Living shorelines collaborator meeting

On Monday of last week, Austin and Lauren headed to Martha's Vineyard for a meeting with collaborators on this summer's living shorelines restoration project. The Humphries lab members joined US Environmental Protection Agency's Atlantic Ecology Division team, Marty Chintala, Suzy Ayvazian, and Mary Schoell to ferry over to Mass Audubon Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary director Suzan Bellincampi and Oak Bluffs shellfish constable Dave Grunden. The meeting marked the first time the whole team got to sit around the same table and the opportunity was used to hash out details of project installation and plans for sanctuary visitor interviews. The team also got out to the marsh to take some pre-installation measurements. Greeted by unseasonably warm February weather and always thankful for a brief respite from the office, the day marked another exciting step forward in some novel social-ecological research. 

In the upcoming month, project supplies will make their way to the island and Lauren will attend the first of a number of meetings with sanctuary staff and volunteers to develop citizen science programming. 

Lauren Josephs, Austin Humphries and Marty Chintala scope out the project site. 

Lauren Josephs runs through the structure and objectives of a sanctuary visitor questionnaire that will be part of her master's thesis work.

End of semester wrap-up

The Fall semester is complete and it seems appropriate to reflect and mention a few notable happenings in the lab. 

Austin spent a week in Portland, OR, at the biennial Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) conference and presented some of the lab's research on environmental impacts of oyster aquaculture and restoration in Rhode Island. The conference was a good opportunity to share the new lab's ongoing work, connect with old colleagues and friends, as well as meet new folks doing interesting and cool research. Oh yeah, and enjoy Portland's food and beer scene!

Around the URI campus, Lauren wrapped up her first semester and completed all of the course requirements for her degree as well as got a good grip on her thesis objectives. Caroline Gottshalk Druske will serve on Lauren's committee and bring her expertise in studying the human dimensions of natural resources management through rhetoric and communication. We are stoked to be collaborating with Caroline in this capacity!

Austin finished teaching his first semester at URI, which included Fisheries Science (AFS 415), a course for fourth year undergraduates as well as graduate students. He was also busy giving seminars in URI's College of the Environment and Life Sciences' Colloquium Series, the Coastal Resources Center's Seminar Series, as well as developing new courses in Ecosystem Science and Sustainability (BES 551) and Food from the Sea (AFS 105). As well as writing a few proposals!

The lab is psyched to have Evans Arizi and Diky Suganda join the team, both of which are doing vital research to improve fisheries management in their home countries of Ghana and Indonesia, respectively.

During the winter break from classes, Austin will be spending most of January in Indonesia, meeting with colleagues about upcoming research and scoping for a potential study abroad course on small-scale coral reef fisheries. Look for a post about this trip at the end of January!

To the Vineyard!

This week was the lab’s first trip to Martha’s Vineyard for some preliminary sampling at Sengekontacket Pond. The pond is the future site of a living shorelines/salt marsh restoration project to be installed along the shores of Mass Audubon’s Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary. While on the island, we met with collaborators Dave Grunden, shellfish constable of Oak Bluffs, and Suzan Bellincampi, director of the wildlife sanctuary, to talk procedure for the restoration project’s expected installation in the spring of 2016. The meeting also produced some exciting brainstorming around a specific segment of the project, which will incorporate visitors to the sanctuary to investigate links between education and outreach and restoration project support. Current Humphries Lab master’s student, Lauren Josephs, will undertake this portion of the project as her graduate thesis work.

We were also incredibly grateful to have fellow URI professor Simon Engelhart along to help us in obtaining a baseline profile of the shoreline using Real-Time Kinematics (RTK) GPS. The trip marked an exciting step forward for the project, not to mention some unseasonably perfect weather. 

Two new papers published

We have just had two new papers published in the open-access journal PeerJ! We feel very strongly that research should be publicly available, so we are making increased efforts to publish all manuscripts in journals that offer open-access. This means that we pay money to publish but that everyone can read about our work, not just academics with subscriptions to journals.

The first paper looks at what happens to fishes and invertebrates when an oyster reef is restored  in coastal Louisiana. If it is built, will they come? We found that there is an increase in fish and invertebrate biomass, which means higher commercial fishery value. While these numbers were low per square meter of restored reef, they should be considered within a larger portfolio of ecosystem services provided by restoration activities (e.g., recreational value, cultural importance). For more info and to read the paper, head on over to the PeerJ webpage.

The second paper assesses the ability of restored oyster reefs to reduce salt marsh erosion in Louisiana. We combined data from 5 different projects and found that reefs were most effective at reducing shoreline loss in high wave energy environments. This is a bit of good news in the context of larger land loss issues in coastal Louisiana. We combined this analysis with a habitat suitability index to display optimal areas where oyster restoration may be successful at recruiting and maintaining a viable oyster population (as a result of optimal salinity, temperature, etc.) and reduce erosion. Combining these types of analyses are important if managers are to provide tangible benefits over the long-term. This paper can be found here. 

Lab website is born

We are launching our new website and working on populating it with content - be patient as we sort through it!