Archaeologists and historians are going to share their evidence of mixed Elizabethan-Algonquian material culture at sites on Hatteras Island during the March installment of the “Science on the Sound” series.

“The Smoking Gun?: New Radiocarbon Dates and Hunting Practices Linking Hatteras Island to Fort Raleigh in the Sixteenth Century” is scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday, March 26, at the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus.

The public is encouraged to attend the program being offered at no charge or view the presentation via YouTube. “Science on the Sound” is a monthly, in-person lecture series highlighting coastal topics.

The nonprofit Croatoan Archaeological Society and the University of Bristol have uncovered evidence that “strongly suggests Hatteras was the location where at least some of the ‘lost’ colonists re-settled when they went missing between 1587 and 1590,” organizers said.

“These objects have been cautiously interpreted, however, since European objects may have been traded long after those who originally brought them to the Carolina coast had passed away,” they continued. “Here we summarize past findings and describe the clearest evidence to date that the 1587 colonists were present on Hatteras Island: biogeochemical, radiocarbon, osteological, and metalwork evidence that demonstrate the presence of late sixteenth century firearms and hunting practices on Croatoan land.”

Beth Scaffidi, Mark Horton and Scott Dawson are presenting.

Scaffidi is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Heritage Studies, director of the Skeletal & Environmental Isotope Laboratory, or SEIL, and co-director of various archaeological field research programs in Peru. She uses bioarchaeological isotopes, palaeopathology and spatial analysis to investigate how interactions between ritual, landscapes and resources co-constitute human and environmental health.

Horton is the pro vice-chancellor of Research and Enterprise and professor of historical archeology at the Royal Agricultural University of England. He specializes in landscape archeology and archaeological science methods as applied to maritime and Colonial contexts around the globe and emphasizes public outreach and conservation of material culture.

Dawson is an area historian, director of the Croatoan Archaeological Society, and owner of the Lost Colony Museum in Buxton. He has been co-directing archaeological excavation of Cape Hatteras sites with Horton and society volunteers for over a decade.

Young learners with an interest in science, technology, engineering, art, and math can get hands-on experience at the Coastal Studies Institute at the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese this summer.

Online registration opens March 2 for the camps that explore the Outer Banks. The fee is $425 a week for each camper.

Camps are 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, and held every week from June 6 to Aug. 7. No camp is scheduled for the week of Fourth of July.

Themes for campers ages 10 to 13 include the following:

• “Coastal Kingdoms: Coastal Marine Biology + Ecology Camp” June 8-12 and June 15-19.
• “Shapes in Science: Art + Science Camp” June 22-26 and July 6-10.
• “Blue Horizons: Coastal Engineering Camp” July 13-17 and July 20-24.
• “Legends of the Atlantic: Maritime Archeology + Ocean Exploration Camp” July 27-31 and Aug. 3-7.

Organizers have planed a one-week camp for ages 13-17 themed “Coastal Explorers: Marine Science Technology & Remote Sensing Camp” for Aug. 10-14.

Contact Parker Murphy at 252-475-5452 for general camp questions. Contact ECU Continuing and Professional Education at 252-328-9198 about the registration process.

Led by East Carolina University, Coastal Studies Institute is a multi-institutional research and educational partnership of the UNC System, in partnership with North Carolina State University, UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Wilmington and Elizabeth City State University.

Get a peek of the underwater world of maritime archaeology at 4 p.m. Wednesday with the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University on its Outer Banks Campus.

The program, “Maritime Mysteries,” at the facility in Wanchese is an opportunity to learn about North Carolina’s maritime history and how its studied.

The interactive lesson is for families with children 7 and older.

The session is open to the public with limited availability, on a first-come, first-serve basis, at $10 per person.

Contact Lauren Kerlin at kerlinl22@ecu.edu or 252-475-5451 with questions or for more information.

Budding birders and seasoned ornithologists alike are invited to join Coastal Studies Institute educators for a guided winter birding experience at Lake Mattamuskeet.

Participants are to meet at the institute at 7 a.m. Monday. Transportation to and from Lake Mattamuskeet will be provided. The group is expected to return to the institute around noon. Registration for the program is required and can be done online. Cost to attend is $25 per person.

“This field-based program will introduce participants to the remarkable diversity of ducks, swans, geese, and other wetland birds that gather here each winter,” organizers said about Lake Mattamuskeet, calling the geographical feature “one of North Carolina’s premier waterfowl habitats and a critical stopover along the Atlantic Flyway.”

Participants are welcome and encouraged to bring personal cameras, binoculars, spotting scopes, and guidebooks. Appropriate attire for extended time outdoors is also encouraged.

“Expect plenty of time in the field with scopes and binoculars, great photo opportunities, and an engaging, place-based learning experience in one of the state’s most iconic wildlife refuges,” organizers added.

The Coastal Studies Institute on East Carolina University’s Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese is a multi-institutional research and educational partnership of the state’s university system and also includes N.C. State University, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, UNC Wilmington, and Elizabeth City State University.

Contact John McCord at mccordr@ecu.edu or 252-475-5450 with questions.

Nature-based coastal shoreline erosion control structures that successfully attract and grow oysters can better defend shores from waves, according to a study led by East Carolina University researchers.

The study, published late last year in the journal Scientific Reports, found that the more oyster-dense a breakwater designed to recruit and grow those shellfish is, the better that structure is at dissipating waves.

“We actually found that wave attenuation increased or improved as the structures recruited oysters,” said Georgette Tso, a doctoral candidate in ECU’s Integrated Coastal Sciences Program and co-author of the study.

As more and more oysters grow on a surface, their shells building layer by layer, those shells alter that structure’s surface, making that surface rougher and less permeable.

After documenting two seasons of oyster recruitment, researchers found that living shorelines constructed with living oyster breakwaters absorbed wave activity by an increase of 10-15%.

Their findings are based on observations of living shorelines at two private properties along Bogue Sound in Newport in Carteret County.

The structures were installed between May and June 2022 by Native Shorelines, the coastal resiliency division of Davey Resources Group, using concrete-based breakwater systems called QuickReef.

QuickReef is built from materials primarily of natural calcium carbonate formed into concrete slabs. Those slabs are installed to allow water flow and attract oyster larval, which attach to and grow on the structures.

Living shorelines are becoming increasingly attractive for coastal waterfront property owners seeking ways to curb erosion of their land.

“I think there’s been a lot more awareness within coastal North Carolina about living shoreline options as an alternative to a hardened shoreline, like bulkheads or some other vertical structure, which oftentimes actually costs more over time to repair. And, they’re not as resistant to hurricane damage because of that vertical profile,” Tso said.

The benefits of living shorelines, including their resiliency against the effects of rising sea levels, have been documented through research spanning back more than a decade.

But Tso said that there is little data how smaller-scale living shoreline projects like the ones she and her fellow scientists observed for this study actually change the way waves interact with shorelines.

Their observations proved to be “an exciting finding,” Tso said, because they prove what researchers have suspected for some time.

“Oysters grow vertically and they increase the roughness on the surfaces that they grow on. They also can grow within interstitial spaces and reduce porosity in that way. So, we hypothesized that the amount of wave attenuation a structure could provide would increase with the recruitment of live and healthy oyster populations,” she said. “This additional factor that’s not been explored, of it actually improving the wave attenuation potential and reducing the wave energy that hits the back of your shoreline over time, is something that we should communicate more to homeowners because they’ve actually bought into a solution that has increased benefits over time that they may not have anticipated when they first put in the structure.”

And while it’s fair to say the longer these structures recruit oysters the more protection they may offer to a shoreline, Tso said there is one important caveat.

“This is just a two-year study so we’re not capturing the point in time where the oyster population will eventually plateau. The size of the structure and the amount of food available to the oysters in the water is limited, obviously, so the oyster population will eventually plateau. So, though we’ve observed increases in wave attenuation potential, probably it’s going to cap off at some point,” she said.

It is also important to note that oyster recruitment and growth will not be the same at every shoreline.

Shorelines bend and curve, leaving pockets where water does not circulate to deliver oyster larvae.

“What we found is only relevant if your structure can actually recruit oysters, and that’s not true on all North Carolina shorelines,” Tso said. “If you don’t have baby oysters being delivered to your shoreline, you’re not going to be able to recruit oysters. If you’re in a site where that’s not possible then the wave attenuation potential that you have at construction is what you’re going to have. It’s not going to improve because you’re not recruiting oysters.”

Successful oyster larval recruitment and growth also depends on things like water temperature, salinity, and tidal variation.

Tso is in the process of analyzing data researchers collected last summer at more than a dozen QuickReef living shoreline sites. Scientists during that time also revisited their two original study sites, which continued to recruit oysters, Tso said.

The other researchers on this study include Dr. Siddharth Narayan, assistant professor in ECU’s Integrated Coastal Programs, Megan Geesin, a doctoral candidate at ECU, Dr. Matthew Reidenbach, professor and chair of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, Dr. Jens Figlus with Texas A&M’s Ocean Engineering Department, and Dr. Rachel Gittman, assistant professor with ECU’s Department of Biology.

A team has scheduled two discussions for later this month to hear from Ocracoke residents their thoughts on the challenges associated with changes to the physical environment the island is likely to experience.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, Duke University and East Carolina University researchers have already completed a multiyear research project that simulates how the physical landscape such as beaches, shoreline, dunes and marshes of Ocracoke Island may change in the future because of road management decisions.

The team now is looking to hear from residents their perspective on meeting these challenges, particularly to transportation and accessing the island.

Sessions are scheduled for 1-3 p.m. Friday, Jan. 30, and 10 a.m.-noon Saturday, Jan. 31, at the Ocracoke Community Center. Reserve a spot to join the discussion. Participants must be an adult residing in Ocracoke.

“We’re conducting community deliberative dialogues to better understand your unique perspective about the challenges Ocracoke faces due to increasing environmental hazards,” researchers said. The two “events are a part of a research study to gain a better understanding of how communities demonstrate scientific literacy, within the context of coastal resilience issues and solutions.”

A deliberative dialogue is a structured discussion, moderated to help foster open conversations and provide an opportunity to share and hear different perspectives.

K.C. Busch, who can be reached at kbusch@ncsu.edu, is leading the study titled, “Redefining Scientific Literacy At The Community Level.”

Why do sheepshead have a mouthful of human-like teeth? Fisheries ecologist Dr. Jim Morley will explain that and more during this month’s “Science on the Sound” Lecture Series.

Morley, an assistant professor in the biology department at East Carolina University, will present, “Investigating the Life History of Sheepshead, North Carolina’s Toothiest Fish,” starting at 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 15, at the Coastal Studies Institute on the ECU Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese.

The public is encouraged to attend the program being offered at no charge. The talk will be livestreamed on the CSI YouTube Channel and archived for later viewing.

Though sheepshead are a popular species among anglers throughout the state, their life history is one of the most poorly understood, according to the university. “Recently, researchers have uncovered important aspects of sheepshead biology relating to reproduction, movement patterns, and habitat use. However, as with all good science, new questions emerge.”

Morley has been investigating the life history of marine and estuarine species in North Carolina for more than 20 years. He is interested in how human-caused disturbances and climate change interact with the life cycles of aquatic species.

Science on the Sound is a monthly, in-person lecture series with the Coastal Studies Institute that brings perspectives from all over the state and highlights coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina.

Coastal oceanographer Dr. Reide Corbett will speak later this week on how the Outer Banks are changing during the first OBX Green Drinks of the year.

He is to give his talk, “Science, Shorelines, and Tradeoffs: Understanding What’s Happening Along the Outer Banks Coast,” at 6 p.m. Thursday at Waverider’s in Nags Head. The program is offered at no charge, food and drinks are available for purchase.

Corbett is the executive director of the Coastal Studies Institute and dean of Integrated Coastal Programs, both at East Carolina University Outer Banks campus in Wanchese, and professor in the Department of Coastal Studies at East Carolina University.

Corbett will explain what the science is showing about shoreline change, coastal dynamics, and the tradeoffs that come with decisions about managing and protecting the coast.

OBX Green Drinks is a monthly speaker series held October through March at Waverider’s in Nags Head. Organized by the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, the program brings together the Outer Banks community for an evening of networking, presentations on local environmental topics, and enjoying good food and drink.

BUXTON – Faced with devastating destruction across a significant segment of its beachfront, this small Outer Banks village is seeking help for coastal solutions, including measures that could require potentially controversial legislative action by the state and federal governments.

Since September, 15 houses have collapsed on a stretch of beach in Buxton just north of Cape Hatteras, the distinctive point of land midway along the East Coast that juts far into the Atlantic. Adaptation to storms and natural forces have fortified the community since its establishment in the late 1800s, but now stunningly rapid erosion is endangering its future.

“Today, small areas of our oceanfront have deteriorated to the point where we can no longer shoulder these challenges alone,” Dare County Board of Commissioners Chairman Bob Woodard wrote to members of the North Carolina General Assembly in November. “With your support, we can preserve our coastline, protect public infrastructure, and sustain the economic engine that benefits all of North Carolina.”

The county is one of the few “donor counties” in North Carolina, with more than 3 million people annually visiting Dare’s beaches and national parks and generating significant state tax revenue, he said. So far, he added, the county has spent about $275 million for beach nourishment as well as additional millions to maintain inlets, with little state or federal assistance.

In addition to a beach nourishment project in 2026 for Buxton, the county is planning to repair a purportedly half-intact groin, one of three installed in 1969 to protect the former Navy base constructed in 1956 near the original location of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.

Dare and Hyde counties also have asked the state Division of Coastal Management to lift the 1985 state ban against hardened structures so the remnants of the two deteriorated groins at the site can be replaced.

But beach stabilization of any sort on the Outer Banks, with its extraordinarily high-energy coastal conditions, is becoming more challenging in a changing climate with quickly evolving and often unpredictable consequences: Sea levels are increasing faster than projected, storms are intensifying, rainfall is heavier.

In recent years, Hatteras and Ocracoke islands on the barrier islands’ southern end have been suffering dramatically increased shoaling in its inlets and far worse erosion at numerous hot spots along N.C. 12, the island’s only highway. Over wash, loss of dunes and road damage is becoming more frequent and difficult to mitigate, sometimes resulting in loss of vehicular access for hours or days. 

People say things feel different. Residents — from old timers to long-time transplants — have noticed places flooding where they never did before, shoaling in waterways that had never clogged before, and erosion consuming an entire shoreline that had been wide and stable just a few years before. And this fall and winter, even seasonal nor’easters have switched to overdrive, with the storms coming in one after another and more often than some ole salts say they’ve ever seen. 

“When we really developed these islands in the ’70s and ’80s, it was a different system, and we need to recognize that, acknowledge it, and plan accordingly,” Reide Corbett, executive director of the Coastal Studies Institute and Dean of the Integrated Coastal Program at East Carolina University, said in a recent interview. “We can’t let self-interest lead the way. We need to understand what this looks like, and we need to get behind better policy. And it starts with how we develop.”

Responding to increasing numbers of house collapses in Buxton and Rodanthe, the Hatteras Island’s northernmost village, state leaders are urging Congress to pass legislation introduced by Rep. Greg Murphy, a Republican from North Carolina’s 3rd District, that would authorize proactive Federal Emergency Management Agency flood insurance payments to remove threatened oceanfront houses before they fall.

While the proposal has garnered bipartisan support, FEMA is currently understaffed and targeted for downsizing, reorganization or even elimination, and its flood insurance program is woefully underfunded.

A delegation representing local, state and federal officials toured the damaged area in Buxton on Nov. 24, where dozens of additional oceanfront houses are scattered willy-nilly, awaiting near-certain demise. Numerous members of the group expressed shock at the disarray and destruction at the scene.

Meanwhile, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Reid Wilson has directed the Coastal Resources Commission’s Science Panel to analyze shoreline stabilization options, including the potential effectiveness or negative impacts of groins.

Erosion on Buxton’s oceanfront has been a persistent problem for many decades, at least to the infrastructure on the beach, such as the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.

“It was quite obvious to everybody that in the course of time the lighthouse would topple into the Atlantic Ocean and the thousand acres of park land, upon which no tree and scarcely any blade of grass grew, would be swallowed up by the warring ocean currents that swirl around the point of Cape Hatteras,” author Ben Dixon MacNeill wrote in an article published on July 30, 1948, in the Coastland Times. At that point, he noted, in just the lifetime of a middle-aged man, erosion had already whittled away 1,500 feet of beach. 

Despite the 1937 congressional directive to the National Park Service to preserve what would later become Cape Hatteras National Seashore as a “primitive wilderness,” until the early 1970s, according to park documents, the agency spent more than $20 million to stop the “natural process” of barrier island movement. Projects included installing in 1930 steel sheet pile groins along the beach by Cape Hatteras Lighthouse; installing in 1933 additional sheet pile groins at the lighthouse; nourishment of the beach in 1966 near the Buxton motel area with sand dredged from Pamlico Sound; and in 1967 placement of revetment of large nylon sandbags in front of the lighthouse.

In addition, the U.S. Navy built three reinforced concrete groins in 1969 to protect its facility near the lighthouse; the beach near the Buxton motels was nourished again in 1971 with material dredged from Cape Point; and the beach near the Navy operation was nourished in 1973 with Cape Point sand. 

Those actions were in addition to construction and repeated reconstruction of sand dunes, as well as beach fences and planting grasses, shrubs and trees to hold the dunes. 

Finally, in 1973, the National Park Service acknowledged the futility and unsustainable costs of stabilization, and abandoned its efforts. The agency, however, did continue various attempts to protect the lighthouse with riprap, offshore artificial grass, sandbags and a scour-mat apron. With the sea by then lapping at its base, the lighthouse in 1999 was relocated a half-mile inland.

In a letter dated Jan. 9, 1974, from the U.S. Department of Interior to a Buxton resident, the agency promised that all available data would be analyzed before determining future beach stabilization management decisions in the Seashore, including relative to the groins.

“The most reliable scientific data we have obtained thus far offer no evidence that the existing jetties or groins at Buxton provide acceptable protection from ocean forces,” the department added. “While some stabilizing effect may be gained in the immediate area, the jetties actually cause more erosion in adjacent locations.”

A report the year earlier published by University of Virginia coastal scientist Robert Dolan, et. al, to analyze the effects of beach nourishment in Buxton, in fact, said that the groins — short jetties extending from a shoreline — rapidly increased erosion by the motel area, causing dune destruction and ocean over wash into private property.

“The groins, somewhat unexpectedly, are trapping sediment at the expense of the beaches to either side and as a result of their success, the reach protected by the groins has become stable,” the report said, adding that the localized erosion problem at Buxton had followed construction of the groins.

Barely more than four years after they were built, the groins were damaged by storms and required repairs with new sheet piling. Patches and reinforcements continued until the Navy in 1982 abandoned the base, apparently leaving the groins to the elements.

By the time heated discussions kicked in about whether the lighthouse should be saved in place or moved, the community tried to persuade the federal government to not only maintain the by-then-deteriorating existing groins, but also to add a fourth groin. The petition was soundly rejected, and the Navy, the Park Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers appeared to want nothing to do with the groins.

Today, the county sees the sand trapping barriers — even a single groin — as a way to prolong the effectiveness of a $50 million beach nourishment project, and importantly, as a way to buy time while consultants determine a long-term strategy for Buxton.

Dare County Manager Bobby Outten reported in March that, according to Coastal Science & Engineering, the firm hired to do the beach nourishment and groin work, the southern-most groin would meet the state’s 50% rule that allows repair of an existing structure that has 50% or less in damages. The county is currently awaiting approval from the state, as well as acknowledgement that the application meets the exemption criteria for an exemption from the hardened structures statute, he said.

If the groin work is approved, contractors estimate the $2 to $4 million project would take up to two months to complete this summer and involve about 640 feet of repairs, using steel sheet pile and riprap scour protection within the original footprint.

As Outten summed up the current dilemma facing Dare and other North Carolina coastal communities: There are two extremes, either hold the coast in place as it is, and build sea walls. Or let nature take its course, let the houses fall and see the economy crumble.

“And neither one of those extremes is acceptable,” he told Coastal Review. “To anybody.”

Sinking your teeth into a buttery, old-fashioned sweet potato biscuit is a legendary experience quickly fading into North Carolina culinary obscurity despite an almost unbelievable pedigree.

Sweet potato biscuits were reportedly served at the opening of the First Continental Congress in 1774. One hundred and forty-eight years later, the great African American botanist George Washington Carver championed this Southern delight as a crucial way farmers could diversify their crop usage.

That significant history is now mostly memorialized in memory. East Carolina University alumni long past their college days join locals in pining for the version once served at the late Venter’s Grill in Greenville. Shuttered Sweet Potatoes Restaurant in Winston-Salem was celebrated for a recipe that today endures only in cofounder Stephanie Tyson’s “Well Shut My Mouth” cookbook.

With North Carolina foodways vanishing as quickly as residential sprawl eats up the state’s farmland, sweet potato biscuits are becoming rare finds on menus and in the repertoire of home cooks. But in Camden, it stands as a delicious reminder of why such a simple thing is worth saving.

Beyond nostalgia

On a foggy morning in the tiny, coastal community, dogs bound excitedly through endless farm fields. Ruritan Club signs announcing a Brunswick stew sale dominate political H-stakes stuck along the roadside.

Inside a crossroads restaurant marked by an age-tangled oak tree, the caramelly aroma of roasting sweet potatoes fills the kitchen as chef Katherine “Kat” Silverwood’s wooden rolling pin squeaks across a cold-hard block of pastel-orange dough.

“We found that sweet potato biscuits actually act better if you make the dough day before,” she says. “It’s best to let it chill for at least a few hours.”

Silverwood knows what she’s talking about. Her Taylor’s Oak Restaurant produces hundreds of sweet potato biscuits each year, especially around Christmastime when fastidious locals, like many North Carolinians, relish fried country ham on their sweet potato biscuits.

 “You feed a bunch of old farmers, you better be making something from scratch,” Silverwood said.

That kind of cooking is what the chef grew up on in Camden. Vegetables fresh from her parents’ garden and baking with Grandma launched her interest in cooking as a child.

She never encountered sweet potato biscuits until around age 9 or 10. Her sister was dating and ultimately married a farmer. His mother made sweet potato biscuits. Silverwood was smitten at first bite. Within a year or so, she was baking her own.

“It’s like that perfect balance of the sweet and the savory,” she said.

As much as Silverwood loved cooking, she didn’t envision it as a worthwhile career. Instead, she joined the military and worked in construction but always had a kitchen side gig. Along the way, she honed her sweet potato biscuit recipe, testing tips from fellow chefs, like folding the dough during rolling to achieve flaky layers.

Eventually, Silverwood accepted her calling, taking a full-time chef position and dreaming of one day opening a restaurant. Her position left time for a night job. She asked the grandfather of a childhood friend if he needed a hand at the family’s new venture, Taylor’s Oak Restaurant. The spot held a special place in Silverwood’s own heritage. Her maternal aunt married into the Taylor family. The couple helped raise Silverwood’s mother after she lost her parents.

“They were only open one day a week. So, I asked if they would like some help, maybe get open for breakfast in the mornings. And that’s how I started here,” she says. “I wrote the recipe for sweet potato biscuits.”

When Silverwood had the opportunity to purchase the business a few years after starting at Taylor’s in 2018, the chapters of her sweet potato story culminated.

“As soon as we decided we were going to open up for dinner, I was like, ‘We got to have mini sweet potato biscuits go on the tables … that’s our signature,’” Silverwood says.

The perfect bite

Throughout telling her story, Silverwood shares many pointers for preparing and eating sweet potato biscuits. Besides chilling the dough before rolling, the Taylor’s team pinches cold butter into flour by hand, just like Silverwood was taught as a kid. They roast whole, skin-on sweet potatoes. Boiling would introduce too much moisture. Before mashing, they drain all liquid from the vegetable. Bags of the puree are frozen so that biscuits can be made quickly.

Just enough sugar goes into the dough to enhance the sweet potato flavor. That’s different from recipes like the one Venters’ chefs used all those years ago in Greenville. Silverwood’s biscuits are flaky and savory; Venters’ were soft, sweet and pillowy with pronounced notes of warm spices like cinnamon. The recipe for Sweet Potatoes Restaurant’s version falls somewhere in between.

“Everyone has their own different ‘you got to do it this way, you got to do it that way,’” Silverwood says, declining to share the family recipe that inspired her way.

Carver’s formula, among the earliest, verifiable printed recipes, leans soft and savory. Although the biscuits served at the First Continental Congress have been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, no original recipe has been found. Any biscuit recipe Jefferson favored was likely developed in kitchens run by enslaved Africans. This is also true for the sweet and salty combination of fried country ham sandwiched between a sweet potato biscuit.

Silverwood prefers less salty city ham rather than country ham. A slice of New Jersey’s Taylor pork roll (no relation) is even better, she reveals. Sausage plus a little mustard is tasty, too, as was the sandwich she offered with pimento cheese and spicy fried chicken.

Still, most Taylor’s Oak Restaurant customers ask for country ham. It’s easy to understand why when Silverwood finally splits open a hot sweet potato biscuit and lays on sizzling country ham directly from the griddle.

The hot ham melds with the biscuit’s interior, creating an almost creamy texture and old-fashioned flavor that fills your mind with memories of home, family and holiday anticipation. Suddenly, you’re wrapped in thoughts of icy mornings, coffee boiling on an old stove and the simple life you wonder why anyone would leave behind.

“I’ve had a couple people almost bring me to tears because they said ‘That’s just how my grandma used to make it taste,” Silverwood says, “‘exactly like that.’”

With each humble bite, the sweet potato biscuit becomes more than a meal; it is a profound, lasting link between generations. It is the legacy of a waning recipe that fatefully defined one woman’s life and continues, every day in Camden, to feed the soul of an entire community.

Sweet Potato Biscuits

Take:

½ cupful mashed sweet potatoes

½ teaspoon salt

1 cupful flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

2 tablespoons butter or lard

Milk sufficient to make a soft dough.

Sift the flour, salt and baking powder together several times; add these to the potatoes, mixing in with a knife.

Now work the fat into the mixture lightly; add the milk; work quickly and lightly until a soft dough is formed; turn out on a floured board; pat and roll out lightly until about one-half inch thick; cut into biscuits; place on buttered or greased pans and bake 12 or 15 minutes in a quick oven.

Source: “How the Farmer Can Save His Sweet Potatoes and Ways of Preparing Them for the Table” by George Washington Carver (Tuskegee Institute Press 1937).

Student researchers will present their findings on Nags Head Woods during the next installment of the “Science on the Sound” lecture series presented by the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus.

The lecture, “Patterns of protection: Natural and Social Values of the Nags Head Woods Maritime Forest,” is set for 3 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 11, at the Coastal Studies Institute, 850 N.C. Highway 345, Wanchese.

The program is free and the public is encouraged to attend. The program will also be livestreamed on YouTube.

The monthly, in-person, lecture series at the Coastal Studies Institute brings perspectives from all over the state and highlights coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina.

During this month’s program, students of the Outer Banks Field Site will present the findings of their capstone research project.

The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute for the Environment’s Outer Banks Field Site is a semester-long, interdisciplinary residential learning experience for undergraduate students hosted by the Coastal Studies Institute. Each fall since 2001, these students have spent the semester taking classes, engaging in internships with local organizations, and completing a capstone research project as a group.

This year’s research examines the maritime forest within the Nags Head Woods Preserve. The students interviewed stakeholders about the values that they ascribe to the woods and collected data about the salt spray, vegetation, and wildlife within the woods. The program will last about 90 minutes, including presentation, questions and discussion.

East Carolina University associate professor of coastal studies Dr. David Lagomasino will be the featured lecturer Thursday for the Coastal Studies Institute’s Science on the Sound Lecture Series.

Lagomasino will present, “Watching the Tides Roll: How Satellites Inform the Future of Coastal Communities” starting at 6 p.m. as part of the monthly, in-person lecture series at the ECU Outer Banks Campus.

Organizers say the series brings perspectives from all over the state and highlights coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina. The public is encouraged to attend and there’s no admission charge. The program will also be livestreamed on YouTube.

“From space, satellites capture the shifting shorelines, retreating beaches, and changing wetlands that define our coasts,” according to organizers. “In this talk, Dr. David Lagomasino will share stories of coastal change from around the world, from tropical mangroves to marshes and barrier islands, and connect those lessons to the challenges and opportunities facing communities on the Outer Banks. By connecting global perspectives with local insights, the seminar will explore how science can guide resilience planning and help coastal communities prepare for the future.”

Lagomasino’s passion for beaches and mangrove forests began in South Florida and has taken him around the world. He earned his Master of Science in geology from ECU and his doctorate in geological sciences from Florida International University, where he used satellite imagery and water chemistry to study coastal water flow.

Before returning to CSI and ECU’s Department of Coastal Studies, Lagomasino conducted research at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, developing models to understand global shoreline change.

Lagomasino combines satellite, drone, and field data to assess coastal resilience and vulnerability, linking his findings directly with stakeholders to guide coastal management and ecosystem valuation, organizers said. “His work, supported by NASA and USDA programs, focuses on coastal blue carbon and has taken him to shorelines worldwide. Dedicated to mentoring students, he emphasizes hands-on research and community engagement to promote informed coastal stewardship.”

Editor’s note: Second in a series on the newest work by coastal geologist Stan Riggs, the following is an excerpt from “Cape Lookout National Seashore: Paradigm For A Coastal System Ethic.”

The book, with a foreword by conservationist Tom Earnhardt, a North Carolina Coastal Federation board member, is the first in the “North Carolina Land of Water” book series and focuses on the Cape Lookout National Seashore.

The nearly 300 photographs, maps and illustrations of shifting dunes, barrier islands and coastal wildlife are interwoven with carefully crafted maps and drawings, “tracing our coast from its ancient past through the centuries to our modern present,” according to NCLOW, the nonprofit founded by Riggs and fellow coastal geologist Dr. Dorothea V. Ames.

NCLOW’s stated mission “is to sustain NC’s dynamic water, land and air systems for generations to come.”

Land-Water-Air Interface: Nature’s Coastal Systems

I like to think that actively evolving coastal systems are like the human body with its totally interdependent array of subsystems: skeletal, muscular, circulatory, pulmonary, nervous, and endocrine systems driven by the incredible brain, heart, and lungs. It is difficult to live a healthy life without all these bodily components working intimately together. Likewise, our coastal system is dominated by an interdependent array of complex subsystems: landscapes, waterscapes, and airscapes all interacting at the land-water-air interface. The geographic conditions, geologic dynamics, meteorologic forces, and chemical-biological characteristics are critical variables that interact to produce a living, breathing, and evolving coastal system. Major coastal system drivers are the Earth’s physical landscape dynamics (uplifting of mountains and opening of ocean basins), its space partners (creating climatic zones and setting the waterscape and airscape into motion), and the life-giving energy from the almighty Sun (driving the hydrologic cycle and atmospheric circulation that dictates the resulting biosphere).

Throughout the world, wherever a water body (ocean, sea, lake, or river) meets the surrounding land, a coastal system occurs. Because all water bodies and land masses are uniquely different, no two coastal systems are alike. Rather, they each display the influence of multiple variables producing continuums of coastal system types. The landscape may be mountainous or low flatlands dominated by hard rock, sand and mud sediment, or rich and black organic matter; located in the polar, temperate, or tropical regions; or it may occur in a stable tectonic zone, an active earthquake zone, or an area dominated by volcanic activity. Likewise, the size, location, and physical-chemical-biological characteristics of the water body are also determining characteristics. A critical third component also occurs at every land-water intersection; this is the overlying atmosphere and its climatic characteristics that help determine the ultimate character and are the drivers of change for each coastal system.

Like the human body, coastal systems tend to be extremely dynamic, changing in response to energy input at several different time scales. Volcanic activity (Hawaiian Island coasts) and earthquakes (US Pacific coasts), the dominant sources of energy, occur over decades, centuries, and millennia. However, the energy input from atmospheric storm dynamics affects all coastal systems and is the dominant energy source along the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts, occurring at irregular but frequent short-term time scales. An extremely active atmosphere with rapidly changing climatic conditions is the overwhelming cumulative force that routinely produces short-term changes and long-term evolution associated with most southeastern US coastal systems. The ultimate driver of these climate systems and associated storms is our space partner, the Sun.

Natural Function of Barrier Islands: Limits to Growth, Development

Barrier islands and their associated water bodies have a set of dynamics that are established by the natural functions of Earth’s systems. The word “function” relative to the interactions between the land-water-air interface means assigned actions, activities, duties, or role. The function of interstate highways is to get vehicles from point A to point B very fast. Yes, I can ride my bike or have a picnic on an interstate, but it is guaranteed suicide for me to do so. I might instead ride a bike on a dead-end backcountry road or on a former railroad bed that has been disconnected from the grid, as these now have totally different functions. Rest areas with picnic tables and dog parks are already major components of most interstate highways and they might have separately constructed bike lanes in the future, but not today.

Absolute limits exist as to the number, size, and speed of vehicles that can use a one-lane dirt road. Absolute but different limits occur when it becomes a paved two-lane road. Soon the two-lane road becomes overwhelmed, and it is expanded to a four-lane highway, and with continued growth and development in expanding urban areas, it will evolve into six- and eight-lane segments. At some point in the situation of unlimited growth and development the function of each system will break down. Then society is generally forced to come up with new rules or zoning conditions essential for developing an upgraded or new roadway system that requires new land and higher-grade building materials for new types of vehicles that need higher speed limits, and so on.

Similar rules, or zoning, what I call geo-zoning or eco-zoning, must now be considered for natural landscapes, waterscapes, and airscapes confronted with the pressures of unlimited growth and development. The problem is that society generally sets economic rules concerning natural dynamics that maximize profits and minimize the cost of living. For example, many laws require state and federal contracts to go to the lowest bidder or require projects to have a certain cost-benefit ratio.

Often this requires that new roadways go straight through natural areas or over waterways. These laws also often eliminate or divide impoverished and minority urban areas, as well as promote minimum water drainage structures and shorter project life expectancies. Rarely do they take into consideration the cumulative impact or unintended consequences on complex, interdependent systems. In addition, a general lack of understanding of the scientific dynamics of many Earth systems leads directly to minimizing the use of scientific data relative to the economic impact of a project. Good societal and natural reasons exist for limits and constraints on our riding bikes on interstate highways; the same is true for living in active riverine floodplains, discharging waste into waterways, or building houses on ocean shorelines.

Barrier islands and their beaches are only mobile piles of sand at the intersection of land, water, and air. Yes, this is real estate that can be subdivided into house lots and developed from shore to shore. However, shoreline lots are not equal to those in the middle of an island since they are direct products of regular storm dynamics on the adjacent water body. A waterfront house for living is like camping on the interstate. The only good news is that your eventual demise will be a bit slower on the beach. With unlimited growth and development, all possible island lots are plotted, sold, and built on. This increased growth soon pressures us to replace our ferry boats with two-lane bridges that quickly become overloaded. Then new four-lane bridges are justified on the premise of the need to get more people safely off the islands during storms. Family beach cottages are rapidly replaced by big businesses that rise vertically as rental McMansions, condominiums, hotels, and full urbanization sets in.

Because sea level is rising and storms continue to impact the barrier islands with more people and larger shoreline structures attempting to prevent the shorelines from moving, beach sand begins to disappear. Pumping new sand onto the islands becomes essential, but it is soon gone even as the islands continue to be developed. The natural coastal system is now destabilized, requiring construction of groins, jetties, and bulkheads to desperately hold a beach and stop shoreline recession. Ultimately, the islands will be encased in steel, concrete, and rock walls with little to no sandy beach along an increasingly steeper shoreface.

When economic development wins the battle, with permanently fixed commercial islands in the ocean covered with urban accoutrements ranging from shopping malls to freshwater parks, the islands will have new economic functions. What happened to the barrier island with its unique natural functions and ecosystems associated with high energy sand beaches, dune fields, tide flats, and marshes that harbored the ghost crabs, sea turtles, and shorebirds? Natural barrier island limits have been violated by unlimited growth and development, and once again the stage is set for the perfect conflict between humans and their natural environment.

Similar to barrier islands, other geographic basins on Earth’s surface and in wet climatic zones (swamps, ponds, lakes, or ocean) have a function of holding water. If the geographic basin is linear and open-ended, its function might be to carry a moving flow of water, generally known as a river. Each type of water system has its own specific functions, each dictating different limits to contiguous growth and development.

Absolute limits to growth and types of development exist for high energy and mobile barrier island sand piles, riverine floodplains, swamp-forest pocosins, and estuarine marshes. Similarly, limits pertain to other landscapes, including the savage clear-cuts of the northwest US rain forests, excavations of Appalachian Mountain tops for coal, the vast deforestation of the Amazon jungle—these are all tracts of insatiable consumption driven by the indigenous American spirit monster of self-destruction. “Unlimited” human consumption has consequences; infinite growth on a finite planet is generally not compatible with natural law. We must embrace the radical notion that all of Earth’s natural resources and crucial ecosystem services are essential if we are to maintain a sustainable and high quality of life in society’s future.

Fortunately, some barrier islands, estuarine water bodies, riverine floodplains, and pocosin swamp forests have been protected from the perils of total modification and urbanization by establishing different forms of protected status such as national seashores, wildlife refuges, coastal preserves, state parks, and conservancy lands. The preservation of Cape Lookout National Seashore, or CALO in 1976 clearly demonstrates the critical interdependence between storm dynamics and the barrier island buffer zone. For these intermediary habitats to continue functioning as nature’s speed bumps, storms must unleash tremendous energy across the coastal wetlands—flooding marshes, reshaping shorelines, and maintaining the shifting sands of healthy barrier islands that buffer the uplands from the sea.

Developing a New Coastal System Ethic

In 1949, Aldo Leopold presented to the world his critical concept of a land ethic. This ethic was primarily focused on Earth’s land-based environments in general; it did not directly address either water or air as discreet components with equal voices to that of uplands. However, in the real world of our planet, land-water-air all form a crucial and highly interwoven trinity, a complex and totally integrated system of subsystems not unlike the human body or every other living organism whose component systems are interactive and interdependent parts of the whole. Society needs to apply Leopold’s land ethic to the total tripartite system of the whole Earth and its multitude of land-water-air based environments. One of the most dynamic parts of that system is the coastal component where the planet’s water world meets land, and wherever this occurs, the resultant climatic conditions tend to drive the energetic forces. This new variant of a coastal system ethic places boundaries around those regions where land and water meet and operates in response to atmospheric dynamics. In these uniquely high energy regions where forces collide, change is dominant and will always prevail.

First of two parts.

It was a nasty January day about 14 years ago, not long after publication of his book, “The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast: Evolutionary History, Present Crisis, and Vision for the Future,” when veteran East Carolina University coastal scientist Dr. Stan Riggs, the book’s lead author, had an unexpected and impactful visit. Not only did it prolong the sunset of his then-50-yearlong career, it cemented the reach of his legacy beyond academia to the lives of everyday people.

And it inspired Riggs to write 10 reader-friendly books focused on a blend of science, culture and history of North Carolina’s northeast and central coastal region.

Related: Riggs to launch first book in series Sunday on Harkers Island

“I’ve done a lot of work here, but science builds on itself,” he said. “And so, I just decided in 2018 that they could just put me in the ground, and who would care? Who would know what I’ve learned?”

In October, the first volume in the series, “Cape Lookout National Seashore, Paradigm for a Coastal System Ethic,” was released. Subsequent volumes, several of which are already written, will cover North Carolinas Inner Banks, or inland coastal region, Outer Banks and the continental shelf.

The books, all planned for release over the next three years, present Riggs’ coastal science research in accessible and understandable language, accompanied by striking photographs and graphics that seek to educate, enrich and engage readers.

Also, the ecotourism-centered program called North Carolina Land of Water that was first proposed in the book, “The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast,” has been transformed from a dim concept into its current sunbeam of possibilities. All because of the support offered to him on that blustery day.

“A nor’easter was blowing Billy out there — it was cold!,” Riggs, 87, recalled in a recent interview with Coastal Review. “I got a knock on the door, and two people were standing there. They introduced themselves and asked if we would take them out on a field trip. And I said, ‘You don’t want to go out there today.’”

But they insisted on a tour of the region he and his co-authors had written about in the book. They wanted to see it for themselves, and chat with some of the folks who lived there. Intrigued, and convinced his visitors were serious, Riggs made some quick phone calls, and soon they were all piling into a vehicle and hitting the road.

“We had one hell of a good trip,” Riggs recalled about the four-day adventure. Starting in Greenville, the group wound their way through the Albemarle Penisula and Inner Banks counties, along rivers, through the wildlife refuges, and down the Outer Banks to Ocracoke Island, then on to a ferry to the Core Banks. Some year-round residents shared “incredible” meals, he said, and invited them to stay.

“We covered the whole system,” Riggs said, a tinge of amazement still in his voice. Finally, as everyone said their goodbyes, one man got out of the car and walked over to Riggs.

“He put his arm around my shoulder, and he said, ‘The real reason we’re here is we’re going to give you some money.’

Surprised, Riggs responded: “‘I don’t need money.’ He said, ‘Yes, you do.’ I said, ‘Why?’”

“‘We want you to implement the vision that you set out in your book,’” Riggs recalled. “And that was the beginning of NCLOW.”

After the visit, representatives from the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science at North Carolina State University provided funding for Riggs to create the North Carolina Land of Water, or NCLOW. The nonprofit is “dedicated to advancing coastal science, education, and community stewardship through research, outreach, and partnerships,” while working to ensure that the state’s coastal systems are “understood and safeguarded,” according to a press release.

In October, NCLOW announced the appointment of Stanton Blakeslee to its board of directors to guide the nonprofit’s future projects and fundraising. As noted in the release, the appointment “comes at a critical inflection point for the organization,” and his leadership will encourage “strategic investment and cross-sector innovation.”

Blakeslee, 55, who had attended ECU and worked for the N.C. Literary Review, is currently the president and CEO of Instigator Inc., a Greenville-based life science marketing firm. His experience includes investment in real estate development and consumer goods industries, and he serves as a member of the East Carolina Angels, an angel investment network.

So far, he has helped Riggs divide his approach to NCLOW in two phases, Blakeslee said. 

“Phase one culminated with the development of the books,” he said. “It was a way for Stan to formalize not only his life’s work, but what he sees as a sustainable future for the coast.” 

Blakeslee’s background as an entrepreneur who understands private equity and venture capital as well as conservation work provides insight into the goals of NCLOW, he explained.

“So the more I started to hear about what he was envisioning, I was like, ‘Oh, wow. So there’s like an economic concept behind everything that you’re trying to do here.’ We’re not trying to stay off the coast. What we’re saying is let’s look at where the opportunities are and invest …  so we can sustain this resource for everyone.”

Riggs’ earlier work with the Bertie County and Scuppernong River projects are two big success stories that drive NCLOW’s future initiatives, Blakeslee added. By harnessing creative ideas to manage and maintain the natural resources, a community’s economy and sustainability can benefit. For example, Windsor, Bertie’s county seat, mitigated flooding risk by requesting the water in a river dam be released slowly about a week before a predicted storm. And the community constructed tree houses above the river’s edge to rent, which quickly became a popular ecotourism attraction.

“The geographic setting of Bertie County provides a prime basis to capitalize on the incredible water system it has been blessed with,” Riggs wrote in his 2018 report, “From Rivers to Sounds in the Bertie Water Crescent” that proposed an approach to ecotourism and environmental education. “Consequently, NCLOW recommends developing a series of five educational and recreational ‘water hubs’ for ecotourism development.”

NCLOW can serve as a catalyst for other communities to take active steps towards sustainability, Blakeslee said. It’s a matter of determining the challenges, how to address them, and how to transform them into economic opportunities.

“I think Stan proved a lot of that in its first 10 years,” he said. “And now we’re looking at what the next 10 years, and possibly 20 years, looks like.”

Over his long career, Riggs, professor emeritus at ECU, has authored or co-authored 16 books and more than 100 journal articles.  But data-heavy research terminology and scientific jargon is a heavy lift for nonscientist readers, Riggs noted, and he believes that educating people about the science in their lives is a critical responsibility so people can understand the processes and relevant public policies that affect their lives.

“You know, when I was at the university, I got all my salary and everything was public funds, and all my research came from public organizations,” he said. “And so I see this as a give-back. It’s one thing to go out there and do a project and raise money and write your technical papers. But nobody in the public domain will ever, ever, read a technical paper.”

Riggs said he decided to write the Cape Lookout book because it is a success story. The undeveloped barrier island showcases how natural beaches recover, adapt and rebuilt after storms because over wash and other coastal processes are not blocked by infrastructure.

With an affable, every-man persona and an uncanny ability to recite minutia about ancient and ongoing geologic processes at seemingly every location he encounters, Riggs has spent considerable time traveling throughout the coastal region talking to residents and politicians in small communities, many of which are stressed by poverty, job losses and frequent flooding. 

As described in “The Battle for the North Carolina Coast,” the “Land of Water” coastal system in northeastern North Carolina includes a huge “drowned-river” estuarine system that encompasses vast shorelines, marsh, swamp forest wetlands, pocosin swamps, Carolina bays and blackwater streams.

“The natural resources that constitute this “Land of Water” can play an increasingly important role in the tourist economy, a role that would revitalize the region … build on the natural and human history and the dynamic coastal resources of northeastern North Carolina within an overarching and integrated umbrella program for sustainable, water-based ecotourism,” the book said.

And indeed, much of the land in northeastern North Carolina, from ocean beaches to river shorelines, from farmlands to forests, is surrounded by a body, or several bodies, of water. The Albemarle-Pamlico estuary is the second largest in the country, behind Chesapeake.

Although still rich with wildlife and natural resources, the low-lying region, some just inches above sea level, is becoming more threatened by impacts of climate change and rising seas: increased flooding, saltwater intrusion, stormwater inundation, shoreline erosion, ocean overwash and storm surge.

“The way I think about this is, you better understand the dynamics of our planet,” Riggs said. “That doesn’t mean that you have to be a scientist. It means you have to know something about water. You have to know something about land. And that comes down to the problem of education.”

That is, people, as a society, need to understand that how and where there is growth and development cannot be unlimited or driven by profit. 

Riggs says he’s had the benefit of learning over the decades from numerous other “incredible” scientists with whom he has worked together in teams, sharing spaces in classrooms and research ships. He has spent years warning about the futility of trying to control destructive natural forces, whether or not people believe they’re created by man-made causes such as burning fossil fuels. On the coast, sea walls, sandbags, and jetties ultimately make things worse by increasing erosion and will ultimately fail anyway, he has preached.

But as nightmare damages from storms, such as the recent deadly flooding in the mountains from Hurricane Helene, have increased, he said he’s noticed that people are starting to listen; they’ve realized that climate conditions are not the same as they were in the old days.

“There’s nothing wrong with the history and and yes, we can respect the history, but the history includes change,” he said.  “We better understand how rivers (and oceans) work, and if we don’t understand that, there will be human disasters. The more we politically ignore the science, the bigger the human disasters.”

Next in the series: “Cape Lookout National Seashore, Paradigm for a Coastal System Ethic”: An excerpt.

During this month’s Science on the Sound lecture series learn how surf forecasters bring real-time ocean and wave conditions and surf reports to a beach near you.

The Coastal Studies Institute is scheduled to host “Predicting Surf on the Outer Banks with the Surfline Forecast Team” at 6 p.m. Thursday at East Carolina University’s Outer Banks campus.

Join Surfline’s forecasting Vice President Kurt Korte, Rob Mitstifer, forecast data lead, and Tim Kent, lead forecaster, as they discuss surf forecasting basics and why the Outer Banks is a unique surf destination.

Surfline provides surf conditions and forecasts for beaches and surf spots around the globe.

Presenters will delve into the tools and technology they use to observe and predict the surf.

Science of the Sound brings perspectives from all over the state to highlight coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina. The program is free.

To join the event via live-stream visit the CSI YouTube channel.

The state has the protocols in place for successful fisheries management, but North Carolina is missing the mark, recently released state-mandated research concludes.

A top recommendation: Hire more fisheries scientists.

And the head of the state body formed to coordinate scientific research for the legislature, in a letter accompanying the report, states that lawmakers’ recent failed shrimp trawling ban measure had no basis in the report’s findings and clarifies that the recommendations did not address trawling.

Legislators in 2021 directed the North Carolina Collaboratory to evaluate the overall health of fisheries and habitats and make recommendations for better management ahead of the 25th anniversary of the state’s Fisheries Reform Act of 1997 and the Coastal Area Management Act’s 50th anniversary in 2024.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences Director Dr. Joel Fodrie and a team of nine researchers presented a summary of their findings to the North Carolina General Assembly late last month, as the legislature had mandated.

Fodrie told Coastal Review that the state requested a broad analysis as part of its 2021 budget bill, so the research team, over the course of three years, collected and used data to assess the state’s fisheries and make the state-mandated recommendations based on those findings that could improve “both marine fisheries and our coastal habitats, with a specific link between those habitats and the way they support fish.”

The 46-page summary highlights the seven findings and the five recommendations to “achieve the vision of the Fisheries Reform Act.” The state Fisheries Reform Act requires fishery management plans to ensure long-term viability of the fisheries, according to the state.

The final, comprehensive report with full analyses and data is still being fine-tuned and is to be sent to the legislature later this year, Fodrie added.

In addition to Chapel Hill, researchers who study fish biology and ecology, estuarine ecology, fisheries management and environmental governance from N.C. State University, East Carolina University and UNC-Wilmington participated in the research.

Fodrie explained that if you were to gather data across states to quantitatively evaluate each state’s attempt to manage fisheries, North Carolina scores pretty high based on the management components put in place as a result of the Fisheries Reform Act, or FRA.

The state seems to have adopted many of the practices that should produce better outcomes and have strengthened these practices for most species over time. Despite those gears being in place, the results are only so-so, he said.

The findings point to at least three significant hurdles for optimizing management outcomes, including a significant time lag in the implementation of new data or information for up-to-date decision-making, a breakdown of trust and communication among managers and key stakeholder groups, and long-term shifts in estuarine habitat quality and coverage.

“What the FRA did for North Carolina is it put us in a position to have many of the building blocks that are helpful and can remain part of the solutions, while the analyses also show that we’re still falling short of the FRA’s core objectives and thus some changes in management structures ought to be seriously considered,” Fodrie said.

About the findings

Researchers found that management intensity in North Carolina had increased over time and is equal to or exceeds the levels of other states throughout the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast and Gulf of Mexico, but despite the presence of a rigorous management structure, the state continues to “exhibit challenges in achieving the core goals of the FRA, which is ‘to protect and enhance … coastal fisheries in NC.’”

A benchmark for informed fishery management, according to the summary, are quantitative stock assessments. These produce estimates of stock biomass and the harvest rate, which define overfished, related to how much fish biomass is in the system, and overfishing, related to how high the catch rate is, for the population.

The most recent stock assessments estimate that blue crab, southern flounder, spotted seatrout, striped bass and striped mullet are experiencing overfishing, meaning that the harvest rate is too high.

Blue crab, southern flounder, striped bass and striped mullet are overfished, or the stock is too low, and sheepshead and red drum are neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing.

The summary notes that developing and updating the fishery management plans process “is relatively slow, which potentially limits the efficacy of science- and process-based public trust resource management,” what researchers call in the summary “hallmark goals” of the Fisheries Reform Act.

Across the 12 stocks the state manages that have an initial fisheries management plan, the average time between the first plan and amendments is seven years. The average time between management plan actions is a little more than five years.

“In the context of these timelines, there is little evidence that adaptive management is being achieved by increased activity within” the North Carolina General Assembly, “by the breadth of motions adopted” by the Marine Fisheries Commission or by proclamation authority from the Division of Marine Fisheries, according to the summary.

The remaining findings relate to the pressures coastal habitats are facing from fishing, development, climate variability and other human activities. Data suggests that the entire ecosystem has changed since the Fisheries Reform Act was passed, particularly for water quality and coastal and estuarine habitats.

Researchers offered five recommendations.

Fodrie said that a primary recommendation is to increase the Division of Marine Fisheries staff, especially the number of stock-assessment scientists, so the stock assessments and fisheries management plans are regularly updated.

An independent science and statistical committee to improve fishery management outcomes in the state, as well as new approaches for enhancing the division’s outreach with stakeholder participation, trust, and management transparency, are also recommendations.

Fodrie said that the role of this type of committee and a redesigned Marine Fisheries Commission would be to target current weaknesses related to implementation of the Fisheries Reform Act, such as the mode and tempo by which catch limits are set, when and how stakeholders can be engaged, and resolving disputes between key resource users.

The final three recommendations relate to fisheries and habitat health, including adopting an ecosystem-based management approach to assess the health of the state fisheries as a whole and the drivers that affect them; stopping or reversing patterns of habitat loss and degradation, along with requiring improved monitoring of habitat extent and water quality; and re-evaluating the nursery designation system and creating an adaptive framework for protecting critical nursery areas.

“The state also has some real challenges related to what’s happening with its coastal habitats,” Fodrie said, adding that it’s a big ask to take the major steps needed to halt or reverse those trends. “This involves balancing fishing practices, coastal population growth, climate variability, and development; which would require buy-in at the whole-state level to manage at the coastal ecosystem scale.”

Note from the Collaboratory

The North Carolina Collaboratory’s “Study of Coastal and Marine Fisheries of the State” hadn’t gotten much attention since it was first mandated — that is, until the Senate added in mid-June to a House bill about recreational flounder and red snapper seasons a proposed law to ban shrimp trawling in inshore waters and within a half-mile of the shoreline.

The report was mentioned more than once during discussions between supporters and opponents. The House declined to advance the bill with the Senate’s amendment on June 25.

Looking back: House Republicans decline to take up shrimp trawling bill

Collaboratory Executive Director Jeff Warren, in a letter dated June 30, the deadline and date when the summary was released, wrote that “recent legislative actions – specifically, those related to shrimp trawling language in the current version of House Bill (H) 442 – have brought into question the contents of this report. Because this specific issue was out of the scope of this study, this report neither advocates for nor opposes a ban on shrimp trawling.”

Warren stated in the report’s cover letter that there had been multiple comments made by legislators in both chambers as well as statements circulating in the media, that “suggested the Senate was aware of the contents of this report and this advance knowledge drove actions to amend the legislation to include a shrimp trawling ban prior to the report’s release.”

Those statements were untrue, Warren stated, “and undermine the credibility of this multi-year research study carried out by nine researchers across four UNC System campuses.”

Warren added that the recommendations in the summary, and ultimately the full report, do not address, nor respond to, the shrimp trawling language contained in the shrimp trawl ban “nor were they ever designed to. Further, no legislative influence or pressure impacted the legislative recommendations or the scope of work, which has remained consistent over the three-year arc of the broader study.”

He closed the letter by adding the full report will be available later this year after it’s refined, “to ensure a broad variety of users can access the data and information. To be clear, this clarifying work will not substantively change the recommendations provided herein.”

Outer Banks Visitors Bureau Executive Director Lee Nettles and Community Engagement Officer Jeff Shwartzenberg are scheduled to speak about long-range tourism plans during the next “Science on the Sound” Lecture Series.

The two are to present “Finding Balance: The Outer Banks Long-Range Tourism Management Plan” beginning at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 19, at the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese.

Recently, Dare County’s Outer Banks tourism spending “has reached record levels, surpassing more than $2 billion in visitor spending in 2023, an all-time high and ranking fourth among North Carolina counties behind only Mecklenburg, Wake, and Buncombe. However, with that economic success also comes impacts that can negatively affect a community,” officials said in a statement.

Nettles and Schwartzenberg are expected to highlight recommendations on how the power of tourism can help improve the quality of life for residents, while protecting the delicate natural environment and preserving the unique history and culture of the area.

The public is welcome and encouraged to attend the program. The program will also be livestreamed on the institute’s YouTube channel for those who cannot make it in person.

This monthly, in-person lecture series brings perspectives from all over the state and highlights coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina.

What is the link between greentail shrimp and green energy? Dr. Lela Schlenker is set to explain why both are critical to North Carolina’s future.

Schlenker will be the speaker for this month’s “Science on the Sound” lecture at the Coastal Studies Institute on the ECU Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese.

The fisheries liaison for Kitty Hawk Wind, Schlenker’s presentation “What do greentails have to do with green energy? An update on the Kitty Hawk offshore wind project served with a side of shrimp” is set for 6 p.m. Thursday, March 20, at the campus. Offered at no charge, the program will also be livestreamed on the CSI YouTube channel.

Schlenker plans to discuss her research on shrimp populations in the Pamlico Sound that she completed while a postdoctoral researcher at the Coastal Studies Institute, as well as give a project update on Kitty Hawk Wind, an offshore wind project being planned by Avangrid Renewables more than 32 miles off of the Outer Banks.

Schlenker holds a master’s in fisheries science from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and a doctorate in marine ecology from the University of Miami.

As the fisheries liaison for Kitty Hawk Wind since 2023, Schlenker leads outreach for the project to fishermen, state, regional, and federal fisheries managers, and the North Carolina research community. She has worked with stakeholders to develop a fisheries monitoring plan for the project and she works in developing policy and advising on fisheries issues across Avangrid’s global portfolio.

The monthly, in-person lecture series at the Coastal Studies Institute “brings perspectives from all over the state and highlights coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina,” organizers said.

​As the hours passed, day turning into night, prospects looked bleak for a research vessel carrying scientists and students hoping to get past the mouth of the Cape Fear River to deeper waters offshore.

The R/V Cape Hatteras had essentially been stuck at the mouth of the river for about 24 hours after leaving the morning of Feb. 10 from its mooring at Cape Fear Community College in downtown Wilmington, thanks to an abrupt change in the weather.

“I won’t lie, I did not think we would make it offshore, which feels like a waste with this large vessel to just be stuck at a spot we could sample fairly easily on smaller boats,” said Dr. Bradley Tolar, an assistant professor with the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

February tends to be a month when the weather serves up less-than-ideal working conditions offshore.

Cold temperatures, whipping winds and rain proved that to be the case during the first several hours of the maiden trip of the TEAL-SHIPS project, a groundbreaking expedition to study shore-to-sea habitats.

TEAL-SHIPS, an acronym for this mouthful: Transect Expedition to Assess Land-to-Sea Habitats via Interdisciplinary Process Studies, will allow researchers the opportunity to get an understanding of the biological, chemical and physical changes in habitats from the mouth of the Cape Fear River to the Gulf Stream’s warm waters.

This particular area of North Carolina’s coast has largely remained understudied since the 1990s. And those previous studies of the area between the 1970s and 1990s focused primarily on nearshore ecosystems.

Now, through a series of cruises (no, not the kind where mai tais are served on the pool deck), researchers of different coastal marine science disciplines hope to build a baseline in understanding how changes in the Gulf Stream flow affect the ocean’s food chain and critical habitats between the coastline and Atlantic continental shelf.

Tolar is spearheading the venture, one that was able to come to fruition through a $1.5 million General Assembly-funded grant through the University of North Carolina System Research Opportunities Initiative, a program that focuses on several research areas including marine and coastal science.

TEALS-SHIPS includes principal investigators from UNCW, the UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University and East Carolina University.

Over the course of the next two years, researchers and some of their students will embark on an expedition about every three months, setting course to a series of stations mapped from the river’s mouth to the Gulf Stream. By going out every three months, researchers aim to capture any potential changes in each season of the year.

“Even though this is only giving us two years, the goal is to write grants to continue sampling further, maybe not to this level or this frequency, but just to have a better understanding of how the coast and offshore are connected,” Tolar said.

The Gulf Stream is a powerful current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico, curves around the Florida peninsula, up the Eastern Seaboard and extends toward Europe where it warms western European countries.

“But for our coastline, we know that it transports nutrients, it transports species up to our coast,” Tolar said.

The Gulf Stream oscillates and there is some thought that rising sea temperatures might actually weaken the current over time.

“We don’t really know what those consequences might be to what it transports up to our coast,” Tolar said. “If it’s transporting nutrients that feed our coastal habitats, which we care about a lot with our state’s blue economy, if it weakens or oscillates farther offshore rather than coming inshore, we would want to know.”

During each cruise, physical oceanographers will collect fine-scale water samples to get a sense of how the Gulf Stream current is moving and any changes in that movement over the course of a year.

Two, 20-minute-long fish trawls will capture as much fish as possible at each of the project’s six major stations, each of which include vastly different types of habitat. Researchers will count all of the species captured during the trawl sweeps, collect 10 of each species, and measure 30 of every species.

“This allows them to get a sense of the diversity of fish, the abundance of fish, and then their variability and size to see basically how fish communities change as we go offshore,” Tolar said.

Dr. Christian Briseño-Avena, a UNCW assistant professor of biological oceanography, plankton ecologist, and another principal investigator on the project, will collect zooplankton and larger phytoplankton to study how those organisms change over time.

“Eventually we’d like to know more about how the zooplankton, or the plankton in general, are changing or not changing for this region over longer periods of time,” he said.

Copepods “change a lot in this region,” he said. But samples of the tiny crustaceans collected from this region are sparse.

Briseño-Avena said he is learning as he goes on each expedition, targeting smaller plankton, fish larvae and zooplankton scooped up from the seafloor to the surface in “bongo nets,” aptly named because they are shaped similar to the open bottomed hand drum.

During TEAL-SHIPS maiden cruise earlier this month, he was met with some surprises when the bongo nets surfaced back aboard the R/V Cape Hatteras, a 135-foot oceangoing research vessel used as a hands-on training tool for marine technology students at Cape Fear Community College.

He wasn’t expecting to see in the winter what turned out to be a large amount of ichthyoplankton, which are the eggs and tiny larvae of fish.

His students have already begun the tedious task of extracting and identifying the different groups and species of plankton he collected. The plankton will be preserved in ethanol and used to build a library-like catalogue of samples that will be available to future coastal marine scientists.

He and Tolar agree the expedition was a success, despite the weather challenges that cut the initial trip by a half day and covered four of the six stations. The ship traveled just under 75 miles offshore, making it to the Gulf Stream where the water temperatures were 30 degrees warmer than those near shore.

“At least we confirmed if we were able to do as much as we did in our 18-hour weather window we’ll be fine for our future expeditions,” Tolar said. “We’ll have no problem getting all the way out there. We learned that we could do it and we learned how to be more efficient about it.”

UNCW’s Center for Marine Science is in the process of acquiring its own, larger research vessel. The 73-foot vessel is expected to be complete in the spring of 2026. TEAL-SHIPS project principal investigators hope to use the new vessel during their final two expeditions covered by the current grant.

Tolar hopes to tap additional funding sources for the program to collect samples beyond two years.

“If we’re able to get more funding in the future we can compare the changes year-to-year,” he said. “Even if not, we have a really nice study that shows this is what’s happening here off the coast of Wilmington and that can connect how other folks along the East Coast are measuring their samples.”

Update 10 a.m. Feb. 20: The Science on the Sound Lecture, originally set for Thursday, Feb. 20, has been rescheduled to Feb. 27 because of weather concerns.

Original post:

The senior scientist monitoring a carbon-removal pilot project off the coast of Duck is scheduled to speak at the next “Science on the Sound” program.

Dr. Jaclyn Cetiner is to present “Preliminary Results from a Carbon Removal Field Trial in Duck, NC” at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Coastal Studies Institute on the ECU Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese.

Cetiner is a chemical oceanographer with a research background in marine mineral dissolution relating to long-term climate regulation for Hourglass Climate. The nonprofit research organization is carrying out the field monitoring program in Duck.

Cetiner will present an overview of the pilot project and preliminary results from the first six months of monitoring.

Organized by the Coastal Studies Institute, Science on the Sound is a monthly lecture series that brings “perspectives from all over the state and highlights coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina.” There is no charge to attend the program that also will be streamed on the CSI YouTube channel.

Undergraduate students who spent their fall semester studying Currituck Sound may have broken new ground in understanding the effects of controlled burns on a marsh island.

For the project, students compared vegetative changes to the marsh islands with the Audubon Pine Island Sanctuary and Center in Currituck County that have no history of recent fire, islands that are occasionally burned, and islands that have had frequent controlled burns.

The students presented their findings “The Sound of Change: Responses to Controlled Burning and Other Changes in the Currituck Sound,” Dec. 12 as part of the monthly Science on the Sound lecture series at the Coastal Studies Institute, or CSI, on East Carolina University’s Outer Banks Campus.

The students conducted the research project as part of the Outer Banks Field Site, or OBXFS, a semester-long, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill undergraduate program hosted each fall by CSI.

Controlled burns are part of a fall tradition that existed well before the first European set foot upon the North American continent and “has deep historical roots in the South, where the practice was quickly adopted from the Indians by early European settlers,” according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service research.

While there have been a number of studies examining how a controlled burn effects a marsh, delving into a fire’s impact on invasive species, soil accretion, plant diversity and potential of endangering some animal species, this research takes a different approach.

The study “was one of the few that worked in brackish marshes, and the students talking to stakeholders and users of the marsh about the changes they perceived is also something that’s, I think, unique to the study,” Outer Banks Field Site Director Lindsay Dubbs said during the presentation.

The students included a human dimension and interviewed people who use the Currituck Sound frequently about the environmental changes they feel have taken place.

For their field work, the students traveled to marsh islands within the boundaries of the Pine Island site and compared the effects of controlled burning on marsh vegetation.

The islands were divided into three groups. The control islands had “no historical data of any burns happening,” explained sophomore Lily Bertlshofer. “Our occasional sites were last burned in 2021 and our frequent sites have data being burned every year.”

The study was designed “to look at how controlled burns impact the allocation resources within marsh plants and soils, the impacts of controlled burning on the vegetation community of marsh and what the implications for marsh resilience are,” Berlshofer said.

The study confirmed that the long-established practice of prescribed burns benefit vegetative diversity in marsh inlands.

At first glance there does not appear to be a significant difference in plant diversity among the three areas.

“We found that there was no statistically significant relationship between species richness and burn frequency,” said Veronica Cheaz, a sophomore.

That finding was expected. Because the number of plants that can live in a salt-to-brackish environment is limited, diversity is relatively low.

“Generally, we found low species richness at all of our plots, which is not very surprising,” Cheaz said. “We have a brackish marsh in the Currituck Sound, and there’s not going to be very many species.”

What the study did identify, though, was how effective controlled burning of a brackish marsh could be in maintaining the habitat.

“We also looked at salinity tolerance,” Chaez said, which “is going to be influential in determining how effective these sites are at adapting to environmental stressors like sea level rise and a rise in salinity. We found that occasionally burned sites had the highest scores compared to our control sites, and we hypothesized that this is because occasionally burned sites have a balance of the disturbance periods and restoration periods that allows salt water species to move in.”

There was at least one surprising finding. When the living root systems, or the biomass, of the three sites were compared, the frequently burned areas have statistically greater biomass than either the control or occasional burn areas.

Pointing to a graph showing more than double the biomass of an occasional site, senior Katelin Harmon, majoring in environmental studies and political science, described the finding that “frequently burn sites were much higher,” as “one of our most interesting findings…There’s much stronger root systems in our frequently sites.”

Verdant and complex, the Currituck Sound marsh is somewhat unique. The nearest saltwater source is Oregon Inlet some 55 miles to the south of the study area at the Pine Island Audubon site. The salinity there is typically under 3 parts per thousand, or ppt, and at times lower.

“The low salinity makes these places special, and we refer to that as an oligohaline environment,” junior Thomas Ferguson said during the presentation.

Currituck Sound has not always been an oligohaline, or a low-salinity, environment. Throughout the colonial period and into the early 19th century, there were two inlets on the north end of the sound. Currituck Inlet across from Knotts Island was open until the 1730s. New Currituck Inlet just to the south, opened soon after that, closing in 1828. Until New Currituck Inlet closed, the north end of the sound was a high-saline brackish marsh.

With the closing of the inlets, Currituck Sound transitioned to an oligohaline marsh and migratory waterfowl began arriving by the hundreds of thousands, creating a hunter’s paradise.

“In 1828 the Currituck Inlet, at that time composed of salt water, was closed by a storm and the vicinity gradually became fresh water. This change allowed vegetation such as wild celery and eel grass to grow on the marsh bottom and this new vegetation attracted wintering fowl in greater quantities than before,” The National Register of Historic Places noted in its assessment of the Currituck Shooting Club.

The Currituck Shooting Club, founded in 1857 “by a group of business men in New York City,” the assessment wrote, was the first of numerous hunting clubs that lined the shores of Currituck Sound. The building was completely destroyed by fire in 2003.

The Pine Island Club was formed in 1910. In 1979 the last private owner of the club, Earl Slick, a Winston-Salem developer, donated 2600 acres of marsh and uplands to the National Audubon Society. In 2009 Audubon North Carolina assumed full-time responsibility for the managing the club.

Hunting is still allowed on the property, but according to at least one of the hunters the student researchers interviewed, it falls well short of what it had once been like.

“It really doesn’t have any ducks compared to when I was young, when I was your age, this place had ducks. This place doesn’t have anything anymore,” the researchers were told.

In a question-and-answer session following the presentation, Pine Island Site Manager Robbie Fearn noted that the statistical biomass findings at the frequently burned areas was inconsistent with what was visually happening.

“I’m at the Pine Island Sanctuary,” he said. “The areas that are frequently burned from my lived experiences are falling apart, and yet the data says that for longer term management, frequent burning may be better… Is it a question of the plants are responding to the frequent burn by trying to survive and creating more below-ground biomass.”

For Fearn, who was very complimentary of the work the students did, the inconsistency between what he has observed and what the statistics say is a jumping off point for much needed further research.

“The work that these students have done have really set us up to dig in and figure out how best to manage these marshes in the sound and I’m very thankful for their work,” he said.

Coastal Review will not publish Jan. 1 in observance of New Year’s Day.

NAGS HEAD — Imagine that a hurricane skirted the coast, causing the power to go out. You wait for the green light to blink on your backup power. Getting the all-clear, you flip on the switch connected to the community’s wave-powered alternate generator, and your refrigerator is humming again.

That creative concept is still a distant fantasy in 2024, but it’s the kind of need-inspired brainstorming that a new $3.6 million National Science Foundation community-oriented wave energy project encourages. Launched on Sept. 27, scientists at the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese will be seeking input from folks around Nags Head to use toward developing and deploying practical wave-energy technology on the Outer Banks before the end of the five-year project.

“The goal is to present two or three potential technologies and get (community) inputs to really see whether or not this meets their need,” Eric Wade, assistant professor in the Department of Coastal Studies at East Carolina University, which includes the CSI campus, told Coastal Review recently.

Researchers from ECU will partner with the University of Michigan, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Virginia Tech on the project, with focal communities chosen in Michigan at Beaver Island and in North Carolina at Nags Head.

While Wade said it’s not yet likely that alternate sources of energy could be produced in Nags Head, other marine energy could be more conceivable for the Outer Banks at this stage. Some examples he cited were use in desalination, powering autonomous underwater vehicles and marine aquaculture.

“The introduction of this technology will not lower the electricity bill,” he said. “It will not have this massive transformation. It may be at a very small scale.”

In a substantive way, the new National Science Foundation project builds on two ongoing research projects that CSI is part of: the NC Renewable Ocean Energy Program and the Atlantic Marine Energy Center. The important difference, Wade explained, is that the main objective of the new project is to converge different components of the community — engineering, sociological and environmental — so they can “speak” with each other.

“The local context will drive the extent, and in my opinion, will drive the feasibility of convergence, because we need to be able to design technologies that meet the needs of communities,” he said.

“And so, what this project is trying to do is see how can we get them to be on the same page, to be able to move marine energy, and specifically wave energy, forward,” Wade said.

Each of the components communicate in different “languages” and have different requirements for their disciplines, he added. “The difficulty and what is unique for this project is that bringing those together requires a lot of work and a lot of intentional talk.”

Wade said the goal in the next two years is to have community sessions that will bring together representatives from different sectors of the communities to share their perspectives and priorities.

“We’ll then take all of that information, go back to the community, consolidate, do some analysis,” he said.

The building and deployment work on the selected technology will be done for remaining three years. The big picture, ultimately, is all part of the what marine energy scientists call “powering the blue economy.”

The blue economy is broadly defined as economic activity driven by or based on the world’s oceans. And as Wade noted, the U.S. is hustling to catch up with the more advanced blue technology of Europe.

Lindsay Dubbs, a UNC research associate professor based at the institute, is collaborating with Wade on the project. She is focused on environmental and ecological assessments. That work, she said, involves devising frameworks for analyzing environmental impacts of potential marine energy developments, as well as best practices for reducing negative impacts.

Dubbs, who also serves as associate director of the NC Renewable Ocean Energy Program and the Atlantic Marine Energy Center, said their project team includes student researchers, as well as colleagues from Virginia and Michigan.

“We’re also communicating a good deal with communities in Alaska who are already implementing wave energy technologies in their communities,” she said. “We have this community advisory group that is comprised of people from all of those different communities, and the two study sites that we’re focusing this convergent research on are Beaver Island and Nags Head.”

Waves on the Outer Banks are powerful, but they’re not as big as waves on the West Coast, Dubbs said. That’s mainly because of differences in the water depths approaching the coasts. “The power density of the wave resource — how much energy can be harnessed — within an area on the West Coast is much greater.”

But, she countered, a large area of the North Carolina coast has untapped wave energy resources that could at least provide energy for niche markets. And that could include backup power. But on the East Coast and the Outer Banks, generation would be more likely occur at a community scale, not at utility scale like on the West Coast.

The project team is just starting conversations with the community groups to understand their perspectives, wants and needs for a wave-energy source, Dubbs said. But rather than advocate for a particular technology, the team’s intent is to help the community decide on the type of technology that meets their needs. Part of that process has to consider trade-offs, she said, and whether it’s worth harnessing the available energy, and if it can be done “in a manner that our community supports” that poses the least environmental risk.

“It’s so abstract and theoretical that it’s sometimes hard to really imagine what’s possible,” she said. “The exciting thing about wave energy right now, is just about everything is being imagined. But as far as coming to convergence on something that will make it more economically viable and less abstract — that’s difficult.”

The last “Science on the Sound” for 2024 will give the public an opportunity to learn more about an undergraduate research project on elements of the Currituck Sound.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Institute for the Environment’s Outer Banks Field Site students are scheduled to present their findings at 4 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 12, in the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus.

Science on the Sound is an in-person lecture series that brings perspectives from all over the state and highlights coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina. The public is welcome to attend the about 90-minute program at no charge. It will also be live-streamed on the CSI YouTube channel.

Outer Banks Field Site program is a semester-long, interdisciplinary residential learning experience for undergraduate students hosted by the Coastal Studies Institute. Each fall since 2001, the students have spent the semester taking classes, engaging in internships with local organizations, and completing a Capstone research project as a group.

This year, the students addressed for their Capstone research project the elements of the Currituck Sound, including how prescribed fire is used as a management tool in marshes and how different stakeholders think about Currituck Sound and their place in it, including the changes they have observed and experienced.

BEAUFORT — The Carteret County Public Library System has joined East Carolina University in a collaborative project aimed at improving access to digital technology and literacy for residents across 29 eastern North Carolina counties.

The Digital Bridges initiative is supported by $1.39 million in funding that was awarded to ECU’s College of Health and Human Performance as part of North Carolina’s first digital equity grant program. The program has allocated $9.9 million to bridge the digital divide statewide.

The Carteret County system said that the partnership will enable its library patrons to borrow iPads and Wi-Fi hotspots for free, giving them the tools they need to stay connected, build digital skills and access online resources.

Patrons will also have access to in-person digital literacy training designed to improve their ability to use technology confidently in their daily lives. Training topics will cover essential skills such as basic computer use, online safety, and health care navigation, with sessions offered at libraries, community centers, senior centers, churches and other area venues.

“We are excited to bring the Digital Bridges program to Carteret County,” said Carteret County Public Library System Director Dorothy Howell. “This initiative will help ensure that our community members have the technology and skills needed to participate fully in the digital world — from connecting with family and friends to accessing critical health resources.”

Adult patrons with a valid library card can borrow devices free of charge. Additionally, the library will launch a four-week Digital Skills Information Sessions series to enhance essential skills in a supportive environment. Sessions include the following:

• Basic Computer Skills: 10:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Nov. 26.
• Online Safety and Privacy: 10:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Dec. 3.
• How to Search and Find Trusted Information Online: 10:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Dec. 10.
• Using Healthcare Online: 10:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Dec. 17.

All sessions will take place at the Newport Library, 210 Howard Blvd., Newport. Light refreshments will be provided, and participants who complete both the pre-test and post-test will be entered into a drawing to win a free iPad.

Officials said the partnership marks a significant step forward for the county library system in helping to ensure that residents, regardless of their location or economic circumstances, have access to the technology and skills they need.

For more information about the program, including how to access devices and register for upcoming learning sessions, visit the library’s website or nearest branch.

WANCHESE — The National Park Service’s historic architect overseeing structural rehabilitation at the Ocracoke Light Station is the featured speaker this week for the “Science on the Sound” lecture series at the Coastal Studies Institute on the ECU Outer Banks Campus.

Historical Architect George Jaramillo of the park service’s Outer Banks Group will present “Elevating Stations: Preserving the Ocracoke Light Station Double Keepers Quarters.” The free lecture is set for 6 p.m. Thursday.

With more than 20 years of architecture, heritage and design experience within the private and public sectors, Jaramillo explores the history, architectural significance and key adaptation strategies for preservation.

The monthly, in-person lecture series brings perspectives from all over the state and highlights coastal topics in northeastern North Carolina.

“For two centuries the Ocracoke Light Station has maintained watch over the waters of Silver Lake,” organizers said in a statement. “Today, its continued threat from stronger storms has brought the need for climate-forward adaptation preservation strategies. We explore the entanglement of history and adaptation within the site and the current strategies implemented at the Ocracoke Light Station Double Keepers Quarters. Old and new techniques are promoted for the rehabilitation of the structure providing ‘tangible interventions’ (Anderson et al, 2018) to adapt our unique maritime legacy for our changing futures.”

The program will also be livestreamed on the CSI YouTube channel for those unable to attend.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologists David Glenn and Ryan Ellis are to give a glimpse of how forecasts are made now and looking ahead at this month’s “Science on the Sound.”

“The National Weather Service: Where We Are and Where We Are Going. A Look into the Current and Future State of Weather Forecasting” is scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday at the Coastal Studies Institute on the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese.

Both based at the National Weather Service forecast office in Newport, Glenn is the meteorologist-in-charge and Ellis is the science and operations officer. The talk will focus on how weather projections are made and delivered to decision-makers, and how forecasting could evolve as new technology is incorporated.

Glenn began his career with NOAA’s National Weather Service in 2008 at the Portland, Maine, Weather Forecast Office. He was promoted in 2010 as forecaster at the Newport office and became the science and operations officer in June 2016. Glenn became the meteorologist-in-charge of the Newport office in October 2018.

Ellis has been with the Newport office since 2019. He was a meteorologist for 10 years with the Raleigh office and a student intern at the office in Honolulu, Hawaii. Ellis received his bachelor’s from the University of Miami and his master’s in meteorology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Ellis is an adjunct professor at East Carolina University in the Department of Geography.

The Coastal Studies Institute offers the monthly, in-person lecture series that highlights coastal topics and the public is encouraged to attend. The talk will be live-streamed on the CSI YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/live/MzxTqhyC1pg.

Before the 200-ton Queen Anne’s Revenge became Blackbeard the pirate’s flagship, the previously named La Concorde was a French slave-trading vessel.

Archaeological conservators and researchers with the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology will explain the history of the ship during 90-minute tours on Saturday, Nov. 2, of the Queen Anne’s Revenge Conservation Lab in Greenville.

The lab works to conserve, document, and investigate the artifacts recovered from the shipwreck identified as the pirate Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge.

The tours being offered at no charge are to begin every 30 minutes between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. and will feature artifacts including gold grains, grenades and cannons recovered from the ship, which was wrecked near Beaufort Inlet over 300 years ago.

The La Concorde belonged to a wealthy French merchant, trafficking human cargo across the Atlantic in the 1710s. Late in the fall of 1717, off the island of Martinique, Blackbeard and his fellow pirates captured the La Concorde and renamed it the Queen Anne’s Revenge. In 1718, the ship ran aground near Beaufort inlet. The shipwreck was discovered in 1996, according to the QAR Lab website.

Organizers ask that participants arrive 10 minutes before tour time. Space is limited and registration is required. Visit the QAR Lab website to reserve a spot. The lab is at 1157 VOA Site C road in Greenville or call 744-6721.

The Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck Project and Queen Anne’s Revenge Conservation Lab, and the Office of State Archaeology are within the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. 

There is a grippingly real sense of dread that some people feel about the state of the environment.

That’s what Dr. Paul Taillie, assistant professor of geography and the environment at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, told an audience last week during the most recent “Science on the Sound” monthly lecture series hosted by Coastal Studies Institute at the East Carolina University Outer Banks Campus.

“This is a documented term called ‘climate anxiety,’ where this state of the Earth these days is causing people to be anxious,” he said. “It’s hard to avoid these dramatic, very worrisome headlines about super hurricanes and death and destruction, historic flooding. This feeling of anxiety is valid (and) I think it’s very justified.”

He delivered his talk, “Coastal Ecosystems and Rising Seas: Impending Collapse or Conservation Opportunity?” Thursday evening, one day before Hurricane Helene brought unheard of rainfall and destruction to Western North Carolina.

Taillie acknowledged that while there is reason for concern about the environment, he does not share the full-on anxiety others may experience. “I tend to be very optimistic about things.”

There were reasons for his optimism, he explained, adding he hoped attendees left the evening’s discussion with “more of a sense of optimism about climate change and biodiversity than when you came in the room.”

Taillie pointed out that all systems evolve and change over time and that the plants and animals living in those systems adjust to the changes and have been “for a really long time, hundreds of thousands of years.”

Questions remain about the impact of environmental change on certain species, especially those that are threatened by the changes that are taking place.

Taillie said that when he began his graduate studies, he wanted to look at how species, in general, reacted to environmental changes. One of the difficulties he found in wanting to study the possible benefits of those changes was the reluctance to focus on possible benefits.

“It’s easier to publish a paper about a species going extinct because of climate change than it is to publish a paper about a species benefiting from climate change,” he said. “But that’s been kind of a driving force behind my research.”

Taillie’s first graduate work was to investigate the effects of wildfire on plants and animals, and what he found was that wildfire is, in fact, an important part of the ecosystem.

“I started to notice that there’s all these plants and animals that are uniquely adapted to the conditions created by fire, and that these disturbances that we think of as being really bad can often be really good for biodiversity,” he said.

When he started his doctoral work, he had the chance to study the 2016 Pains Bay Fire in Dare County that burned 15,000 acres in Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.

“I was super interested to see what happened to this area. As soon as I was allowed to, I went in there,” Taillie continued, showing the audience a picture of burned trees and shrubbery. Just a week later, grass had begun growing among the charred trees.

“These grasses (are) palladium or sawgrass. This is exploding,” he said. “It’s growing superfast and responding to fire very rapidly.”

A year later, he found what was once a forest was completely covered in grasses and fast-growing vegetation.

“This is almost unrecognizable as forest,” Taillie continued. “That fire is catalyzing this transition from forest to marsh.”

Taillie made the point that the grasses that have grown where there was once dense forest are essential for the survival of a number of species.

“These marshes support a lot of really unique animals that hide in these dense grasses,” he explained. “Many birds and small mammals are running around in there. They’re super vulnerable to predation, and so they need this dense grass in order to hide from predators.”

Fire is a relatively spectacular environmental change. The changes that occur in a marsh are more subtle but every bit as dynamic.

“Marshes,” he said, “have these built-in mechanisms of resilience to changes in sea level.”

As sea levels rise, the marsh will often migrate landward, replacing terrestrial systems, especially forest. That movement is apparent in ghost forests, where stands of dead trees immediately adjacent to a live forest.

State and federal agencies, including the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, are concerned about these ghost forests. “These were proliferating all over Dare and Hyde counties.”

Taillie continued that he realized while he studied what was happening that “the ghost forest represented a transition from one stage of this transition from forest to marsh. This is not something to stop.”

Bird surveys that were taken of the living forest and ghost forest showed that the ghost forests are an important part of species survival and adaptation.

“We started to notice that there were lots of interesting birds hanging out in the ghost forests, much different than in the live forest. One of those is a prothonotary warbler,” he said.

A highly migratory species, the prothonotary warbler is described by the Cornell University All About Birds website as “a species of high conservation concern.”

The birds prefer nesting sites in standing dead trees over shallow water, a condition that Taillie described as “the exact sort of conditions that you find in those forests.”

He said his work has taken him from the marsh and barrier islands of coastal North Carolina to the Florida Keys, where he has been studying the ability of a subspecies of marsh rice rats to adapt and survive in their environment.

“Everyone always wants to know, well, if all the Keys were underwater, where did they go? I don’t know,” he said and pointed out that, “They have dealt with hurricanes for a very long time.”

There are, he pointed out, a number of similarities between North Carolina’s barrier islands and the Florida Keys. Both are subject, as an example, to periodic flooding, and it was the flooding that brought the silver rice rat to Taillie’s attention in 2017.

At the time, he was working with the Fish and Wildlife Service following Hurricane Irma. The agency was concerned that because of storm surge, “this entire endangered species could be no longer in existence.”

It quickly became apparent that the silver rice rat population was holding its own, even though the storm surge of 2 to 3 feet should have inundated the Keys where the rats lived.

How they survived is a mystery, Taillie said.

See what happens at the Coastal Studies Institute and East Carolina University Integrated Coastal Programs during the annual open house at the ECU Outer Banks Campus on Roanoke Island.

Scheduled for 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, April 20, the public can tour the campus, grounds and facilities, learn about current research and education programs, take part in family-friendly activities and interact with faculty and staff.

The Coastal Studies Institute is a multi-institutional research partnership led by ECU, in association with North Carolina State University, the universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wilmington, and Elizabeth City State University.

ECU’s Integrated Coastal Programs is an interdisciplinary unit that focuses on coastal research and education.

The research and education initiatives of the two programs span a variety of coastal topics from nearshore coastal estuaries to the offshore waters along the continental shelf.

During the open house, visitors can meet a range of faculty and staff including coastal geoscientists, ecologists who study estuarine systems, maritime archaeologists researching and discovering new shipwrecks, oceanographers and coastal engineers, and social scientists who work with coastal residents, visitors and relevant social statistics.

WILMINGTON – North Carolina’s leading PFAS researchers aim to trace the chemical compounds found in waterways, air and soil in the state to the polluters emitting them.

Using newly acquired machines called mass spectrometers, scientists will also have the ability to identify per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances not in the Environmental Protection Agency’s registry, one that has steadily grown over the past several years from a few thousand to 15,000 known PFAS today.

The brand-new fleet of mass spectrometers are being disbursed to research labs on a handful of university campuses that are part of the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory’s PFAS Testing Network.

Referred to as the PFAST Network, this group of academic researchers was created after scientists at N.C. State University and the EPA discovered that the Cape Fear River, the drinking water sources for tens of thousands, contained elevated levels of PFAS.

The discovery sparked what has become a nationally-recognized, state-led effort to better understand the potential human health effects of PFAS and ways to cut down the amount of these chemicals from getting into the environment.

Academic researchers, state legislators, environmental regulators and representatives with Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., the multibillion-dollar company that makes the mass spectrometers, recently hosted a press conference on the campus of the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science to announce how the technology will be used to expand PFAS research here in the state.

Related: Secretaries’ Science Board to review PFAS’ effects

Dr. Lee Ferguson, an environmental analytical chemist and assistant professor at Duke University, said the investments by the North Carolina General Assembly, which has pumped millions into PFAS research, and the collaboration with Thermo Fisher, puts the network at the cusp of increasing the sophistication of its PFAS investigations.

The mass spectrometers will allow researchers to move from canvassing the state for PFAS contamination to “understanding sources, tracking those sources, fingerprinting those sources and then move into collaborations with treatment technologies and treatment engineers to try to remove those contamination sources,” he said.

“Specifically, the new instrumentation that we are getting, and already have in some cases, will allow us to do things like ultra-fast and ultra-sensitive, targeted and nontargeted analysis so that we can try to get a picture of those 15,000 PFAS compounds that may be present,” Ferguson said.

In all, five mass spectrometers are being delivered to labs at Duke University, N.C. State, UNCW and East Carolina University.

Thermo Fisher showcased a mock mass spectrometer at the March 27 afternoon press conference. The instrument is not exactly a visual marvel. It looks like a large, boxy-shaped piece of equipment you might see in any given lab.

Each machine will be used like a key that will unlock some of the mysteries about PFAS –which PFAS are in the environment, what levels of them are in the environment, where they’re coming from and what treatments are available to reduce the amount that get into the environment.

UNCW Professor Dr. Ralph Mead explained that the mass spectrometer in a lab he heads at the university’s Center for Marine Science will be used to investigate samples of everything from rain and snow to soil.

“Specifically, the questions that we’re trying to address is understanding can we use that instrument to develop a forensics approach to trace the source of PFAS, as well as understand the fate and ultimate transport of it,” he said.

As researchers gather this and other information, they will be able to create an online library, one that would be a resource for environmental regulators and law makers navigating how much to crack down on industries that use PFAS to make a sweeping array of consumer goods.

The General Assembly will, by this July, have appropriated more than $50 million for the collaboratory specifically to perform PFAS-related research in the state.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-New Hanover, one of a small number of state delegates who spoke at last week’s press conference, said North Carolina is fortunate, not because it is, in some respects, ground zero for PFAS, but because the state has some of the leading experts to take on PFAS research.

“Here we are today utilizing state-of-the-art equipment from a great company to really accomplish some of the goals that we not only want as a state, but we want as a solution to a worldwide problem,” he said.

Rep. Deb Butler, D-New Hanover, said the discovery of PFAS in the Cape Fear region is a reminder of the far-reaching consequences of unchecked pollution.

“For too long, PFAS contamination has lurked beneath the surface undetected and unchecked,” she said. “In my opinion, we have not been diligent enough on the front-end of manufacturing and that must change. We must demand stringent standards for PFAS emissions, as well as any discharge that affects our public trust resources. We must strengthen enforcement mechanisms and promote pollution prevention initiatives. By addressing the root causes of contamination rather than focusing on the cleanup, we will better serve the citizens of North Carolina.”

Projects to preserve and protect habitat and improve water quality in eastern North Carolina have been awarded a total of $866,591 in grants through the Environmental Enhancement Grant program, Attorney General Josh Stein announced Tuesday.

This year, the program is awarding nearly $3 million to 27 grantees across the state.

The grant program began after an agreement made in 2000 between the North Carolina attorney general’s office and Smithfield Foods, which provides $2 million to the state every year to be distributed among environmental projects across the state. Including this year’s grants, listed below, the attorney general office’s has awarded nearly $37 million to more than 190 projects in the state.

Jacksonville

Jacksonville is to receive $175,000 to continue efforts to preserve and protect the New River.

The grant is to help the city expand 12 of the existing New River Estuary Oyster Highway sites, construct 1,850 small patch reefs and add nearly 2.5 million oysters to improve biofiltration.

“The City of Jacksonville is committed to preserving and protecting the New River, a process which began 21 years ago with the close of the City’s Wilson Bay WWTP (waste water treatment plant) and the immediate cleanup efforts utilizing an innovative process called bioremediation,” said Pat Donovan-Brandenburg, stormwater manager for city.

“We continued those efforts three years ago with the “New River Oyster Highway” where we created 12 half-acre artificial reefs or stepping stone habitats for oyster and fish populations in the region between Wilson Bay and Stones Bay within the New River, Donovan-Brandenburg continued. Using funds these funds will enable the city to expand the 12 existing New River Estuary Oyster Highway sites by adding more than 2.48 million oysters and constructing an additional 1,850 or so patch reefs across all sites.

“This grant will help safeguard the New River,” said Stein. “It will help marine life thrive and help improve the quality of water sources.”

New Bern

New Bern is getting $134,000 to build stormwater infrastructure in an underserved neighborhood that has long been subject to flooding. The grant is a part of the city’s larger resiliency and revitalization project.

“The Attorney General’s Environmental Enhancement Grant Program award supports the city’s overall resiliency initiatives and one of the primary goals of our Resiliency and Hazard Mitigation Plan, to improve conditions for our most underserved and socially vulnerable populations,” said Jeffrey Ruggieri, Development Services Director for New Bern.

“Flooding is the biggest concern and most frequent hazard experienced in the Greater Duffyfield Community. The Stormwater Enhancement Project is a representative mitigation solution to retrofit sustainable practices and nature-based solutions in our older neighborhoods that have been plagued with disinvestment. The project will make the neighborhood safer, improve water quality, and add an amenity for the surrounding residents,” he continued. “EEG funds have been imperative to the city’s broader planning efforts, which encompass a holistic approach toward building the resilience capacity of New Bern and being better prepared for the future.”

Stein said in a statement that New Bern is making smart investments in improving water quality and preventing flooding in historically underserved neighborhoods. “I hope this grant will help improve the quality of life for people in New Bern.”

North Carolina Coastal Land Trust

The North Carolina Coastal Land Trust is receiving $50,000 for the Hoggard’s Millpond Conservation Project, which will help the trust acquire 348 acres of Hoggard’s Millpond Tract and transfer it to the town of Windsor in Bertie County to create a new public park.

“Coastal Land Trust is ever appreciative of this recently approved EEG grant for our Hoggard’s Millpond Conservation Project which represents a unique community conservation partnership to protect a site with significant wildlife, historic, water quality, and recreational resources,” said Janice Allen, director of land protection, adding that the trust’s primary partner, Windsor, is one step closer to having a new nature, historic park for all to enjoy.

“Public parks make our communities stronger and happier,” Stein said. “I’m pleased to distribute these funds to help the town of Windsor create a new public park that the community can enjoy for decades to come.”

Ducks Unlimited

Ducks Unlimited is getting $75,000 to restore wetlands within the Goose Creek Game Lands in Pamlico County, a project to increase water exchanges between Smith Creek and its estuary.

“The Environmental Enhancement Grant award serves as a critical funding source in support of our project to enhance 25 acres of tidally-influenced managed wetlands,” said Ducks Unlimited Regional biologist Ethan Massey.

“The grant funds will be leveraged with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (NCWRC) and Ducks Unlimited matching support to complete the project. Wetland restoration projects like these are important to maintain and improve wetland function and water quality in North Carolina,” Massey said, adding that the project will also allow the commission to manage the area more effectively to provide high quality wildlife habitat and public outdoor recreational opportunities.

“Wetlands protect our communities from flooding and enhance water quality,” said Stein. “I’m proud to partner with Ducks Unlimited to preserve this area for more people to enjoy in the future.”

Bertie County Hive House

Bertie County Hive House is receiving $74,350 to improve a 4-acre greenspace in Lewiston Woodville through cleaning, stormwater remediation and planting. The greenspace provides recreational and educational opportunities for the underserved community.

“Public green areas are vital to our community health,” Stein said. “This grant will help create a community space people can visit and enjoy.”

Other EEG awards in eastern North Carolina:

Pollocksville will receive $114,000 to construct publicly accessible wetlands in Riverfront Park to help protect flood-prone properties.

Kinston Cares, a nonprofit organization run by the Center for Community Self-Help, is receiving $95,000 to rehabilitate Federal Emergency Management Agency flood buyout property in east Kinston through research, community planning and environmental education.

East Carolina University will receive $149,241 to identify and evaluate stormwater control measures throughout Greenville. The project will help the city determine which locations are at a higher risk for flooding and poor water quality and take steps to reduce the environmental damage caused by stormwater runoff, especially in underserved communities.