million.

Notably, over half of the cost in all scenarios comes from the carbon sequestration category. SAV absorbs carbon dioxide and stores it. The loss of seagrasses would release that carbon back into the world.

But commercial and recreational fishing will also be greatly affected by SAV loss. Blue crabs rely on seagrass as a nursery habitat, and a 5% decadal loss in SAV could result in $700,000 in lost profit for the commercial fishing industry. If there is a 50% loss in SAV, that cost rises to $6.7 million.

The data shows that SAV loss affects many people without them realizing it. Even home values can be affected in the next decade by the loss of seagrass.

“The idea is that when the SAV declines, we lose some of the value that we get from these ecosystem services,” Sutherland said. “And that value is capitalized into the property value for homeowners.”

The researchers focused on a 10-year timeframe because projections for more than 10 years would include too much uncertainty and also because much of North Carolina’s coastal policy is developed using increments of five to 10 years. The actual costs are not limited to the 10-year timeframe of the report — SAV lost today will continue to impact the state’s economy beyond the projected time period.

Both APNEP and Sutherland emphasize that despite the staggering potential costs in each scenario, the projections are extremely conservative. Without more data, it is impossible to get a complete picture of what declines in SAV cost financially.

For example, for the commercial and recreational fishing categories, the researchers only focused on species for which they had data. These were red drum, blue crab and spotted seatrout. But the research team believes that other species for which they don’t have data would also be affected by declines in SAV.

Ellis hopes that this report will encourage other researchers to start filling in those gaps. If the report is to eventually be updated, this initial version serves as a roadmap toward what future research is needed. APNEP hopes to facilitate some of this research in the coming years.

“We have aspirations of updating this economic report down the road, but we want to make sure we put our program and our scientific community partners in a position to be able to produce an updated report that moves the ball forward,” Ellis said.

In addition to inspiring future research, Ellis hopes that this report makes the plight of SAV loss more relatable to a wide audience. It could fuel efforts or legislation to restore and protect SAV.

Seagrass restoration is a costly endeavor, and currently has a two-thirds failure rate. So APNEP is addressing SAV conservation in two ways. First, by focusing on improving water quality so that SAV can thrive. And second, by attempting to preserve the SAV that currently exists in the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary. Because if it is lost, this report shows that the effects will be costly.

In America’s bays and estuaries, stormwater runoff is the second largest cause of water degradation. North Carolina’s coastal watersheds are no exception, making stormwater management techniques necessary to preserve the quality of the state’s waters.

A study published in the Journal of Environmental Management in January by Amy Grogan and Michael Mallin of the Center for Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina Wilmington, examined the effectiveness of a set of stormwater best management practices, or BMPs, implemented at a study site in Wrightsville Beach.

The study, “Successful mitigation of stormwater-driven nutrient, fecal bacteria and suspended solids loading in a recreational beach community” found that the BMPs implemented in Wrightsville Beach had reduced the overall amount of contaminants in the study area.

Wrightsville Beach is an island community on the North Carolina coast near Wilmington. Running between the town’s two islands is Banks Channel, an estuarine sound dotted with boat docks, a beach and places to rent kayaks and paddleboards.

The study looked at the drainage area of two particular stormwater outfall pipes that drain into Banks Channel. Like many urbanized areas of the coastline, the study area in Wrightsville Beach was high in impervious pavement. Impervious pavement does not allow water to seep into the ground, instead it’s washed into the waterways. It carries with it any contaminants it has come into contact with. Stormwater pollution has been identified as an issue meriting attention in the Wrightsville Beach community.

Funding for the project was provided by the North Carolina Coastal Federation, using a grant from the North Carolina Land and Water Fund, formerly known as the North Carolina Clean Water Management Trust Fund. The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

A BMP system was installed to replace impervious pavement with pervious pavement, designed to let stormwater seep into the ground, at the Hanover Seaside Club in Wrightsville Beach. An infiltration chamber also was built in the parking lot. This BMP system was installed in the spring of 2018.

Mallin and Grogan’s study endeavored to test the efficacy of the BMPs at the study area. They tested stormwater discharge in the two outfall pipes into Banks Channel both before and after the installation of the BMPs. They tested for things like fecal bacteria, suspended solids and nitrogen. In coastal communities, high levels of nitrogen can be the canary in the coalmine for more significant issues.

“(When) you load nitrogen in the water, you increase your chances of causing an algal bloom,” Mallin said. “And some of these blooms might be toxic.” 

Harmful algal blooms have become increasingly common in the United States. Because they can be destructive to the ecosystems in which they occur and produce toxins that are poisonous to humans,there is significant interest in monitoring nitrogen levels in waterways.

Mallin and Grogan found that the BMP system reduced overall stormwater runoff by 62%. Total nitrogen was decreased by 87% and the fecal contamination indicator bacteria enterococcus by 76%. Mallin considers these overall results to indicate that the BMPs were successful in ways that can positively impact the community of Wrightsville Beach.

Water quality is significant not just to the habitats and ecosystems in contact with Banks Channel, but to the local economy and residents as well. In warm weather, Banks Channel is a popular spot for sunbathers, swimmers and kayakers. These are all tourist activities that depend on water quality.

Shellfish growers in the area are also directly dependent on water quality for their line of work. When fecal microbial pollution reaches high levels in coastal waters, shellfish farmers have to shut down their operations. For an island community like Wrightsville Beach, the usability of the channel is significant to the local economy.

“That becomes not only a health thing, but it’s an economic pressure on the local municipality,” Mallin said.

According to Mallin, these BMPs demonstrated success in Wrightsville Beach, but could also prove useful in comparable coastal communities, as well as certain inland riparian habitats. That being said, the efficacy of BMPs has to be individualized to different study areas.

“The BMPs that work in one location may not work in another one, depending on the geology of the area,” Mallin said. A lot of it depends on the type of soil. Wrightsville Beach is very sandy, and comparable areas may see similar results.

While the overall numbers indicate success, the breakdown between the two pipes studied shows that even though enterococcus decreased in the north pipe after installing the BMPs, it actually increased in the south pipe.

According to Dr. Rachel Noble of the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, this shows that the efficacy of BMPs like these is an ongoing conversation.

Much of Noble’s work has focused on water quality and microbial contaminants, and she was part of a research team that identified stormwater in the Wrightsville Beach area as contaminated and meriting further study. Noble says there is a bigger picture of systemic issues that cause this pollution.

“We can’t continue to develop the coast and increase impervious surfaces without attention to promoting infiltration for rain and floodwater,” Noble said.

According to Noble, there are multiple pressures on North Carolina’s coastal systems that challenge effective stormwater management. These pressures include things like aging sewage systems, sea level rise, groundwater height and wastewater management. Furthermore, coastal topography doesn’t have much variability when it comes to gradient. This makes it hard to always make water move in the desired direction. The variability of the study’s results, said Noble, illustrates the complexity of the issue.

“There’s just no magic bullet,” Noble said.

So while Noble believes that BMPs like pervious pavement show promise and offer hope, systemic issues need to be addressed in tandem.

Noble said that the more information that can be gathered, the better coastal communities can do to keep heading in the right direction. And stormwater BMPs like this show promise for reducing certain contaminants.

“It shows some possibilities,” Noble said. “But there’s a lot more work to be done.”

Coastal seagrass beds are critical parts of ecosystem function. Seagrasses are a foundation species, providing essential habitat for fish and birds, protecting against erosion and improving water quality.

A study published recently in Frontiers in Marine Science called “Inclusion of Intra- and Interspecific Facilitation Expands the Theoretical Framework for Seagrass Restoration” took a closer look at restoration methods.

Despite the critical functions they provide for the ecosystem, 29% of global seagrasses have been lost or converted as a result of things like climate change, pollution and habitat destruction. Efforts to restore seagrass have a two-thirds failure rate.

The lead author, Dr. Y. Stacy Zhang, currently at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, wanted to investigate how restoration efforts usually take place, and how they might be improved by different planting strategies. She conducted the research while a doctoral student at Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort.

The study documented two direct experiments as well as a global survey of others who have worked in seagrass restoration.

For the survey, Zhang and her team reached out to 750 individuals and organizations involved in restoration in 23 countries. Of those, Zhang received 152 responses. Participants filled out a 20-question form about their restoration strategies and practices. Demographically, respondents included academic, nonprofit and governmental agencies.

The results indicated that 86% of respondents planted using dispersed arrangements, as opposed to planting large patches of seagrass. Additionally, efforts rarely attempted to restore seagrass alongside other species from the natural habitat.

Zhang hypothesizes that there could be different reasons why more people don’t attempt multispecies restoration. One reason could be funding constraints. This is a factor that Zhang keeps at the forefront of her research.

“For restoration to be successful, it has to be cost-effective, and produce yields,” Zhang said. “I think that’s sort of the goal that we are trying to reach with a lot of our seagrass restoration experiments.”

The survey indicated that the current theoretical framework used for coastal restoration is derived from forestry science. These strategies aim to decrease environmental stressors by trying to minimize competitiveness amongst species. But this framework has still resulted in a high failure rate for seagrass restoration projects. According to Zhang, this means it is necessary to figure out some new ways to improve the chances of successful restoration.

To this end, Zhang experimented with different intra- and interspecific planting arrangements. An “interspecific” approach means planting different species alongside each other. In the case of this experiment, Zhang implemented the use of clams in some of the seagrass plots. The “intraspecific” approach meant planting members of the same species alongside each other, instead of in a dispersed arrangement.

They tried both of these approaches in a couple of different treatments, both with plots of seagrass seeds and with adult outplant shoots.

What they found was that interspecific planting significantly aided in the growth of the seagrass seeds, both in shoot size and patch expansion. On average, seed patches with clams expanded by 500%, while those without barely changed.

Transplanted shoots weren’t significantly affected by clams. Zhang hypothesizes that seagrass seeds have different nitrogen needs than more mature plants. The clams were able to facilitate a boost in nitrogen for the seeds. By contrast, intraspecific planting — large, intact plots of seagrass as opposed to dispersed planting arrangements — helped the adult outplant shoots grow faster and expand in patch size. Altogether, the study shows that positive species interactions maximize restoration productivity. They could even increase resilience across the whole ecosystem.

Zhang said she didn’t expect the results to be as dramatic as they were.

“What we really ended up seeing instead was almost that it was changing the trajectory of these experimental restoration plots from failure to success,” Zhang said.

According to Dr. Shelby Ziegler, postdoctoral research associate at Moss Landing Marine Labs in California, this study is on the forefront of a new wave of seagrass research.

“It’s one of the first studies to look at both inter- and intraspecific facilitation and how that affects restoration,” Ziegler said. “So instead of just restoring one species, you can look at restoring two different types of species or different organisms together, and see how that enhances the overall restoration effects. This could be really important for the future of restoration and how we think about restoration practices.”

North Carolina has one of the highest numbers of seagrass meadows on the East Coast. This fact, plus the plethora of ecosystem services that seagrasses provide, make seagrass an excellent lens for viewing coastal restoration. Ziegler said that seagrass is critical for both ecosystem needs and human activity, though people rarely realize it.

“People don’t realize how important those habitats are to enhancing their everyday livelihood,” Ziegler said.

Seagrass beds provide habitat for waterfowl, which attract hunters to the coast. They also provide shelter to fish like red drum, the official state saltwater fish. And, said Ziegler, when people go out to fish, the effects of seagrass beds on water quality are the reason they can see through the water.

Zhang’s study emphasizes the idea that a multispecies approach to restoration could increase their success rates. This idea is reflected in broader restoration efforts, and has been a growing trend for the last few decades.

According to Zhang, restoration work is currently undergoing a transition from focusing on a single species to a whole ecosystem. The effectiveness of this approach was supported by the results of the study. Positive interactions amongst species can bolster seagrass shoot growth and patch expansion.

Still, the approach is fairly novel when it comes to seagrass, but considering the significance of seagrass in the coastal ecosystem, the implications could be huge, and not just in North Carolina but around the globe.

According to Zhang, taking this type of view and expanding the body of knowledge surrounding inter- and intraspecific planting could help coastal restoration efforts become more effective long term.

Advocates say the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries’ new Shellfish Lease Restoration Permit, or SLRP, will make it easier for shellfish farmers, particularly those who cultivate oysters, to participate in restoration projects.

The restoration permit took effect April 12. Oyster farmers who apply can farm oysters on their leases to be used at restoration sites. Oysters that are farmed for human consumption must comply with stricter regulations in order to ensure safety. Officials said the conditions for the new permit were developed in a way to eliminate risk to public health in the cultivation of oysters not intended for human consumption. The permit is free, and an application is available online.

Before the restoration permit became an option, there was no clear legal pathway for oyster farmers to grow product for restoration.

For oyster farmers like Niels Lindquist, the permit is a game-changer.

“It’s really potentially a big deal,” Lindquist said.

Lindquist is co-founder of Sandbar Oyster Co., which is based in Morehead City and has a special focus on restoration. Lindquist was one of the first oyster farmers to submit an application for the restoration permit last week. He said oysters are a key aspect of restoration, but up until now, there had not been a clear way for farmers to participate in restoration projects without accidentally breaking the rules.

“It really wasn’t clear what (the rules) were,” Lindquist said. “I really have to hand it to them, to see this issue and the opportunity that was there for people to use oysters grown on leases for restoration and find the quickest way of getting North Carolina in that game.”

Oysters are key actors in restoration projects. They form reefs that serve as protective habitats for other species and guard against erosion. They are also a significant boon for water quality — the average adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water in a single day.

And yet, for all of those benefits, previous legislation had never designated a clear pathway for shellfish farmers to sell their product to be used in restoration projects. The laws in place all focus on regulating shellfish cultivation for human consumption. So, in lieu of live product from oyster farms, many restoration efforts implement the use of oyster shells. The goal is that oyster shells, rock or cement will act as substrate, or the surface upon which organisms like oysters can grow, and will attract wild oyster larvae that will colonize the substrate.

But the process can take years to be effective. External factors can inhibit recruitment rate. Being able to transport live oysters to restoration sites provides a clearer pathway toward restoration.

Division of Marine Fisheries Habitat and Enhancement Section Chief Jacob Boyd said that the permit option was largely inspired by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Widespread restaurant closures posed a threat to the oyster industry, which had a large yield and no one to sell to. The division began meeting with other stakeholders to try and find a creative solution for farmers in the shellfish industry.

“We wanted to try to figure out a way to legally allow growers to use shellfish grown on a shellfish lease to be able to sell that product to be placed on a restoration site,” Boyd said. “Because at that time, we did not have an avenue to do that legally.”

Things came together in almost exactly one year — exceedingly quick, compared to similar endeavors. The division had to carefully work around state and federal laws and officials didn’t want to put shellfish farmers in legal jeopardy, while still ensuring public health and safety. If they could pull it off, it could offer economic security to farmers and support ongoing restoration projects along the coast.

“I very apprehensively say ‘win-win’ in my line of work,” Boyd said. “I definitely think this would be considered a win-win for everyone.”

The North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review Online, manages multiple ongoing restoration projects and was a strong advocate for the new permit. Currently, oysters are highly valued for what they literally bring to the table, and restaurants and seafood markets drive the oyster industry. But according to the federation’s founder and executive director, Todd Miller, the value of oysters goes so much deeper. Oysters are key players in ongoing restoration projects, and this new permit will change the way restoration is planned going forward.

“I think this concept of the farms actually being a source of oysters for restoration is a relatively new one,” Miller said.

The federation was a key participant in the working groups of the past year that made the new permit possible.

“We were reached out to basically by the industry to help facilitate the discussion of what could be done to make all of this work better,” Miller said.

According to Miller, the federation would like to see North Carolina’s oyster farming industry continue to grow. The restoration permit could aid in that goal by providing growers with another means of revenue.

For farmers like Lindquist, the permit protects and expands his options for participating in restoration projects. It could encourage other oyster farmers to get involved in restoration as well.

“I think it’s nice to have the option to diversify,” Lindquist said. “Having another product line there is, from a business perspective, a wonderful thing to have in your pocket.”

Encountering a ghost forest is a decidedly eerie experience. Tall, stripped tree skeletons remain standing long after they have died on the inside. The other deeply visceral part of the image is the sheer expanse of the ghost forests along the North Carolina coast, says Dr. Emily Ury, an ecologist at Duke University who studies ecosystem responses to rapid environmental change.

“Not just one or two dead trees, but hundreds of dead trees in one area,” Ury said. “You know just by looking at it that it’s not normal.”

Ury is the lead author of a study published this month in the journal Ecological Applications called “Rapid Deforestation of a Coastal Landscape Driven By Sea Level Rise and Extreme Events.” The purpose of the study was to map rates of vegetation change in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on the Outer Banks using remote sensing techniques. Ury and her team analyzed data to measure the change in these coastal forests over a period of 35 years. They found that more and more coastal forestland is transitioning away from freshwater forest cover –and it is doing so quickly.

“The rate at which this is happening is fast, even for me, someone who studies climate change and ecological change,” Ury said.

“The rate at which this is happening is fast, even for me, someone who studies climate change and ecological change.”

Emily Ury, study author

Ury and her team found that 32% of the refuge had changed land cover classification over the last 35 years, whether that be through land loss, forest loss or shrubland expansion. This is happening despite the study area’s protected status as a National Wildlife Refuge.

About 19,300 hectares, or nearly 47,000 acres, was converted to marsh or shrubland, while 1,151 hectares was lost to the sea completely. What’s more, approximately 11% of forest cover transitioned into what has commonly become known as a “ghost forest.”

Ghost forests are not a random phenomenon. Most scientists accept the assumption that they are caused by increased exposure to salinity. Too much salt can cause widespread tree death, ultimately changing the ecosystem entirely. This results in habitat loss for wildlife and is capable of wiping out entire coastal forests.

Rising sea levels are one cause of the infiltration of salinated water into coastal forests. Data compiled by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science show that the sea level has been rising every year along the North Carolina coast for decades. While sea level follows a linear curve, Ury’s study shows that ghost forests aren’t following quite the same pattern. Instead, ghost forests seem to expand largely after extreme weather events. For example, the refuge saw 4,500 — plus or minus 990 — hectares of ghost forest form between  2011 and 2012. Ury attributes this high point in conversion to be caused by the end of a five-year drought and the impact of Hurricane Irene that hit the coast in late August 2011.

But either way, said Ury, both the rising tide and extreme weather events are climate change-related things. What’s more, ghost forests are also an indicator of other environmental consequences.

Coastal forests are known for sequestering carbon in high rates in both their soil and in their plant life, particularly trees. When these areas begin to convert, some of that carbon is released into the atmosphere.

Dr. Lindsey Smart of North Carolina State University published a study in 2020 about ghost forest mapping across the Carolina coast. Her study focused specifically on aboveground carbon loss as habitats convert. According to Smart, Ury’s study supports what she and her team of interdisciplinary scientists also found.

“The Duke study identified the potential role of severe storms and droughts in the proliferation of ghost forests, which gives us a better understanding of why these ghost forests can appear in a much shorter timeframe than previously anticipated or expected,” Smart said.

Ury’s study was the first mapping effort to use completely remote sensing data, like NASA’s 430-mile-high Landsat satellite images. Smart’s work also used this technology in part. According to Smart, the technological abilities to make these measurements have expanded exponentially in the last decade, as has access to that technology.

“With the increase in the availability of remote sensing technologies and access to big data, like this volunteer geographic info and drone imagery, we’re really able to piece together the stories of the landscape in time and space more completely,” Smart said.

This evolving technology will allow for additional research to take place in order to more fully understand why ghost forests appear and what they mean for coastal communities. In addition, Smart said some research is needed to determine how people along the coast perceive ghost forests and what steps they are willing to take in order to adapt to them. The coast is a mix of public and private land, and any further conversations about ghost forests should account for the communities affected by them.

“Different landowners have different values for their landscapes,” Smart said. “And it just shows how critical it is to bring landowners into the conversation.”

This information would allow for a fuller picture of the issue and its consequences, as well as help scientists like Ury and Smart piece together the stories of these coastal forests more completely.

A recent study published in Scientific Reports found that if consumers made a 20% shift from buying small plastic bottles to larger plastic bottles it could decrease polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, waste by about 10,000 tons annually in the United States.

While 10,000 tons is only about 1% of the plastic bottle waste generated by the U.S. every year, it is no small amount. About 5,000 cars weigh a total of 10,000 tons. Put another way, the Eiffel Tower weighs 10,100 tons.

Rafael Becerril-Arreola is the lead author of the study, “Beverage Bottle Capacity, Packaging Efficiency, and the Potential for Plastic Waste Reduction.” Becerril-Arreola is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of South Carolina. For this study, he drew data from Minnesota. There were three important motivations behind this choice.

First, Minnesota’s plastic bottle trends most closely match those of the United States in general. This allowed him to make hypotheses about how a consumer shift might affect PET waste rates across the entire country. Second, Minnesota is one of a handful of states that carefully document their PET waste, allowing Becerril-Arreola to get as close to an accurate projection as possible. Finally, Minnesota collects the majority of its PET from residential sources, which is tightly connected with retail sales.

Becerril-Arreola looked at plastic bottles being used for water, juices, sodas and other bottled drinks. He found that buying one 16-ounce bottle of something is more efficient than buying two, 8 ounce bottles of the same liquid.

The United States could achieve a 10,000-ton reduction, Becerril-Arreola said, if more consumers make this shift away from smaller size bottles. But, he said that this situation doesn’t exist in a vacuum, making matters more complicated.

For example, many people may find it easy to switch to larger bottles for things like water. But for things like soda, switching to bigger sizes causes other, equally important concerns regarding health and sugar intake. These are topics that Becerril-Arreola would like to address in future research.

So, who is in charge of spearheading this 20% shift from small bottles to larger bottles? Ultimately, Becerril-Arreola said that manufacturers are the ones in charge of choosing to make this change. But the onus is not completely on them. Consumer action matters just as much.

“As long as consumers ask for those small bottles, (companies) cannot stop making them,” said Becerril-Arreola. “Say one company decides to stop supplying small bottles, another company is going to step in.”

According to Bonnie Monteleone, executive director of the Plastic Ocean Project, even relatively small degrees of consumer action are enough to make manufacturers take notice. What consumers choose to buy ultimately has a great impact on what suppliers do.

Monteleone co-founded the Plastic Ocean Project in 2012 and has led initiatives to create sustainable businesses aimed at reducing plastic waste ever since. At the University of North Carolina Wilmington, she has worked as an adjunct instructor, leading students in projects and classes related to plastic waste.

Monteleone has collected marine plastic samples at four out of the five main ocean gyres, or systems of large circling ocean currents, and believes that moving away from single-use plastics can help us deal with the environmental crisis that plastic has created. With regard to Becerril- Arreola’s research, she said  that shifting from smaller containers to larger ones makes a lot of sense.

“Buying in bulk is certainly one of the best ways that we can reduce the amount of plastic being used,” said Monteleone. “I have very often pushed people to buy in bulk — buy the bigger container instead of two small ones.”

According to Monteleone, reducing plastic use is the best way to prevent it from ending up in our oceans. And even on the individual level, a person’s actions make a difference.

But what about the plastic that is already out there? South Carolina Commerce Recycling Market Development Manager Anna DeLage said that recycling is also an important option for residents of the Carolinas.

“Almost three-fourths of our bottles end up in the trash,” said DeLage. “Individuals really do have that impact on recycling that material.”

DeLage said that more than 70% of the plastic bottles used in the United States don’t get recycled. In the Carolinas, there is a growing manufacturing sector that is interested in repurposing recycled plastic bottles to create new textiles, like T-shirts or carpeting.

According to DeLage, Carolinians are in a unique position to cut down on plastic waste and repurpose plastic bottles for a second, or even third life. Many manufacturers have made commitments to use recycled materials, but they aren’t getting enough plastic from the Carolinas alone.

That isn’t to say that the plastic isn’t in circulation, said DeLage. It is just ending up in the trash instead of in the recycling bin.

According to DeLage, The Carolina Plastics Recycling Council found that if every household recycled just two more plastic bottles per week instead of throwing them in the trash, manufacturers could repurpose that plastic, and create as many as 300 more jobs in the Carolinas. This plastic would be turned into a new, useful textile, as opposed to ending up in the states’ rivers, roads, and beaches.

“You can think of your bottle as a polyester opportunity,” said DeLage.

Ryan Gadow is the owner of Three Little Spats Oyster Co., a 55-acre shellfish farm in Stump Sound. Founded in 2018, Gadow chose Stump Sound in Onslow County as the location of his farm because of its renowned shellfishing waters. In North Carolina and beyond, they are recognized as some of the best.

But as much as Gadow loves Stump Sound, he is also increasingly concerned about poor water quality in the sound and the surrounding watershed. Stump Sound has been on North Carolina’s list of impaired waters for decades — a sign of devastating pollution in the area.

As a result, Gadow frequently has to close down operations when pollution levels get too high. This means that the same body of water that represents North Carolina’s shellfish mecca is also inhibiting his flow of business.

“We have restaurants and seafood markets depending on us, and we also have full-time employees that we have to pay whether we’re harvesting or not,” said Gadow. “It really hurts the economics of our business.”

Gadow, like others in the Stump Sound and surrounding areas, is eager for a solution. A planning-based approach now in the works aims to improve water quality in Stump Sound and protect it in the years ahead.

Last fall, the North Carolina Land and Water Fund awarded a $75,000 grant to the North Carolina Coastal Federation to develop the plan. The federation publishes Coastal Review Online. Two main objectives of the project will be decreasing stormwater runoff into the sound and identifying other sources of nonpoint source pollution. In other words, the project is geared toward figuring out what is causing such extreme pollution in Stump Sound and determining how to mitigate those causes in the future.

The project does not focus on a short-term cleanup but rather emphasizes a sustainable approach to prevent ongoing pollution in the future. The federation’s Southeast Regional Manager Tracy Skrabal said recently that it doesn’t make sense to clean up waters without figuring out how to prevent the problem going forward.

“The goal of this project is really to take a holistic look at everything we can do to protect water quality and reverse the trend of degradation of Stump Sound,” said Skrabal.

The federation’s approach will focus largely on stormwater runoff. As land-based development has increased along the North Carolina coast in recent years, the amount of polluted water that makes its way into rivers and streams has become a growing concern. But does land-based development have to cease in order to protect North Carolina’s waters?

Not according to Skrabal. She said a focus for the project will be educational outreach to the community about options for low-impact development, or strategies for allowing rainwater to soak into the ground, mimicking natural hydrology, as opposed to drainage systems that direct runoff toward water bodies. Currently, these low-impact building strategies are not widely used.

A 2014 case study by the Cary-based engineering firm, WithersRavenel found that when implemented correctly, low-impact development can be a cost-effective alternative to conventional building methods. Skrabal said she hopes that cost comparisons like this will show developers that low-impact development could save them money and increase their engagement in the project.

It was the amount of support of other stakeholders that the federation included in its proposal that led to the grant.

“One of the things that stuck out to me about this project is that the Coastal Federation was able to get every municipality within this watershed to actually come out in support of the project,” said Justin Mercer, eastern field representative with the North Carolina Land and Water Fund. “So, there’s this great local buy-in, which is very important for any of these types of projects –not just for the planning stage, but for hopeful eventual implementation.”

Skrabal said this active engagement with municipalities around Stump Sound was intentional. Local governments are the ones who view development plans, and since land-based development is a driving force in this project, it made sense to get those teams on board.

“It makes no sense to prepare a watershed plan in a vacuum,” said Skrabal. “You have to involve the people that are looking at development requests day by day by day.”

It’s also why Skrabal said she plans on opening the floor this year to other local stakeholders. She said diverse attendance at public hearings will lead to the most effective plan possible. Without the engagement of oyster farmers, landowners and others with a stake in Stump Sound’s water quality, the eventual plan would be lacking, she said.

“These are the people that are on the water, on the land, and they can tell us things that don’t pop up when you’re just doing GIS work, or soils analysis and that sort of thing,” said Skrabal. “So we’re going to be having them help us really make sure that we really understand this watershed before we establish a plan to protect it or restore some of these waters.”

The College of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences recently released its latest annual U.S. Sea-Level Report Cards, drawing on a collection of data that includes water level analysis from the past 52 years.

“Sea level is rising, but it’s also rising a little bit faster each year.”

Molly Mitchell, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William & Mary

Consistent with preceding years, this year’s collection of trends, projections and explanations shows that in most places, sea levels have been rising in year-to-year comparisons, but the rate is faster than in previous decades.

The institute uses 32 tide gauges placed in ports and harbors across the country, from Wilmington all the way to the banks of Alaska. These tide gauges are maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and they take measurements every six minutes.

But the institute doesn’t simply use the measurements, instead, the researchers use a monthly average. This helps them look past anomalies like storms or fluke weather patterns and see the larger trends.

“Sea level is rising, but it’s also rising a little bit faster each year,” said Molly Mitchell, a marine scientist, assistant professor at the institute and one of the researchers responsible for the report cards. Mitchell said the trend is not surprising, but it is a problem.

The institute’s report cards do three things: they depict sea level changes and trends, forecast future trends and offer explanations of the changes at particular localities.

In some places, the sea level appears to be going down, but that measurement is relative to what the land is doing at the same time.

“There are actually falling rates in places like Alaska,” said Derek Loftis, an assistant research scientist who also works on the report cards. Loftis said there, the decrease is due to shifting tectonic plates, which essentially cancel out a rise in sea level.

The institute releases its report cards annually because, Mitchell said, a yearly update allows the researchers to see changes quickly and not be surprised by the results. They can document not only how much sea level has changed, but also the rate at which it changes.

“The sea level’s been rising as long as we’ve been measuring it. We’ve had tide gauges going back to the mid-1800s in some places,” said Mitchell. “But now that rate of acceleration is becoming very noticeable.”

To a certain extent, Mitchell said, the researchers can forecast trends. But whereas many climate predictions look ahead to 2100, Mitchell said the institute’s researchers limit their outlook to the next 30 years. Predictions must include the assumption that the future will be based on the past, said Mitchell, but because rates of acceleration have changed before, they can change again.

One of the tide gauges in Wilmington shows that the sea level in the area rose about 3 millimeters last year. Not an appreciable amount to the average coastal resident, but, Mitchell said, it’s enough to contribute to problems including frequent flooding, changes in coastal marshland and the need to build things like docks higher than during previous years.

Mitchell describes this continual sea level rise as a “slow emergency.” It isn’t a storm that is going to hit tomorrow, but over time it will cause bigger and bigger problems. But, said Mitchell, the report cards are a tool for planning at the local level.

Skip Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch in Virginia, agreed that adaptation is key for the future. Stiles and his team at Wetlands Watch work toward wetlands preservation and use data from the institute to further their mission. One of the group’s main objectives is adaptation, because the rising sea level is projected to affect a large percentage of Virginia’s coastal wetlands.

Stiles said the institute’s report cards make science accessible to everyone. And because that information is accessible, it can be used to adapt.

“Once you have that information, that locality can begin to plan,” said Stiles.

Wetlands Watch’s efforts to preserve coastal wetlands involve policy advocacy as well as street-level solutions, including the development of an app, called Sea Rising Solutions. This app takes a citizen-scientist approach to mapping out where flooding events occur.

Stiles said the project is as much about getting data to flood modelers as it is about engaging the whole community in the sea level rise conversation. Widespread community knowledge can enable developers and legislators to make adaptive decisions regarding sea level rise.

Stiles said adaptation planned for years in advance can help coastal residents deal with the “slow emergency” headed their way.

Last month, a grassroots group of volunteers walked around Sneads Ferry and collected 34 bags of trash by hand. After a couple of hours, their haul weighed in at a whopping 680 pounds.

The group calls itself Debris Free Sneads Ferry, and it was organized and led by Hannah Faith Kushner. Kushner, of Sneads Ferry, said she considers litter in the area to be a tremendous problem.

Debris Free Sneads Ferry is just one of a handful of emerging efforts to clean up the area around Stump Sound. The sound touches a handful of municipalities and unincorporated areas, which poses challenges to managing issues like litter. Who is in charge of addressing this problem?

That’s the type of question that Lisa Rider found herself asking when she came up with the idea for Stewards of Stump Sound, a group that plans to address cleanup strategies and litter management in the surrounding area. Rider is the executive director of Coastal Carolina Riverwatch. She and others workshopped the idea during a past annual North Carolina Marine Debris Symposium. The 2021 event was held online last week.

“We collaboratively wanted to put together a program in an underserved or unincorporated area of eastern North Carolina,” said Rider.

Marine debris along roadsides and waterways poses a problem for local ecosystems, in addition to being unsightly for residents. The North Carolina Coastal Federation’s 2020 Marine Debris Action Plan listed the Stewards of Stump Sound pilot program as a key way to address marine debris in unincorporated areas, where there is no municipal government to take charge of the problem.

One of the pilot program’s first acts was to initiate a litter survey of the area, which returned results in December 2019. The litter survey helped Rider highlight problem areas where debris rates were exceptionally high.

“When the study came out, it was really apparent to us which areas we really needed to target with litter removal programs,” said Rider.

But just as momentum for the project was building, the onset of the pandemic caused a lingering delay.

“So, we have to start rebuilding that momentum,” said Rider. “And that’s kind of where we’re at today.”

As years go on, it can be difficult to maintain a consistent group of stakeholders. But Rider said she is optimistic, simply because she knows other people committed to the cause are out there and are starting to organize their own initiatives.

“Knowing that that’s happening in the community is a good sign that we can get this thing back together and get it rolling down the hill again,” she said.

Jan Farmer is a coastal ambassador for the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which works with partners to restore Morris Landing Clean Water Preserve, 52 acres of forest habitat, salt marsh, tidal creek and more than 3,000 feet of shoreline along Stump Sound. Farmer is also working on the project, and she said that Stewards of Stump Sound will complement other grassroots efforts, not replace them. When she heard about Debris Free Sneads Ferry, she reached out to Kushner and asked how she could help.

“What we’re trying to avoid is creating just another program that is redundant to other things that are being done,” said Farmer.

As Stewards of Stump Sound evolves and takes shape, Farmer said she is excited about grassroots litter efforts like Debris Free Sneads Ferry because it does more than just clean up the litter, it creates an involved community all concerned about the same issue.

“It seems to have kind of ignited something in the Sneads Ferry area right now,” said Farmer, “to encourage people to participate, to be aware of the problem.”

That is something that Farmer has been wanting for a long time — people paying attention to the area and working together to keep it clean.

“It takes time to build allies,” said Farmer. “And just this past year, really, it seems like it’s starting to really get attention. And I’m super excited about that.”

Still in its early phases, Stewards of Stump Sound is continually deciding what it’s going to be. But the primary goal has remained unchanged from the start: to clean up the area around Stump Sound. Rider encourages anyone who wants to know more about the group’s progress to contact Rebecca Drohan, program coordinator at Coastal Carolina River Watch, at 919-961-3299 or RebeccaD@crystalcoastwaterkeeper.org.

The latest review by a federal advisory committee of 20 scientists finds that Americans need to eat more fish.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the United States Department of Health and Human Services released in December the latest dietary recommendations for Americans. The ninth edition of the report, “Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025,” is available for download at DietaryGuidelines.gov. This time around, they are advocating for an increase in seafood consumption like never before.

For the first time since 1980, the departments’ joint report included specific recommendations for all life stages. A common theme throughout is the advocacy of nutrient-dense foods — comestibles that are rich in vitamins and minerals, but low in sodium and added sugar. As a source of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins and protein, most seafood falls into this category.

The dietary recommendations are released every five years and have a significant impact on policy and social initiatives. These recommendations influence Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, programs and school lunches, among other things. By including seafood so robustly in their report, the USDA and USDHHS are sending a clear message: Seafood belongs in the American diet.

Abby Neuroh, a registered dietician and director of nutrition at Summerfield Custom Wellness in Raleigh, said a lot of people aren’t meeting their recommended intake of seafood.

“It’s because maybe they haven’t had it prepared correctly, they’re not even sure how to cook it,” Neuroh said. “So that’s one of the things that I work on with a lot of patients is flavor profiles, ways to incorporate it into their day with easier cooking methods so that they feel confident and get the taste that they’re looking for.”

The report estimates that almost 90% of Americans currently do not get enough seafood in their diet. By contrast, most Americans exceed the suggested intake of other proteins, like beef, poultry and pork.

This does not surprise Ryan Speckman. Speckman and his business partner Lin Peterson are the owners and founders of Locals Seafood, based in Raleigh.

Speckman theorizes that many people don’t know how good fresh fish is until they’ve had it. He says that he himself didn’t understand North Carolina’s quality or variety of seafood until he moved to the coast. And then once he’d experienced a fresh catch, he wanted to bring that experience inland.

“I realized that a lot of the seafood we are catching in North Carolina isn’t readily accessible to the average consumer in North Carolina,” said Speckman. “And Lin and I decided that we needed to start bringing that seafood inland, and making it more readily accessible.”

According to Speckman, it’s important to keep the seafood market locally based for a number of reasons. It’s a lower carbon footprint, and it stimulates the local economy. But additionally, Speckman considers seafood to be a public trust resource and believes that all North Carolinians should have access to their state’s bountiful catch.

“A lot of the fish is caught in our state waters,” said Speckman. “And our tax dollars pay for the management of those species.”

Accessibility is geographic, but it is also knowledge-based. Buying nationally or internationally means that consumers can have whatever type of fish they want regardless of the season. Buying locally means that consumers have to trust their fisherfolk’s expertise. Many people need their fisher to guide them to what tastes good and how to cook it.

According to Speckman, education is a part of Locals Seafood’s mission.

“(Buyers) were unfamiliar with a lot of the fish we were bringing in because they never had access to it,” said Speckman. “We realized in the very early stages of our business that a lot of people were intimidated by cooking fish, not knowing all the different types of fish, and so we really had to spend a lot of time educating consumers and chefs.”

North Carolina’s extensive variety of fish is due to its unique geography and waterways. Boundary islands along the coast provide protected habitats for a large number of species.

Karen Amspacher is the director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center in Harkers Island. She is also a self-described “cheerleader” for the local fishing industry. Amspacher credits the local food movement with strengthening the bond between North Carolina’s fisherfolk and consumers.

As a tendril of the national local food movement, some North Carolinians are turning to their own waters for their seafood. This gives the industry more of a platform to speak from as it faces issues like water quality and increased regulation.

According to Amspacher, local seafood consumption isn’t important just because of its nutritional advantages, but also because of its social value. The North Carolina coast has a rich history of fishing, and that history informs the coastal identity.

“It’s more than just a job,” said Amspacher. “There’s tradition, not only in the product they harvest, but in the landscape and the culture, and the value system, and the knowledge they have.”

According to Amspacher, people are realizing that fisherfolk are the link between fresh seafood and their dinner plates. As the federal report becomes more widely accepted and integrated into social programs, that link may grow even stronger.

The latest dietary report recommends 8 ounces of seafood per week for an American consuming 2,000 calories per day. For North Carolinians, that 8 ounces isn’t far away.

“It’s very important to everybody that these fishermen stay in the water,” said Amspacher. “If they stay in the water, they continue to be the link.”

James Hargrove is an environmental consultant and the owner of Middle Sound Mariculture, an oyster company in New Hanover County. But he’s not always out tending to his oysters. More and more, he’s at his computer, looking at maps.

These maps show water closures across the state. After a body of water reaches a certain level of pollution, the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries closes it to shellfish harvest. On the maps, these closures show up as little red lines.

As pollution in the area worsens, Hargrove has watched these little red lines creep farther and farther out from the shoreline and creeks — and closer and closer to his oyster farm.

“Those lines move, and they move in a relatively frequent basis,” said Hargrove. “There’s one that scares the heck out of me, which is pretty close to my farm in Masonboro Sound.”

For all this worry, it’s nothing new. This is just another day in the “Napa Valley of Oysters.”

That nickname is an allusion to North Carolina’s ample shellfish farming waters, as well as the recent swell of new farmers to the industry.

Over the last decade, North Carolina has helped promote a shellfish economy through legislation that more easily enables shellfish aquaculture. In response, the industry has grown substantially. The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries reports that the amount of shellfish lease applications they have received has increased by 5,200% in the last five years, compared to the previous five years.

But in a water-based industry, poor water quality can be a death sentence. Hargrove worries that the shellfish relay program will ax the very industry the state is trying so hard to promote.

North Carolina’s shellfish relay program is more than 100 years old. A shellfish relay is when a farmer takes natural oysters from a polluted area and brings them back to their individual lease. After a couple of weeks, the oysters have cleaned themselves, and the farmer can sell them commercially.

Over the last decade, there has been a land-based development boom up and down the North Carolina coast. Hargrove said this development, along with concentrated animal farming operations just to the west, is causing a water quality crisis in the state, and he worries that the relay program makes his shellfish farm more vulnerable to encroaching polluted waters.

Oysters are natural water filters, and they purify the water simply by existing. Hargrove says that removing the ecosystem’s natural line of defense is exacerbating the issue of poor water quality in North Carolina.

Hargrove has raised his concerns to government officials many times over the last few years, but they always get brushed off as inconsequential.

Division of Marine Fisheries Section Chief of Habitat and Enhancement Jacob Boyd agreed that North Carolina has a water quality issue, but he doesn’t think the relay program has anything to do with it.

“A lot of these are waters that are so polluted anyway, you can take every oyster out of there or put 5 million oysters in there and it’s not going to make a difference,” said Boyd. “You can’t oyster your way out of water quality issues.”

However, even though Boyd said he doesn’t think the relay program should be disbanded because of environmental concerns, he also is unconvinced that it will be around much longer anyway.

“It’s really a shell of what it used to be, and I don’t really see it going back,” said Boyd.

Boyd explained that the relay program was initiated to help bottom-lease oyster farmers be more productive. But modern technology and the popularity of vertical water column leases make the relay program less and less relevant.

And because of new regulations by the National Shellfish Sanitation Program, relay farmers must be escorted from polluted tidal creeks to their own leases by the North Carolina Marine Patrol. Boyd said that’s a lot of resources to allocate to just one program.

He said the department is informally evaluating the practice and will continue to do so. Eventually, it just might not be viable anymore.

For oyster farmer Keith Walls, that day can’t come soon enough.

Walls is a marine scientist, and sees the relay program as a direct threat to his oyster operation, Falling Tide Oyster Co. He said that if the state is going to promote the growth of the commercial shellfish industry, it needs to find ways to protect it.

He points to the actual Napa Valley. When expansion from San Francisco posed a threat to the region’s fertile land, it became the country’s first agriculture preserve. This not only protected the industry but the environment as well.

Walls doesn’t expect anything similar in North Carolina, but he said that removing the relay program would be a good start. Or at the very least, he thinks the relay program could be managed differently to mitigate the environmental effects. By rotating relayed areas or subsidizing relay farmers with funds for oyster seed, Walls says he would see the relay program as less of a threat.

There’s little research on the actual effects of the relay program. This is a knowledge gap that Walls said needs to be filled to determine if any additional actions need to be taken. He only hopes it won’t be too late.

“The lifeblood of our industry is water quality,” said Walls. “Without it, we have no industry.”

Learn more

• View an example of a designated relay program map

As population growth makes the expansion of traditional farming without severe ecological damage more and more challenging, scientists are looking to the sea as one potential solution.

A recent study published in Nature projects that the amount of food sustainably produced by the ocean could increase up to 74% by 2050. But researchers say that there are substantial obstacles to bringing in more food from the sea, obstacles that have little to do with fishing and more to do with policy and regulation.

This concern hits home for North Carolina’s shellfish mariculture farmers like Jay Styron, of Carolina Mariculture Co.

“The biggest issue we are going to have is public perception and public policy,” said Styron.

Styron has been in the shellfish mariculture business for upwards of 17 years. According to Styron, shellfish mariculture on the North Carolina coast has only been going at a steady clip for seven or eight years. Despite the industry’s fledgling status, Styron sees enormous potential for growth. And he’s not the only one.

According to the study in Nature, land-based agriculture cannot significantly expand without permanently damaging the ecosystem. The study found that by 2050, the demand for protein will have increased by 500 megatons per year. According to the researchers, limited water, land and declining yields make this an unrealistic goal for traditional farming.

“It’s very hard to tell a story of expanding sustainable production of beef and other land-based animal sources of protein,” said Christopher Costello, a lead researcher on the project. “So where is all this animal protein going to come from?”

According to researchers, the sea may hold one possible solution.

The researchers analyzed census data from fisheries and farms like Styron’s to make their projections, trying to account for regulatory and economic obstacles along the way. The research team included experts from multiple fields, including ecologists, economists and nutritionists, in order to seek answers to their sustainable food systems questions.

Among these, the researchers sought to find out if sustainable farming and fishing was profitable, and if so, if people would actually want to eat the things produced by sustainable farms or fisheries.

The team found answers in the form of a resounding “yes” and a reluctant “maybe.”

The study projects that sustainable farming and fishing has the potential to increase yields and to do so profitably. But they aren’t certain that’s enough to make a difference in the economic market. For countries like the United States, wholly married to traditional farming and proteins like beef, the shift would be nothing less than a fundamental culture change.

But according to the researchers, the sustainable management of fisheries and the expansion of seafood farming would be paramount in addressing supply problems. For fishing and seafood farming to be viable protein options for the future, there has to be an increase in demand.

According to the study, food from the sea represents 17% of the world’s consumed meat. Parts of the globe, like countries in Southeast Asia, already emphasize fishing and seafood farming in their diets, said Halley Froehlich, part of the research team that produced the study.

But the United States isn’t one of those countries. While the study projects that the ocean could provide more than six times the amount of food it currently produces by 2050, the researchers don’t expect a similar increase in demand.

Changing public perception around protein from the sea as a long–term food option is a complex and political issue, said Froehlich.

“Whether or not people would be willing to trade one thing for another, and how does that mechanism occur … the social dimensions of that from a consumer perspective are quite challenging if the policies are not there,” Froehlich said. According to the study, updated and improved policies could bolster seafood yield and meet sustainability goals.

As an example, Costello recommends taking a look at fisheries.

Many wild fisheries are overfished in order to bring in the maximum yield, Costello said.

He believes that when it comes to these operations, there’s a popular misconception that to sustainably farm means a lesser yield, and therefore, less food for people to eat. This isn’t true at all, he said.

“Actually, by growing those stocks to a larger level (and by) sustainably managing those stocks, eventually you’ll be able to catch more, not less,” Costello said.

James Hargrove, an oyster farmer and owner of Middle Sound Mariculture, agreed.

“Fisheries in North Carolina have been mismanaged and overfished for generations,” said Hargrove. “And we see that with the limited stock that are here now.”

Hargrove has an extensive background in shellfish mariculture. Before he started taking his own leases, he was Secretary of the North Carolina Shellfish Growers Association for four years, and had even done his graduate work in applied mariculture. Now, he works as an environmental consultant when he’s not out tending to his oysters. So he is familiar with the types of policies that small shellfish farmers are up against in North Carolina.

One of these obstacles is submerged land claims. The tussle over who owns land beneath the water’s surface is not new, but it can be inhibitive for shellfish farmers looking to establish leases. Despite the appearance of public water access along the coast, many portions of submerged land are actually pre-owned by someone else.

It is not unheard of that a farmer applies for a lease, only to find out that it was not legally viable due to a submerged land claim.

According to the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s Mariculture Feasibility Study, there were 278 shellfish leases in North Carolina as of 2020. Hargrove figures he’s one of only a small handful that have multiple leases.

He estimated that he’s currently the only farmer with a water-column lease in New Hanover County. Other leases in the region were either not renewed, or due to a state-issued moratorium on new leases for that area, were denied altogether.

There are only a few moratoriums on new leases in North Carolina — but they are one of the things that keep the shellfish industry from expanding. Hargrove is in the middle of his 10-year lease in Masonboro Sound, and hopes that when it’s over, he’ll get to renew it. But ultimately, he’s not sure what will happen.

And then there’s the issue of coastal development.

Hargrove views coastal development as one of the biggest things in the way of sustainable shellfish farms in North Carolina. Some development practices increase runoff and impact water quality. Hargrove is concerned that without a significant policy change, pollution will inhibit the potential for sustainable shellfish farming.

But which has to come first, policy changes, or an increase in demand? Froehlich and Costello are working on other projects to continue the search for sustainable food solutions from the sea, specifically to find answers to questions like these.

While the pathway to the future of food grows more complicated by the second due to climate change and a growing population, Costello recommends people look at their own diet and consider its impact.

“Look to the sea as a possible alternative to what you’re already eating,” Costello said. “Our study and lots of other evidence suggests that it can be done sustainably and is also good for you.”

The nutritionists involved in the study noted that in comparison to beef and other land-based meat, seafood provides more substantial health benefits. It is high in fatty acids, vitamins and nutrients that are essential to human health.

Despite these benefits, oysters and other shellfish are still seen in North Carolina as a luxury item. With the exception of an autumn outdoor roast, most people don’t buy oysters to cook at home. Most of Hargroves’ buyers are restaurants and chefs.

According to Hargrove, culinary professionals are some of the few who seem to care about the story behind each oyster. Flavor variation in each oyster is tremendous, depending on the body of water and fluctuations in the tide.

North Carolina has a lot of this variation, which is why Hargrove and others like to call it “the Napa Valley of Oysters.” But public awareness isn’t quite there yet.

According to Hargrove, the shellfish industry has some reckoning to do. Without substantial policy changes at the state level, he isn’t sure what kind of future shellfish mariculture can have.

It’s a risky business on its own, said Hargrove. Many farms were still recovering from the effects of hurricane damage by the time that COVID-19 hit. With one setback after another, it’s hard to be optimistic about the future of sustainable seafood.

And yet, he is. For all its difficulties, Hargrove believes shellfish mariculture is incredibly rewarding. And he believes the scientists are correct. When it comes to sustainable food solutions, the ocean holds the key.

“I do want to expand this industry, even with the challenges,” said Hargrove. “Myself and others look at it as the ultimate form of protein production. There is no other more sustainable form of protein production.”