When most people hear the word “tsunami,” they likely think of a seismic tsunami – one caused by an earthquake or underwater volcano, and an image of a giant wall of water rushing toward the shore may come to mind.

But not all tsunamis are quite so dramatic. Some tsunamis can be triggered by atmospheric conditions and weather. These are called “meteotsunamis.” And while they may not pack the same punch for destruction as their seismic counterparts, meteotsunamis may be having a big impact on coastlines all along the East Coast.

A group of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists have been investigating these wave events, and Gregory Dusek, a senior scientist with NOAA and lead author on a meteotsunami study published last month, said knowing more about these waves will help better understand potential contributors to flooding and inundation.

“This is a component of storms that has generally not been looked at – when you start thinking about understanding storm surge and potential impacts,” Dusek said. “Can we better understand why (meteotsunamis) occurred during tropical storms or winter storms, and how much are they potentially contributing toward flooding? Do we need to start including some component of this in our (weather) modeling?”

According to NOAA press release, meteotsunamis are generally small – less than 1.5 feet tall – and weather-driven, set off by air pressure change from fast-moving severe thunderstorms, tropical storms and squalls. They occur all over the world, even in the Great Lakes, though the East Coast sees an average of about 25 a year.

Scientists looked at the water level records between 1996-2017 from 125 tide gauges along the eastern seaboard and found nearly 550 meteotsunamis had occurred in that 22-year period, including one during Hurricane Irma in 2017. They found meteotsunamis occur most often in the Carolinas, northern Florida and Long Island Sound, with the largest waves found in areas where estuaries or the shape of the coastline has amplified them.

According to the press release, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Duck, North Carolina, observed the greatest number of events: 148 or 7.2 per year; and 130 or 6.0 per year, respectively. Wrightsville Beach and Cape Hatteras had the highest averages per year – 8.7 per year and 8.9 per year, respectively – for any station with at least five years of data.

Cape Hatteras also saw one of the larger events recorded. Dusek said in February 1998, a meteotsunami of about 3 feet was recorded at the fishing pier, presumably caused by a winter storm.

“The event was recorded in Cape Hatteras and then also in Beaufort and at Springmaid Pier, which is Myrtle Beach, so it was observed in southern North Carolina into South Carolina,” Dusek said. “I’m not exactly sure on the characteristics of why that specific event occurred, but it was fairly substantial. It would be interesting to know if that was observed by anyone or if it caused any damage.”

The largest events recorded included a roughly 3.5-foot wave at Providence, Rhode Island, in December 2005 and a nearly 4-foot wave in Port Canaveral, Florida, in June 1996, according to the report.

While most are less than 1.5 feet in height, some are large enough to cause some injuries and destruction. The study cites one such incident in Barnegat Inlet in New Jersey in June 2013, when a series of large waves sent a group of divers over a breakwater and crashed into a jetty, knocking people into the water and causing property damage.

Dusek said there have been others instances of injury or property damage in Maine, the Great Lakes and on the coast of the Mediterranean, which it’s another good reason to monitor meteotsunamis.

“I would say that injury cases are the extreme events, but we have had a few of those. So I think we want to make sure that we are prepared for the potential extreme events,” he said.

Making Bad Weather Worse

While there are exceptions to the rule, typical meteotsunamis often go unnoticed because of their size. Dusek said there have been eyewitness accounts of water receding, similar to what might be seen ahead of a large seismic tsunami, but most people may not recognize a meteotsunami unless they really knew what they were looking for.  He explained that just like in a seismic tsunami, there could be multiple waves in a meteotsunami traveling 30 minutes to an hour or more apart, depending on conditions.

“I think in most cases, especially when you think the kind of open beach areas along most of the North Carolina coast where you open shoreline, unless you are on the beach you probably wouldn’t notice (a meteotsunami),” Dusek said. “You’re probably not going to notice a 1- to 2-foot rise in water level in most cases.”

A 1- to 2-foot wave might not seem like much on its own, but “if it’s coupled with tropical storms or winter storms, it might increase (beach) erosion or flooding if you have a meteotsunami at the same time,” Dusek said.

“The challenge we have with some of these (meteotsunamis) is that if they occur during a winter storm or during a tropical storm, that storm might already be causing a lot of damage, or an increase in water level,” he said. “So the meteotsunami is probably not the primary reason why you might have flooding or something, but it can contribute to it.”

“… a lot of times these meteotsunamis are going to be created in conjunction with land-falling hurricanes, for instance, and other types of storms that maybe are moving toward the coast …”

Michael Angove, National Weather Service

Michael Angove, tsunami program manager for the National Weather Service, agreed. The National Weather Service is interested in the meteotsunami research because it could help with forecasting such events.

Angove said the June 2013 meteotsunami in New Jersey caught the attention of scientists because the system of storms that triggered it had moved from the upper Midwest and across the mid-Atlantic before heading offshore, where it triggered meteotsunami wave.

“It hit our tsunami sensor … off of New York state, and it was a pretty strong hit,” he said. “That was really when we looked at this data and said, ‘We have to treat these more rigorously like we would other types of hazards.’ It’s really what got the ball rolling in terms of going back and looking at the data and trying to make sense of it – if it’s something we could potentially issue forecast warnings on.”

He noted that meteotsunamis are not likely to be stand-alone events that could pose a threat to the public on the North Carolina coast.

“But a lot of times these meteotsunamis are going to be created in conjunction with land-falling hurricanes, for instance, and other types of storms that maybe are moving toward the coast – and therefore (a meteotsunami is) going to be kind of incorporated in this broader bad weather,” Angove said.

In such a case, he said the local forecast office might issue a special weather statement saying in addition to strong storm surge, wind waves and rain, conditions may be favorable to create a “shallow water long wave” that could add to any expected coastal inundation.

“Along the North Carolina coast, it’s something that can at certain times make bad weather worse,” he said.

Looking ahead, Dusek said the next steps in meteotsunami research are to create computer modeling and numerical modeling.

“That will help give us a better look at how these events are created, how they move and how they might affect locations that are away from the tide gauges,” Dusek said. “It’s quite possible that in many cases we don’t observe the largest of an event – a wave might only be a couple of feet at our gauge but maybe it’s larger somewhere else because we’re only observing it at that one point.”

Dusek said his group will also continue to work with the National Weather Service.

“We’re collaborating with them on trying to get them this information because before you can better understand events and when to expect them, you’ve got to know when they have occurred in the past,” he said. “So this (study) was kind of the first step just to better establish when you might be concerned with events.”

Learn More

• First World Conference on Meteotsunamis begins

If it seems like hurricanes in recent years are dumping more rain and causing more flooding when they make landfall, it’s because they are.

The first paper simulated how 15 historically destructive hurricanes across the globe would have developed in different scenarios: pre-industrial, modern and three potential late-21^st century climates. It found that climate change increased the rainfall from hurricanes Katrina, Irma and Maria by 4-9 percent and could cause up to 30 percent more storm-derived rain in the future.

This comes as many parts of Eastern North Carolina are still recovering from Hurricane Florence – a storm that dumped a reported 9 trillion gallons of rain across the state and raised the bar for flooding in North Carolina.

And while Florence arrived too late to be included in this research, it’s conceivable to draw lines between the two.

Charles Konrad, director of the Southeast Regional Climate Center and a professor in the geography department at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, agreed. He explained that Florence’s size and slow forward momentum were big factors in the amount of rain that fell.

“There needs to be proper research done, but there’s the suggestion that the sea surface temperatures are warmer in that part of the Atlantic (where Florence traveled), and so we can certainly hypothesize that the rainfall rates were a bit greater with Florence – at least slightly greater – because with the ocean being warmer, there’s more evaporation and water vapor going up into the atmosphere,” Konrad said. “That’s something, if properly done, a climate attribution study might effectively show.”

Urbanization

The second paper used data from Houston during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and compared it to models of that area if the city had never been built. The conclusion was that “urbanization exacerbated not only the flood response, but also the storm total rainfall” and the probability of extreme flooding events was increased around 21 times, according to the paper.

Konrad explained that the tall buildings in Houston create a “surface roughness” that ends up putting more moisture into the air of a storm making landfall.

“When the winds carrying all this moisture hit these buildings, all of them together, you get more lifting and then that squeezes more rain out of the atmosphere,” he said. “It makes perfect sense.”

Sankar Arumugam, a professor and university faculty scholar at N.C. State’s Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, has researched similar trends for the Southeast.

He said that while a slow-moving hurricane will almost always come with drenching rains, combining that with an urban setting that tends to trap air and moisture can help increase precipitation.

“We clearly see a trend in the tropical storm contribution in the precipitation,” he said.

To see if some of that moisture is going back into the air, rather than into nearby streams or creeks and rivers, or streamflow, he compared the records of rainfall amounts with that of streamflow measurements.

“What we find is that they do exhibit the trend in terms of increasing amounts of tropical storm contribution … but we don’t see a similar trend on the streamflow,” Arumugam said.

“The point is that perhaps – and this is not a conclusion – but perhaps the rural watersheds dampen that (rain) signal better as opposed to urban watersheds.”

Konrad said that as hurricanes or tropical storms make landfall, there’s always some additional “uplift” as onshore winds hit the land surface and any trees or buildings that may be on it.

“So it’s really a scale thing, right? Houston is a very large city and there’s been a tremendous amount of development and there are quite a few tall buildings,” Konrad said.

“But it’s intriguing to think that, yeah, with a lot of tall buildings – take Myrtle Beach, for example, where there’s just miles and miles of tall buildings – perhaps is increasing the rates of rainfall there locally when tropical systems are making landfall.”

‘A New Normal’

These papers could not show a link between climate change and its effect on the intensity of hurricanes, but the scientific community has agreed for decades that the trending impact of human activity on the climate will result in more frequent extreme weather events.

“We know meteorologically that as the world warms, there’s greater potential for higher rainfall rates,” Konrad said. “There’s also been work, too, that shows a really marked slowing down of hurricanes – not every single hurricane … but you’re getting more situations where they move really slow or stall out like we saw with Hurricane Florence. That’s something that connects with climate change.”

More severe extreme weather events are something we need to get used to, he said.

“We need to really understand that this is basically a new normal that’s developing here,” Konrad said.

“We’re seeing extreme precipitation and flooding occurring at a higher frequency than we’ve seen in the past inland … We need to really rethink what the 100-year flood is. We need to think about these events that, in the past, we would consider to happen once every thousand years – these are occurring more frequently. And we need to really think hard about how to get more people out of harm’s way.”

Learn More

• Anthropogenic influences on major tropical cyclone events
• Urbanization exacerbated the rainfall and flooding caused by hurricane Harvey in Houston

EASTERN NORTH CAROLINA — Bull sharks in recent years have found the Pamlico Sound to be a good place to birth their young, according to a study published last month. But scientists say more research is needed to understand exactly what effects the new nursery habitat might have on the sound’s ecosystem.

Meanwhile, longer-term research shows increasing numbers of big sharks across the region, which may be a good thing.

Charles Bangley with the Fish and Invertebrate Ecology Laboratory at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center is the lead author of a study that showed that bull sharks were having babies in the Pamlico Sound in increasing numbers from 2011-2016 during the warmer summer months.

“As far as the ecology goes, these sharks are kind of one species among many that have been documented as expanding their range northward, or poleward, kind of on a global scale,” Bangley said. “These kinds of animals that tend to be endemic in warmer water are being found in areas that use to be quite a bit cooler but now have been brought up into (the sharks’) comfort zone by changing temperatures and some other environmental factors.”

He said that with temperatures increasing in the early summer, which is when bull sharks typically give birth, the waters of the Pamlico have come into a “preferred range” for the sharks to utilize as a nursery habitat.

Bull sharks in the Pamlico aren’t new, Bangley said, but the presence of their babies is.

“Adult bull sharks have been spotted in the sound for as long as anybody has been spending time in the sound,” he said. “The adults kind of move around and go where they want (in and out of the Pamlico), but it’s these juveniles that are new.

“Bull sharks have been part of the Pamlico Sound for a long time, but they seem to be using the sound in a different way now. Instead of these quick visits to forage, they’re now giving birth and having decent numbers of juveniles actually spend at least their first summer in the sound.”

So what does it mean for the other species living in the sound to have all these baby sharks around?

“That’s something that we’re actually looking at as the next step,” Bangley said. “That’s something we’re interested in looking at for sure – what these sharks might be interacting with in the system.”

He said studying the stomach contents of bull sharks caught in the Pamlico will be a big part of that next step along with other research.

“We plan to look at the diets, we plan to continue our tagging efforts. Once we identify what some of the key prey species are, the next steps may be to look at the interactions between predator and prey, to see if the presence of these sharks is affecting the numbers and the distribution of things like rays, red drum and other potential prey species,” Bangley said. “Bulls act as an apex predator in estuaries, so they can potentially be one of those top predators and have a trickle-down effect through the food web.”

Bangley noted that bull sharks in Florida eat marine catfishes, which are not currently present in the Pamlico, as well as Atlantic stingrays and sometimes cownose rays, which are common in the areas of the Pamlico where juveniles are seasonally residing.

“There are also other things, like red drum in that area. There’s spotted sea trout, croaker – there’s plenty of other fish that are actively targeted by fisheries,” Bangley said. “There’s a chance you could see these sharks interacting with the rays particularly, but also some fish species that we also like to target. So there’s some potential for some human-wildlife conflict going on in Pamlico Sound.”

A Window to What’s Happening

Martin Benavides is a doctoral student researching the ecological role of sharks on the coast at the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City. His research involves conducting shark surveys that began in the early 1970s and collecting data, as well as analyzing the shark population data collected over the last 45 years.

He said the bull shark study was interesting and agreed more research is needed to understand how shark habitats might be shifting or changing.

“With sharks, particularly the longer-lived species, which my understanding is the bull shark falls under this category, I think we have a window into what could be happening,” Benavides said. “And it’s really important that we follow up with this long term to see if these increases are something that will be occurring over decades.

“That’s sort of the angle of my research coming in because we’ve been surveying populations for decades, and we feel that you really need that time series to make definitive answers about changes in shark populations.”

Benavides said the study does fall in line with patterns he’s seen across the Southeast.

“I don’t necessarily think there’s any reason to doubt that there will be an increase in bull sharks – the pattern is that we’re seeing an increase in larger sharks,” he said.

And while “more bigger sharks” may not be something people like to hear, Benavides said it is a sign of optimism from a marine science standpoint.

“Sharks fill a really important role in the ecosystem as apex predators, and so they’re kind of giving us a sign that the ocean is returning at least closer to what it would have been before (human) impact on shark populations, which would have been to pretty much decimate them in the ’70s and ’80s before there was any sort of management put in place in the ’90s.”

As important as their role might be, it’s hard to ignore the potential for human contact. But the sharks in question are small and generally stick to their nursery habitats that tend to be in fairly uninhabited areas of the Pamlico, Bangley said.

“The biggest impact they are likely to have on people is interactions with fisheries,” he said. “The area of Pamlico Sound that they’re in is not particularly settled, it’s kind of along the Hyde and Dare county (mainland) shoreline. They seem to be along a stretch of the shoreline from Rose Bay out to this area called the Long Shoal River in the middle of the Alligator River Wildlife Refuge, so there’s nobody out there.”

It’s not an area that gets much tourism action, but it does see some recreational fishing and a fair amount of commercial fishing, he said.

“There’s the potential that these sharks might kind of interfere with fishing gear or grab somebody’s fish off the hook or something like that,” Bangley said. “That’s probably going to be the main interaction with these sharks, especially since they are juveniles.”

Benavides noted a study conducted in 2014 that showed promising results of shark-safe barriers using magnetic deterrent as a possible way to keep sharks out of baited areas.

“While there may be some negative interactions with humans – and this mainly relates to our behavior – there are things we can do to try to minimize those interactions,” Benavides said.

But he stressed that any increased contact humans have with sharks – whether it’s due to population numbers returning, populations migrating north or even more people spending more time on beaches – it’s largely caused by humans.

“I think it’s important to keep that in context,” Benavides said. “What we’re seeing – if there are increases of encounters – is probably more a reflection of our actions than it is of the sharks’. I think there is sort of a fear that has been blown out of proportion because in terms of risk (of a shark encounter) there’s relatively almost none.”

What would development along the coastline look like if subsidies for infrastructure were taken away? Would it keep homes from being built in high-risk environmentally fragile areas?

The Coastal Barrier Resources Act, or CBRA, enacted in 1982, sought to discourage such development by doing away with federal incentive subsidies for infrastructure – namely water/sewer, roads and flood insurance.

But development along coastal barriers has continued despite the lack of federal incentives, and a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill wants to know more about why that is happening.

Over the next two years, researchers Todd BenDor, David Salvesen and Nikhil Kazah will be evaluating the effect CBRA has had on development along the coasts of North Carolina and other states.

BenDor, the lead researcher on the project, said one goal of the study is to understand what happens when federal subsidies for development are ended.

“What happens when you end subsidies for infrastructure and flood insurance in high-hazard areas in some places and don’t end subsidies in other places,” he said. “Basically, you create this unlevel playing field.”

While the intent of CBRA was to reduce or slow development in those high-hazard areas, BenDor said state and local governments might be undoing that effort – especially in CBRA areas in or near tourist areas.

“Our hypothesis is that is happening, that state and local governments are stepping in to basically fill in what the federal government had removed,” he said.

Another goal of the study is to determine if CBRA has worked at slowing development and the role state and local governments have played in picking up where the federal government has left off, BenDor said.

“When does that actually happen?” he said. “We’re not expecting it’s all the time.”

But, he said, it begs the question: What happens when you stop paying someone to not do something they weren’t going to do anyway?

“One hypothesis is that some of these areas that were chosen to be in (the CBRA) system essentially will never develop whether or not they have infrastructure subsidies,” BenDor said. “So, one of the things we’re also interested in is did (the federal government) appear to select areas that were just never really going to develop in the first place?”

Salvesen, who researched CBRA development 15 years ago for his dissertation, said he thinks the study will find that some areas that were desirable for development will develop with or without the federal subsidies.

“What I found last time is that CBRA seemed to have a delaying effect, in that other areas that were not part of the Coastal Barrier Resources Act get developed first, and then finally developers turn their attention to the CBRA areas because that’s all that’s left. And if land values are high enough, and if the market is strong enough, what I found last time is that development will occur there.”

BenDor agreed.

“We’re expecting that some of these areas that had not developed in 1980, a lot of them are close to areas that have (since) become highly developed,” he said. “Topsail Island is a great example of this, where you get spillover from lots of other development around it, and now that area is highly developed even though it’s in the Coastal Barrier Resource system.”

The project could impact the way federal flood insurance and infrastructure subsidies are allocated for environmentally fragile areas besides the coast, as well as the way state and local governments allocate their own subsidies.

“The same kind of approach could apply to, say, floodplains,” Salvesen said. “Local governments could say, ‘We’re not going to provide water and sewer or roads or any kind infrastructure or government services to areas that are deemed risky places to develop.’ They could do that.”

While the CBRA includes areas from the United States’ entire coastline, the project will focus on the coasts of North Carolina, Texas, Florida, Alabama and Delaware for their differences in development patterns, climates, coastal resources and economies.

“In the first couple of months we’ll be doing an inventory of all of the coastal barrier units in those five states and we’ll look and see how much development has occurred,” Salvesen said. “And then we’ll zero in on a handful of CBRA units to do our more in-depth analysis.”

The two-year project, made possible by a National Science Foundation grant, is just getting underway now that students have returned at UNC, Salvesen said.

“We did some preliminary work – we’ve talked to Fish and Wildlife Service, we’ve looked at what data is already available and who else has done studies like this,” he said. “And now that we have students on board, we’re really ready to start sinking our teeth in.”

Learn More

• Explore the CBRA mapper
• Coastal Barrier Resources Act 1982 Document
• CBRA Fact Sheet

A new report on sea level rise says as many as 20 North Carolina communities could be regularly inundated with sea water within 15 years, but local experts believe the number affected could be greater and that some areas are already suffering the effects of a rising sea.

The report, When Rising Seas Hit Home: Hard Choices Ahead for Hundreds of U.S. Coastal Communities, looks at when coastal towns and cities across the country can expect to see a level of flooding that is disruptive to daily life – affecting homes, routines and livelihoods.

The report uses three projected scenarios of flooding – low, intermediate and high – based on estimated carbon emission through the end of the century. The low scenario assumes global warming is limited to less than 2 degrees Celsius in accordance with the Paris Climate Agreement, while the high scenario assumes carbon emissions will rise through the end of the century.

According to the report, 13 coastal North Carolina communities will face “chronic inundation,” flooding that covers more than 10 percent of usable land at least 26 times a year, by 2035 in an intermediate scenario.

With the high scenario of sea level rise, the number of communities being chronically inundated jumps to 20 by 2030 and 40 by 2060.

Mike Giles, a coastal advocate with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, said he was not surprised by the report’s findings.

“If anything I think they are fairly conservative,” he said. “If you look at just a normal high tide in the Wilmington area, you can go down to areas bordering the tidal creeks and you can find sewer manhole covers that are under water. And I’m not talking about a flood event. I’m talking about a normal high tide – that’s a warning that we’ve got to start planning better.”

Larry Cahoon, a biology and marine biology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, agreed and said the effects on infrastructure will be felt far in advance of regularly occurring flooding.

“I think if anything, the report is kind of conservative. It talks about inundation, which is actual standing water in the streets. The least mistakable effect of sea level rise is that you’re under water,” Cahoon said.

“Long before we have sea water standing in the streets, we’re going to have other problems, and those problems are going to cost us more money and cause us more trouble steadily.”

One of those problems will be waste management, he said.

“The infrastructure that is first exposed to seawater effects is the waste treatment systems that we use,” Cahoon said. “Long before your roads become flooded, your sewer pipes are going to be under water. And if they’re leaky, they’re going be full of sea water – and that’s bad – and your septic tanks progressively go under water and they’ll fail.”

In some places, this sort of thing is already happening, he said. Communities such as Sunset Beach and Oak Island in recent years have switched from septic systems to central sewage systems. But with a price tag of about $1 million per mile of sewer line to install, he said central sewer isn’t exactly a cheap fix, and the system is still quite vulnerable to increasing tides.

“The problem with central sewer, aside from it being very expensive, is that now you’ve got infrastructure in the ground,” Cahoon said. “If you don’t build the central sewer system properly, the collection system – if it leaks excessively to begin with or breaks down over time … the sea water, as it comes up and engulfs those pipes, will enter those pipes and then you’re actually treating sea water in your sewage system.”

And the wastewater treatment plant above ground is likely vulnerable to flooding from storms, as well, he said.

“Kinston lost its sewage system to Hurricane Floyd back in 1999,” Cahoon said. “That becomes a really expensive proposition, when you’ve got to rebuild a sewage system. Once you’ve gone down that road, you’ve invested many, many millions of dollars, so you almost have no choice but to keep doing it.”

Cahoon said he believes the solution to the wastewater management problem is a technologically advanced on-site management system.

“I’m not a waste system engineer, but there are technologies out there that, if they were developed properly, could provide for on-site waste treatment – that is residential-scale treatment that does not require a central system and collection system,” he said.

It would be a big change, he said, but “my view is if you want to live on the coast you’re going to have to deal with waste treatment somehow. Central sewer is vulnerable to flooding  … septic systems are primitive technology … we can do better than that.”

Other changes sparked by rising seas and increased flooding can already be seen in some areas across the North Carolina coast. For more than 10 years the Hazard Mitigation Assistance program has been awarding grants funded by FEMA to either elevate homes above flood levels or buy out and remove homes to make them public open space, with the goal of reducing or eliminating the risk of repetitive flooding.

Nick Burk, who oversees the Hazard Mitigation Assistance program for North Carolina Emergency Management, said the program has bought out about 8,000 and elevated around 700 homes across coastal North Carolina since its inception in 1996.

“You see us doing this type of work after a disaster, but … for the past decade North Carolina Emergency Management has been very effective in helping local governments get nationally competitive funding, too. So you don’t necessarily need a disaster,” he said. “And a lot of coastal communities have been very proficient in raising houses whether there’s a disaster or not.”

Burk said there are no income restrictions for the program and explained that the requirements are based on a sort of flood analysis showing that for every dollar spent on a subject property, enough potential future damages will be avoided that the federal government can recoup the investment.

“Say there’s flood insurance on a house and every five or 10 years you’re making a flood claim of $20,000 a year – that’s going to drain the National Flood Insurance Program,” he said. “So if (we) buy that house out or raise it so flood waters pass safely under the elevated foundation, there’s not going to be as many flood insurance claims.”

Burk estimated that roughly $870 million has been spent on buying out or elevating homes through the program. But the dollar figure spent would likely be much higher without the hazard mitigation program, he said.

“There have been academic studies that show for every dollar you spend, typically you’re going to recoup about $4 in potential future damages avoided,” Burk said. “So if we were to take that $870 million and multiply it by $4, you’re looking at almost $3.5 billion dollars in potential damages avoided.”

While local cities and communities may be working to adapt to higher water levels, the report cites reducing global temperature and carbon emissions as outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement as the best way to slow the acceleration of sea level rise.

Giles with the federation agreed, adding that more could be done in North Carolina, as well as nationally.

“I think Gov. Cooper should reinstate and appoint a new climate change commission and advisory science panel and it be one of his priorities and strategic things, and something that’s set in stone that another governor, or whatever, cannot disband it,” he said. “The need to start planning and working with all of the local governments and local organizations and federal government agencies and start developing a long-range strategic plan on how we’re going to have to adapt to this oncoming, excuse the pun, tide.”

Giles noted the Coastal Stormwater Rules passed in 2008 that lawmakers have attempted to weaken in recent years.

“North Carolina used to be the model government of every other coastal state. They would come, they would look at our rules and try to emulate what North Carolina had done,” Giles said. “And now what we’re doing is regulatory rollback and the people that make the rules, all the legislators in Raleigh, they’re just listening to short-term opinions of people that want to make a short-term profit, and they don’t care about what’s going to happen in 20, 30, 50 years. And they need to start caring.

“When you talk to the politicians, they don’t want to talk about (climate change),” he said. “They’re sticking their head in the sand, so to speak, but pretty soon their head is going to be underwater.”

Learn More

• Read the Report: When Rising Seas Hit Home

N.C. COAST – Abandoned boats and finding ways to deal with them are not new issues for eastern North Carolina. Locating owners or funding the removal of an abandoned boat are just some of the hurdles involved in cleaning up a vessel left to rot where it sits.

“We don’t really have adequate laws (in North Carolina) that address this and there’s no teeth in much of anything to deal with (abandoned boats),” said Judy Hills, executive director of the Eastern Carolina Council of Governments.

And except for a few limited instances, the federal government doesn’t offer much assistance.

A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office published in March found that federal agencies face some of the same challenges as local and state governments when it comes to handling abandoned and derelict vessels, also referred to ADVs: there’s simply not enough money and not enough regulations for cleaning up such vessels.

There are some cases in which federal agencies like the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency or others will get involved with an abandoned or derelict vessel. But those cases are limited to vessels in federally maintained waterways, containing potential pollutants or that were grounded or considered debris due to a major storm event.

According to the study, those agencies felt they had little or no responsibility to be involved in vessel cleanup outside the parameters laid out in federal statute.

“Agencies reported they generally did not have funding to support actions beyond responding to ADVs posing navigation hazards in federally-maintained waterways and pollution and public health threats, nor were they required to do so by federal law or agency policy,” the report states.

Many states are taking it upon themselves to clean up abandoned boats. The study surveyed 28 coastal states, and 18 of those reported identifying more than 5,600 abandoned or derelict vessels between 2013 and 2016 – 88 percent being recreational vessels under 40 feet in length. Of the 5,600 abandoned vessels identified, just more than 3,000 were removed.

While North Carolina responded to the survey, it was not one of the 18 states to identify or remove abandoned vessels. It reported that it did not know the number of ADVs during the three-year time period.

Hills, a recreational boater who has championed an abandoned boat monitoring program for the state in years past, called the issue complex.

Some of the complexities include locating owners when all identifiers have been removed from the vessel, private property rights, insurance and more – let alone keeping track of abandoned boats, she said.

“Other states have a more active monitoring program, like Florida, where it’s kind of like an abandoned car, they’ll go put a sticker on (the abandoned boat),” she said. “They’ll mark it and put it on a GIS mapping system and go back and check on them periodically and send notices to people about them. And we just don’t have anything like that here in North Carolina.”

In North Carolina, the Wildlife Resources Commission handles the titling and registering of boats, as well as the state’s Boating and Water Safety provisions for abandoned vessels, according to WRC Land and Water Access Section Chief Brian McRae.

He explained that though state laws don’t require the removal of an abandoned or derelict boat, there is procedure for a person who finds such a boat to apply for ownership of the vessel.

“The Wildlife Resources Commission’s procedures … allow a person who finds an abandoned vessel to become the registered and titled owner, provided the previous owner(s) cannot be located and have not reported the vessel missing or stolen,” McRae said in an email.

“This issue becomes a little more complicated if the abandoned vessel is hindering the launching or retrieving of vessels at a WRC Boat Access Area or posing a danger at a WRC Boat Access Area. In these circumstances, we will conduct a title search but eventually take on the salvage and remove costs to get it taken care of.”

McRae said while there are criminal charges that can be filed for abandoning a vessel, the state has no mechanism to force an individual to remove a vessel.

“The only reference to removal requirements for abandoned vessels in North Carolina in under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 143-355(b)(5). It states that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (now known as the Department of Environmental Quality) is required to cooperate with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in removing ‘any wrecked, sunken or abandoned vessel or unauthorized obstructions and encroachments in public harbors, channels, waterways and tidewaters of the state,’” he said.

Hills said she tried in the past to get a monitoring program for the state with the commission but was unsuccessful.

“We showed (the commission) what Florida is doing as far as monitoring and tagging (abandoned boats). We made a pitch and basically the bottom line (from the commission) is, ‘We don’t have the resources,’” Hills said.

“I’m not saying there wasn’t an interest there – they understand there is a problem,” she continued. “But my impression was: ‘Unless somebody dictates that to (the commission), we really don’t want to have any responsibility.’ And you can’t blame them. They don’t have unlimited resources and it’s a tremendously complex problem.”

That can leave local governments in the lurch when it comes to cleaning up scenic waterfronts and harbors.

“(Local governments) could expend the funds (for removal) if they so desired, but if you do it for one, you have to do it for everybody,” Hills said. “So it’s a really hard decision, and there really isn’t any money for it.”

Some local governments have taken matters into their own hands. Kyle Garner, the planning and inspections director for Beaufort, said the town has an ordinance outlining the procedure to follow should a boat need to be removed from Taylor’s Creek.

The procedure includes everything from attempting to locate the boat’s owner, to posting public notice that the boat will be removed, to working with a local marine towing company for the removal.

“We want to make sure we do things the right way and the ultimate goal is abatement or getting the areas cleaned up and sometimes it takes time,” Garner said. “But it’s a worthy endeavor and when it’s done it’s hopefully finished and you’ve met your goal.”

Garner said town officials recently met with representatives of the Corps of Engineers to discuss possible efforts on Beaufort’s part to remove sunken boats in Town Creek.

Though Town Creek is a federal harbor of refuge, it is not a federally maintained waterway, so the Corps is not required or funded to remove vessels there.

Dealing with and cleaning up abandoned and derelict vessels is an ongoing challenge for many coastal areas, Garner said.

“It’s going to be a challenge not only for us, but for coastal areas throughout the country. And we’re not the only community that has some of these vessels in just deplorable shape,” Garner said. “It’s a shame they’ve gotten there, but (cleaning them up is) something we have to do to help protect the environment of our areas and our waterways here – and not only what I would consider the fragile environment but also the visual environment, the aesthetic environment.”

Learn More

• Read the Report

If you’ve ever wondered exactly what kind of wildlife exists in your backyard, a statewide photography project could help you discover those curious creatures living nearby.

Candid Critters, a collaboration between North Carolina Wildlife Resources, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University, is hoping to get people more interested in the wildlife around them by providing trail cameras, or camera traps, to help survey wildlife across the state.

The project kicked off in December in the eastern part of the state and is expanding March 1 to include all 100 counties of North Carolina with a goal of surveying 20,000-30,000 sites over the next three years.

“The idea was to bring people closer to nature, bring people closer to the wildlife around them, make them more aware of what’s around them and excited about what’s around them,” said Dr. Maria Palamar, wildlife veterinarian with the Wildlife Resources Commission, which is funding the project. “We wanted them to really start to enjoy a part of the natural world that they maybe don’t see.”

Arielle Parsons with the Museum of Natural Sciences said the project is open to anyone living in or owning property in the state who is willing to run a camera trap. Volunteers use trail cameras on loan from one of nearly three dozen participating public libraries, or they can run their own trail camera if it meets the necessary criteria. And cameras can be set up on the volunteer’s property or at participating state parks and wildlife refuges.

Candid Critters is also geared toward students and can be used in the classroom with lesson plans that are available for all age groups.

“Basically, anyone who wants to participate – there’s no age or education or any limitation on people that are able to participate in this,” Parsons said. “We provide cameras that we are lending out through public libraries across the state that people can then borrow to run and help us complete this (camera-trapping) survey.”

She said if the project is successful, Candid Critters will be “an unprecedentedly large camera trapping survey.”

“We’re really hoping to cover every corner of every county in the state,” Parsons said.

Roland Kays, a professor with N.C. State and the Museum of Natural Sciences, is the creator of the software, database and website – called eMammal – used to manage all the photos taken and uploaded from camera traps, all of which gets saved at the Smithsonian.

In addition to getting people more engaged with the outdoors, he said the project will help answer some scientific questions about the state’s wildlife to better manage and conserve them.

“By documenting the animals at all these different points, we’ll learn a lot about all these different species,” Kays said. “We’re particularly interested in looking at relationships between deer and coyotes. We’re interested in documenting the expanding elk population in the western part of the state. It seems like the red wolf population in the eastern part of the state might be declining, so we want to monitor that and see, do the coyotes increase, for example, in the absence of the wolf? So, there’s dozens of questions we’ll be able to get at with this data.”

Palamar explained that the Wildlife Resources Commission is specifically interested in seeing how coyotes are distributed throughout the state and how their use of land overlaps with deer.

“Also, we are trying to understand the question of fawn recruitment. We’re going to do that with concentrated efforts throughout different parts of the state where we’re actually looking at the fawn-to-doe ratio,” she said. “So, how many fawns are with each doe in those pictures? Say (for example) most does in the Piedmont have two fawns but in the mountains they have one fawn with them at a time. All of that is going to help us understand our deer population and how it’s growing and moving throughout the state.”

Palamar said she’s hoping more scientific questions will arise from volunteers running camera traps, as well.

“We’re actually hoping the kids in the schools and the public in general are going to come up with very interesting management-oriented questions that they are going to be able to answer with (the camera-trap images),” she said. “Maybe something we have not thought of or maybe something that we don’t think is as important to the public, but the public comes to us and says, ‘Hey, this is important to us. We see that you could answer some of these questions with this data we are providing to you.’

“Hopefully this is going to increase people’s understanding of how you do science, and they are going to start asking the scientific questions and see that they can answer them with the data.”

Parsons with the Museum of Natural Sciences noted that the project will create a vast database of information that will be available to other researchers and scientists

“One of our goals as researchers here at the museum is to turn this citizen-science into actual peer-reviewed publications that contribute to the body of scientific literature,” she said. “So we’re not just doing this as a hobby, we consider this to be real science, and we can share that (data) with the scientific public.

“So far, all of our projects that we’ve done with citizen-science camera-trapping has resulted in multiple peer-reviewed scientific publications. We really like that aspect of this, and it become a great partnership between the citizen-scientists and ourselves and so it’s really beneficial in that way.”

So, how does one become a citizen-scientist camera-trapper for Candid Critters? The first step is to visit nccandidcritters.org to sign up and complete the online training, which takes about 45 minutes. From there, volunteers pick up a camera from the nearest participating library, which are listed on the website, and choose a location to set it up.

“We want the camera to run for three weeks (at a time), but we ask that people check it out for a season – three months, spring, summer, fall, etc.,” Kays said. “So, hopefully, they’ll run it in three different places … If they’re into it and they want to keep going and do it for a year, that would be great. We’ve got special T-shirts to give for running a camera for a year.”

Kays said the software used to upload and identify animals is user-friendly and complete with shortcuts for common animals.

“Once they’ve gone through (all the photos), they hit upload and they send them to us, and then we go through and double check everything,” he said. “They’ll get a response back that gives a summary of what they found, and we’ll tell them what they got right and what they got wrong so they can get better in the future.”

Since December, more than 270 people have signed up to participate and 110 camera “deployments” have been uploaded. The images and data are all available at nccandidcritters.org.

“We want to make sure that people know that foxes and squirrels and coyotes, they’re everywhere – they’re well distributed throughout our state and there are so many that you don’t see,” Palamar said. “But this camera can capture it for you, and that you would later be able to see the same path where you were walking your dog that morning is used at night by this bobcat. And it’s fine – you’ve never seen that bobcat before and now with this camera you can see that he actually is using the same path that you are using and that you guys are coexisting well.”

Learn More

• North Carolina’s Candid Critters
• eMammal: See Wildlife, Do Science
• Lunchtime Discovery Series on Candid Critters

With much of the Atlantic and Arctic waters no longer up for grabs for offshore drilling, the U.S. is on the right track to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius by 2040.

That’s according to a study, prepared by Seattle-based researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute in cooperation with the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a think tank working to limit future greenhouse emissions, that shows any future drilling of oil or gas in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans would push global warming to 4 degrees or beyond.

“The only way (offshore) drilling makes sense is if we fail on climate and force high oil prices on our children and go backwards on the promise of clean energy, which is already knocking on our door,” Franz Matzner of the Natural Resources Defense Council told reporters during a December press call.

World leaders agreed last year in Paris to the 2-degree threshold. And just before leaving office, President Obama, using his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, permanently withdrew about 115 million acres of federally owned land in the Arctic and about 3.8 million acres of the Atlantic Ocean from new offshore oil and gas drilling leases.

Now there’s speculation that President Trump could move to undo Obama’s decision. Oil industry advocates are hopeful for such a reversal, which would likely require congressional action and almost certainly face legal challenges.

The drilling ban in the north and mid-Atlantic Ocean extends from New England to Virginia. Waters off the coast of Virginia and North Carolina were pulled previously from Obama’s five-year energy plan, but that ban will expire in 2022.

“Protecting and preserving our Arctic and Atlantic waters embraces the promise of (a) clean energy future,” Matzner wrote following the announcement of the drilling ban last month. “It embraces the notion that we will succeed in meeting the challenge of climate change, not turn backwards on progress or shirk our responsibilities to future generations.”

Michael Lazarus, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute and co-author of the report, said during the December press call that although the Paris Agreement was adopted last year, the U.S. now ranks first in the world in oil and gas production, with one-fifth of the total coming from lands and waters the federal government leases to private producers.

But to keep global warming below 2 degrees, Lazarus said U.S. oil production would need to drop to nearly half its current levels by 2040 and that new leases on offshore oil and gas just wouldn’t make sense.

“It’s clear that Arctic and Atlantic resources are way too expensive and don’t really make sense and are consistent in a future … that is more like 4 degrees and perhaps even 5 degrees (of global warming),” he said.

Lazarus explained two related risks of continued U.S. offshore oil development: “carbon lock-in” and “stranded assets.”

Carbon lock-in occurs when carbon-intensive investments become difficult to walk away from in the long term – for economic, institutional and/or political reasons. Because offshore oil has very high upfront costs, but relatively low operating costs once platforms are in place, Lazarus said investments in this infrastructure are particularly susceptible to carbon lock-in.

At the same time, if global demand for oil declines, as would be expected on a 2-degree pathway, offshore oil investments could easily become “stranded” – meaning they fail to achieve the expected returns, potentially creating economic losses for investors and local communities.

“We found in our study that projects dependent on new leases in the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic, the Pacific, Arctic, appear to require on average break-even oil prices of at least $140 per barrel,” he said. “That’s quite a bit over today’s prices and that’s $50-per-barrel higher than would be cost-efficient if oil demand follows the 2-degree pathway based on the various studies we looked at (for the report).”

“So, indeed, only with demand more consistent with global warming of about 4 degrees or higher and no further climate policies or ramping up of ambition, only then would oil prices be high enough to yield some additional offshore oil from new drilling – only some.”

Dan Lashof, chief operating officer at the nonprofit NextGen Climate America, posed the question, “Is it feasible to transition our economy away from fossil fuels quickly enough to live within a 2-degree carbon budget?”

“The answer to that question is: absolutely yes,” Lashof told reporters.

NextGen is an advocacy group that works to put low-carbon energy sources on par, competitively, with fossil fuel interests.

“Until recently, the prospect of transitioning to a 100 percent clean energy economy would have been considered aspirational at best, particularly when it comes to oil, which, after all, currently powers more than 95 percent of our transportation system,” Lashof said. “But that really has changed in the last couple of years both in terms of the analytical rigor demonstrating the ability to make that transition and the real-world evidence in the marketplace that this is feasible an already underway.”

He cited as an example California, where state law now calls for 50 percent of the state’s electricity to come from renewable energy by 2030 and requires a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050.

Lashof also noted the Tesla’s long-range electric car, Model 3, which got 400,000 preorders in the weeks of its unveiling, and the Chevy Bolt, the price tag for which is about average for new cars sold in the U.S.

Likewise in North Carolina, the town of Boone unanimously passed on Dec. 15 a resolution calling for 100 percent clean energy in North Carolina by 2050.

“The reality is that the technology is here to make the transition to clean energy – the climate data only gets worse month-by-month, showing that we must make that transition,” Lashof said. “And as we make that transition, it only makes sense to put off limits offshore oil from the Arctic and Atlantic – that we cannot afford to burn and stay within any reasonable climate budget.”

Learn More

• Read the Report
• Stockholm Environment Institute
• Carbon Tracker Initiative
• NextGen Climate America

The benefits of keeping stormwater runoff out of waterways are well known, but what if that runoff is viewed as potential drinking water – is it as valuable as the water that flows from the kitchen sink?

Research from the Environmental Protection Agency, indicates that if the stormwater can make it back into the ground, it could be worth as much as that in the drinking water supply.

“I think this is a great piece of data – it’s another great way to talk in economics about the value of doing these stormwater reduction projects,” said Tracy Skrabal, coastal scientist with North Carolina Coastal Federation, of the study. “When we put water back into the ground and it is cleaned as it is infiltrating, then we are resupplying that resource that provides us with drinking water. That’s intuitive, but to put the value on it of hundreds of millions of dollars per year – or billions of dollars cumulatively – is really valuable.”

The study, “Estimating Monetized Benefits of Groundwater Recharge from Stormwater Retention Practices,” estimates the benefits of groundwater recharge from the application of small stormwater retention practices on new development and redevelopment across the country.

Stormwater that makes it back into the ground could be worth as much as $225 million annually as drinking water, according to the study.

“This analysis was undertaken as part of the effort to estimate monetary value of the co-benefits of stormwater retention policies to inform policy makers,” Enesta Jones, a spokesperson for the EPA, said. “Stormwater retention policies are driven for different reasons, this study was to assess the potential economic benefit. While groundwater recharge may not economically drive retention, it should be noted as a side benefit of the water quality and stream protection. “

Skrabal agreed that placing a monetary estimate to stormwater would be an addition to the list of benefits of managing runoff.

“We talk about these projects in terms of multiple benefits, so groundwater recharge is one of them,” she said. “Those (estimated values) don’t even touch the value of keeping polluted stormwater out of our creeks and rivers and streams. So when you look at the overall valuation in terms of having clean waters and development around that, and recreation, the number must be enormous.”

Skrabal called the study further evidence that there is more than just environmental benefits to managing stormwater.

“It actually is a financial or economic benefit to the state and relates to something that is pretty critical in our state, which is adequate water supply,” she said. “So I think this piece of data should drive not just public policy, but also should help the state justify making more changes to their programs to allow these better infiltration practices.”

Bridget Munger, a spokesperson for the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, which manages the state’s stormwater permitting program, said the department is open to looking at new research and data that could improve the program and provide more flexibility for developers in choosing how they want to manage stormwater at a particular site.

“While the state’s stormwater program has not yet studied the economics of infiltration and groundwater recharge, our engineers are always looking at innovative ways to provide design options that will protect water quality, while providing additional environmental benefits,” Munger said. “Program staff work closely with researchers at N.C. State University, as well as diverse stakeholder groups, in that effort.”

She explained that new stormwater rules developed this year by the state require infiltration in areas of active shellfish harvesting waters whenever it’s technically feasible. In areas outside active shellfish harvesting waters, developers can choose the stormwater control measures best suited to their projects, though the state provides options for infiltration devices that follow specific guidelines.

Annette Lucas, an engineer with the state Department of Environmental Quality’s stormwater permitting program, said permit applicants have 12 options for treating stormwater with methods varying from more traditional wet ponds, where water settles into a manmade pond, to complex bio-retention ponds that infiltrate stormwater through a series of plants, sand, clay and other organic materials to increase the rate in which the water goes back into the ground. Other methods include pervious pavement, rain gardens and more.

“The person who owns the property gets to choose how the stormwater is treated,” Lucas said. “But we’ve made a lot of changes that make it easier to do infiltration, to do bio-retention. We’ve taken away in our design (of the stormwater rules) some of the things that unwittingly prevented people from making that choice. So a lot of times people are choosing to do bio-retention and infiltration, but there’s a lot of factors that go into making that decision that are really site specific.”

“As we move Down East, we have trouble with high water table. So you might have great soil for infiltration, but the soils are saturated with groundwater,” she explained, noting the need for a wide range of stormwater treatment choices.

“I think over time people are choosing more of the low-impact type systems,” Lucas said.

Skrabal said she believes North Carolina has been “very aggressive” in its approach to managing stormwater runoff through innovative, low-impact development techniques, like vegetative swales, rain gardens, bio-retention areas and more.

More attention should be paid to redevelopment and retrofitting opportunities, she said, as well as moving away from the more traditional methods of stormwater treatment, like wet ponds, and encouraging or requiring more use of the low-impact development techniques.

“I think (the EPA study is) just another sort of confirmation of what we already know, and that is: When you can employ low-impact development techniques during new development, it is going to be financially beneficial to the community, but also to the developer,” Skrabal said. “We know that a lot of these techniques are actually cheaper in the long run to employ than what I would call old-school stormwater retention ponds and detention ponds. It just makes good financial sense all around to do this.

“And the added benefit of reducing the volume of polluted stormwater in our adjacent waters – that’s a win-win for everybody.”

Learn More

• Read the EPA Study

Imagine data could be plugged into a computer to show exactly how much human presence and interaction the delicate ecology of a popular coastal area could handle before being severely affected.

Would it help with managing national seashores or state parks along the coast?

According to Pat Kenney, superintendent of Cape Lookout National Seashore, yes.

“One of the things – and I’ve been in this business for a long time – that we’re always trying to figure out is: Where is that line, or that sweet spot so to say, that the resources can be preserved for future generations while allowing this level of public use?” Kenney said.

“That is very difficult to determine, but any sort of tools that help us with that would be useful.”

New research out of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill seeks to do just that – help find the “sweet spot” in sustaining ecotourism.

The research is taking place at the school’s Center for Galapagos Studies in the Galapagos Islands, where tourism is booming and the residential population is growing as people flock to the island for higher wages in the ecotourism economy.

The islands are a province of Ecuador more than 600 miles from the mainland. Officials in Ecuador were looking for scenarios of change reflecting the number of tourists and residents the islands could accommodate before they start to lose their luster, according to a press release about the study.

“The Ecuadorian government and the Galapagos National Park are asking the exact right questions,” said Dr. Stephen Walsh, geography professor at UNC-CH and director of the Center for Galapagos Studies. “No one wants a boom-and-bust situation. We want wise, managed growth within the concept of sustainability.”

And while the research is focused on the Galapagos, it can be applied to other locations, Walsh said.

“(Models) could be developed to examine the conflicts between resource conservation and economic development and the impact of tourism, nearby residents, transportation and visitation on the ecological sustainability of special places in North Carolina,” he said.

Such research could be helpful in managing places like the national seashores along the state’s coast.

“Yes, this is the type of information we would find useful,” Kenney with Cape Lookout National Seashore said. “The National Park Service has a preservation mandate first and foremost, and obviously our mission also calls for the use of public enjoyment.

“However, that being said, our main mandate is the preservation of these places for future generations. So any sort of information that would look at managing human use relative to preservation would be useful.”

Kenney noted there are challenges in managing land for public use.

“There’s the political challenges of putting limitations on public use – it’s always a challenge because parks become economic engines for local communities,” he said. “People want to be able to access their parks. So, having good information that can show correlations between too much use resulting in degradation of resources would be important. Having good science to support decisions is really important.”

Dave Hallac, Outer Banks Group superintendent, agreed.

“I would anticipate that that type of science is, yes, something that the park service is very interested in,” he said. “But it’s also something we have been studying and working on I think for many, many years.”

Hallac, who oversees Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Wright Brothers National Memorial and Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, explained that the park service does a lot of research on parks’ carrying capacity, which takes into account things like the visitor experience, the effects on natural and cultural resources and what it takes to manage the park and the flow of visitors.

He used the beach driving regulations for Cape Hatteras National Seashore as an example.

“We actually built a carrying capacity element into our Off Road Vehicle Managament Plan … it’s called vehicle carrying capacity and it’s the maximum number of vehicles allowed on a route at one time (equal to) the length of the route divided by 20 feet,” Hallac said.

“Now whether or not that’s the right statistic – maybe it should be 30 feet or 50 feet or 10 feet – those are the types of things we seek more information on, where we have an incredible opportunity to collect more scientific data.”

Hallac said the park service has traditionally done a good job of collecting data on natural and cultural resources but could use more information about visitors.

“We have a lot of information about the productivity of shorebirds and sea turtles, but we don’t have a lot of information – we don’t collect as much data – on the visitors that come to the park and what their preferences are and what their attitudes and perceptions of the types of experiences that they desire,” Hallac said. “So I think we seek to gain a lot more of that information.”

The research from Walsh’s study could also be a tool for how natural areas are promoted, said Carol Lohr, executive director of the Carteret County Tourism Development Authority.

“The Cape Lookout National Seashore and the horses on Shackleford Banks are … probably the top areas of interest that people – once they’re here – come to see,” Lohr said, noting that protecting the area’s natural resources is important so that visitors have such areas to enjoy.

“I think we are so blessed to have not only the Cape Lookout National Seashore that includes Shackleford Banks and Portsmouth Island, but also the Croatan National Forest, along with Fort Macon State Park, the Rachel Carson Reserve – all that have been basically set aside for recreational use,” Lohr said. “And I think all the administrative branches of all of these areas are looking closely at visitation and the use.”

Walsh’s research could be another tool for local government and land management agencies, she said.

“It appears to be a great resource that we could take a look at and plug our local data in, but the key would be making sure we have accurate local data” on visitation, Lohr said.

Learn More

• Read the research team’s report
• Galapagos National Park

Humpback whales are making a comeback.

More than 40 years after being placed on the endangered species list, most populations of the giant marine mammal are believed to be thriving and no longer meet the definition of a threatened or endangered species, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service.

Some conservation groups are calling the status change premature and say humpbacks still face many threats and need the continued protection of the Endangered Species Act.

“While humpback whales are recovering thanks to the tremendous power of the Endangered Species Act, (NOAA Fisheries) shouldn’t be in a hurry to declare the job complete when so many threats are on the rise,” said Kristen Monsell, staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.

Monsell cited entanglements in fishing gear and other threats as a top concerns for humpback whales.

“Entanglements are definitely a concern for humpbacks on the East Coast,” she said. “Research using entanglement-related scarring data indicates that up to 65 percent of the Gulf of Maine humpback population has experienced entanglements.

“Ship strikes are another concern for humpbacks on the East Coast, as are increasing threats from climate change, ocean noise and offshore aquaculture.”

NOAA Fisheries, which has jurisdiction over 147 endangered and threatened marine species under the Endangered Species Act, has classified 14 populations of the world’s humpback whales. Nine of those populations, including the West Indies population that migrates along the East Coast, have been determined to be recovered and no longer meet the definition of an endangered species.

One population that migrates along the West Coast has been classified as threatened, while the remaining four populations are still considered endangered. Those five populations will continue to receive all the protections of an endangered species, said Angela Somma, chief of NOAA Fisheries’ endangered species division.

“NOAA Fisheries made this decision following a comprehensive status review,” Somma stated in an email. “We continue to monitor and work to address whale entanglements in fishing gear, but we are confident that many of the humpback whale populations have rebounded.”

But the thriving populations of humpbacks are not without protections.

“There are other important protections that continue to remain in place, even if certain populations are not listed under the Endangered Species Act,” Somma said during a press call in September. “The Marine Mammal Protection Act, which is a comprehensive conservation law for the protection of marine mammals, still applies. (Humpback whales) will still be protected comprehensively under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”

Somma noted that because the Marine Mammal Protection Act carries many of the same or similar protections for marine mammals as the Endangered Species Act, there would be few practical implications in terms of protection of humpbacks.

“For the populations that are no longer listed under the Endangered Species Act, federal agencies will not be required anymore to consult (with NOAA Fisheries) when they want to undertake an activity that might affect those populations,” Somma said, although such agencies may need authorization for the effects of their activities on humpbacks through the Marine Mammals Protection Act.

“Many of the day-to-day protections and activities (for humpback whales) will continue to occur,” Somma said. “We will continue to work and maintain their conservation under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”

Humpback whales were once widely hunted for their oil, meat and baleen, or whalebone. The oil was used for burning lamps and making soap, while baleen was used for all sorts of items, from backscratchers to corset stays.

It wasn’t until 1946 that commercial whaling worldwide was formally regulated. In 1966, the practice was banned altogether by the International Whaling Commission, and the moratorium on commercial whaling has been in place ever since, though some subsistence hunting is allowed for certain native peoples in the Arctic.

Then in 1970, humpback whales, along with many other species, were designated as endangered with the passing of the Endangered Species Conservation Act. That legislation was replaced in 1973 by the Endangered Species Act, which continued the humpbacks’ endangered status.

“At the time (humpbacks) were listed, there were a number of large whale species that were put on the endangered species list when the Endangered Species Act was passed,” Somma said. “We didn’t have specific population abundance estimates at that time, but it was well known that humpback whales, as well as many other species of large whales, had been severely depleted due to commercial whaling.”

But humpback whale populations have “increased substantially,” Somma said, thanks to the end of commercial whaling and protections of the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammals Protection Act. But exactly how much they’ve increased is hard to estimate.

“Our status review does talk in terms of having a population of at least 1,000 animals to ensure that there is at least some level of viability, but it’s not a hard and fast number,” Somma said, adding that the 1,000-animal goal applies to each of the 14 humpback whale populations.

According to NOAA Fisheries data estimates, there are somewhere around 80,000 humpback whales in the world’s oceans, with 10,000-12,000 of them, the West Indies population, swimming up and down the East Coast of North America. The same number of whales is estimated to be living in the Hawaii population in the Pacific Ocean.

The largest population, West Australia, is estimated to have around 21,000 whales. The four remaining endangered populations – Cape Verde Islands/Northwest Africa, Western North Pacific, Central America and Arabian Sea – may have fewer than 1,600 humpback whales combined.

Marta Nammack, the national Endangered Species Act listing coordinator for NOAA Fisheries, said threats against the four endangered populations include fishing gear entanglements, energy exploration and development, vessel collision and climate change.

She noted that some threats are more severe than others depending on the region of the whale population, and that in some cases, such as with the Cape Verde Islands/Northwest Africa population that may have fewer than 100 whales, there simply isn’t enough data to justify removing the whales from the endangered species list.

Somma said that climate change was a factor in the analysis of the humpback whale populations, and is one that will continue to be looked at, along with other threats to humpbacks, in the future.

“As a general matter, NOAA Fisheries is trying to assess the potential impact of climate change on all of the species for which we manage so we can better understand how to manage them in the future,” she said. “For those (humpback) populations that will no longer be on the endangered species list, we have developed a monitoring plan for the next 10 years to continue to assess their status.

“That monitoring plan is not specifically targeted at climate change but it certainly is going to look at the health of those populations. And if there are any changes in those populations, the monitoring plan is designed to help us understand why that might be occurring.”

Learn More

• Marine Mammal Protection Act
• Song of the humpback whale