News

Professor Jennifer Bowen has received WHOI Sea Grant funding to investigate bacterial contamination threatening Massachusetts soft-shell clam harvests.

CSI researchers Samuel Muñoz, James Dennedy-Frank, Geoffrey Trussell and Damon Hall were awarded a $998,696 NSF grant for “Working with communities to reduce flood risk and increase resilience.”

Researchers at Northeastern University used machine learning to aggregate nearly five decades of weather data to better understand the factors that lead to New England flooding.

For years, the Endangered Species Act has been interpreted in a way that preserves the environments where endangered and threatened plants and animals live. A proposed regulatory change by the Trump administration would limit the act’s protection to prohibit killing, harming or injuring individual animals and not the habitats on which they rely, some experts say.

Salt marshes are among coastal habitats endangered by both rising sea levels and urban development. Preserving and restoring salt marshes is essential not only for wildlife protection and natural flood mitigation, but also for the numerous ecosystem services — such as carbon storage, bird watching and fishing — they provide to urban dwellers.

As extraordinary as it is to have months’ worth of rainfall in hours, scientists say to expect more flash flooding in the future as warmer water and air temperatures lead to increased precipitation from hurricanes and other storms.

Already the world’s hottest coastal environment in the summer, the shallow sea between the Arabian peninsula and southwestern Iran continues to heat at a breathtaking pace. But an improvement in diplomatic relations among gulf nations presents “a window of opportunity” to develop a regional network of scientists to share data and come up with marine conservation strategies that cut across borders.

A hurricane is coming. Northeastern researchers Julia Hopkins and Jim Chen will be monitoring wave action and storm surge in Boston Harbor near Quincy, a portion of Cape Cod and western Penobscot Bay in Maine.

Northeastern graduate Amanda Dwyer did her doctoral research on how corals survive changing ocean conditions. Her next task is to help reduce the impact of billions of tons of plastic in the world’s oceans.

Andrea Unzueta-Martinez, a doctoral candidate at Northeastern’s Marine Science Center, spent three months at the Port Stephens Fisheries Institute raising oyster larvae to try and figure out how they acquire their microbiome—the environment or from their parents?

Using molecules left in the mud of an Illinois lakebed by long-dead bacteria, Muñoz and his colleagues have reconstructed ancient climate conditions in the midwestern United States. Their results, published earlier this year, could help us understand what’s in store for the region’s future as the planet continues to warm.

A recent study, led by Dr. Jennifer Bowen, associate professor and associate chair of the Northeastern’s Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences, synthesizes a decade of research from her team and collaborators, focused on understanding human impacts on the structure and function of salt marsh systems.

With their round, furry faces and tendency to hold hands while they sleep, sea otters seem almost perfectly built to appeal to our sense of the adorable. But they also play a vital role in protecting their ecosystem from the effects of climate change.

Plastics are everywhere. They’re in our water, in our food, and even in the air we breathe. They show up in remote glaciers and deep in the ocean. And plastic is largely made up of carbon, which is released into the environment when that trash breaks down. So when Aron Stubbins was planning lectures about the Earth’s carbon cycle, he decided to take a look at how much carbon that plastics were adding to our planet’s natural systems.

Fetch, the autonomous underwater robot developed by Mark Patterson, professor of marine and environmental sciences, will travel to the Canadian Arctic to explore kelp forests, an ecosystem largely uncharted by marine biologists.

As severe heat waves are becoming more frequent and more intense in many parts of the world, coastal researchers are increasingly finding the cooked carcasses of creatures that make a living in the part of the shore where the tides cyclically expose and quench the landscape, called the intertidal zone.

As much as 95% of the climates in the surface ocean that exist today could completely disappear within 80 years, according to new research led by Katie Lotterhos, associate professor of marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern. That means that the creatures that live there could soon be subject to conditions that they have never experienced—and some of those conditions might literally erode their skeletons and shells.

As Hurricane Ida’s blistering 150-mile-per-hour winds and 15-foot storm surge raced toward Louisiana early Sunday morning, Northeastern professor Qin Jim Chen was wide awake in Boston coordinating a last-minute bid to capture critical data from the eye of the Category 4 storm.

When it comes to the business of seafood, COVID-19 hasn’t been nearly as damaging as the ecological havoc caused by humans, a recent global survey of fish farms found. More than 80% of the 585 fish farms surveyed worldwide reported that the economic losses from human-caused issues such as climate change, pollution, and flooding far outweigh losses from supply-chain hiccups or a loss in buyers caused by the pandemic.

Solutions to environmental issues are “often not technically difficult,” says Brian Helmuth, professor of marine and environmental sciences. “The tricky part comes in to get the buy-in from people and in the willingness to act.” So Helmuth, Jon Coley, professor of psychology, and their colleagues decided to test how differently framed questions affected people’s beliefs about stewardship and environmental responsibility.

Earth’s oceans are warming and becoming more acidic as the climate changes. For much of the flora and fauna of the sea, that could mean extinction, unless species can adapt to new conditions and food sources—or migrate to more hospitable waters. But imperiled species might be able to get a helping hand from humans, says Katie Lotterhos, associate professor of marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern, as long as scientists can accurately determine which species will need an assist.

They are everywhere: in riverbanks, on glaciers, in deserts, in fish populations, even in the air we breathe. And these are just a few of the places where scientists have found microplastics, plastic debris roughly the size of a sesame seed that move easily through the environment, the impact of which remains somewhat of a mystery, Northeastern University experts say.

There are many ways that infrastructure transforms its immediate surroundings, and that can impact the other inhabitants of a neighborhood, whether they’re plants and animals or humans, says Michelle Laboy, assistant professor of architecture at Northeastern. But during site planning, she says, architects typically look at the climate of the broader region rather than the development’s specific street corner.

The tall slender leaves of the marsh grass spartina that edge coastal areas from the Atlantic Coast to the Gulf of Mexico in the United States function as an environmental workhorse, halting erosion and grabbing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it in the soil. “It’s a foundation species in marshes. It holds the sediment in place, which is really important for erosion purposes. It provides habitat for critters—snails, crabs, fish,” says Northeastern University doctoral student Johanna L’Heureux.

Thirty-two visitors, ranging from ages 14 to 22, were touring the Marine Science Center on Tuesday as part of the We Belong Leadership Academy, a program launched with nine students in 2016 by the Boston Police Department’s Bureau of Community Engagement that connects young people with leaders in profit and nonprofit businesses, government and the community.

Nature lovers tend to be categorized as either “appreciative” or “extractive.” The first group includes people like hikers and bird watchers, while the second includes hunters, fishermen and fisherwomen. A recent study by Northeastern marine biologists says there’s an overlap between the two groups that could be the start of a new conversation about protecting the environment—and combating climate change.

California is once again being deluged by atmospheric rivers that have unleashed major flooding across the state, with river number 12 scheduled to dump more precipitation the week of March 19. Experts from Northeastern explained in a story that originally ran in January what causes these flowing streams of vapor that causing the record rains and deadly floods that have put millions of people under an evacuation order.

The monarch butterfly is one of the most widely recognized and admired creatures native to North America. The iconic critter, identified by its vibrant, sunset orange color and speckles of white dotting its black borders, has suffered significant population loss in recent decades. Last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the monarch butterfly as endangered. But the U.S. has yet to do the same, and many states that harbor the migratory insect don’t list it as a species in need of conservation, according to new Northeastern research.

Witnessing disease outbreaks that have nearly annihilated staghorn coral colonies in the Caribbean, Northeastern scientist Steven Vollmer wondered what lessons a few lone survivors might offer for the future of coral reefs. Would it be possible to identify disease-resistant corals by their genetic makeup? And if the hardier types were specially selected for underwater coral nurseries, would the result be healthier reef systems?

The heat wave striking Europe has sent temperatures in Britain above 40 degrees Celsius–or 104 Fahrenheit—for the first time ever, caused wildfires in France and killed more than 1,000 people in Spain and Portugal. Northeastern University professors say it is a sign of more to come as climate change continues to create extreme weather challenges.

If you were to stare down into one of a few dozen intertidal pools at low tide, as waves glide in and out, you might have a hard time spotting the robots.

That’s because they look just like the real mussels that surround them.

“It’s a problem finding them again,” said Brian...

As restoration projects throughout Massachusetts and the country focus on restoring natural ecosystems, researchers are looking for ways to better bridge the “practice science gap” between practitioners and biodiversity research in an effort optimize these types of projects. The findings...

The Trussell Lab has been studying the “ecology of fear” for some time now, and the extent to which parents pass along their fear of predation to their offspring. Sarah Donelan, a postdoctoral researcher, recently...

Tropical corals are severely threatened by white band disease, which can destroy the tissues of several species in the Caribbean. Researchers from the Vollmer and Patterson Labs, working from a base at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, have explored the possibility that...

The ecosystem services provided by restored seagrass, salt marsh, and oyster reef habitat will likely continue to evolve for decades, but post-restoration monitoring of these projects is often limited to the time frame of grants, which are often funded just for one or two years. Research from...

Recent research published in Environmental Microbiology by Rebecca Certner and her advisor, Steve Vollmer, contributes to the emergent field of quorum sensing as a mechanism for coral disease development, specifically for white band disease in the critically endangered...

When it comes to environmental issues, there has always been a lot to learn and a lot of potential for action. Scientific understanding of ozone depletion led to the banning of CFCs. Climate research has helped us to understand the contributions of fossil fuel burning and greenhouse gas emissions to global warming.

When Aron Stubbins first arrived in Boston during the first week of January 2018, he received a snowy and cold welcome. It was a big adjustment from the weather at his previous home at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in...

Research by assistant professor David Kimbro has been considered in a water rights battle that made it all the way to the US Supreme Court recently. Kimbro’s work studying oyster populations in Apalachicola Bay, Florida,...

Northeastern professor Daniel Distel and his colleagues have discovered a dark slithering creature four feet long that dwells in the foul mud of a remote lagoon in the Philippines. They say studying the animal, a...

On sustainability, professor Geoffrey Trussell, director of Northeastern’s Marine Science Center and chair of the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences, addresses the “collision between humanity and the environment.” How, he asks, can we create cleaner, safer, smarter coastal...

Northeastern’s Ocean Genome Legacy maintains a collection of marine DNA and tissue samples that is unlike anything else in the world.

Tiny marine snails have challenged doomsday assumptions that ocean acidification driven by global warming will inevitably render the oceans sterile.

While there’s no doubt that many...

Out in a bed of mussels, off the Monterey coast in California in a space exposed at low tide, a handful of green LEDs blink, indicating the location of a cohort of robomussels.

A massive Nassau grouper, four species of black corals, and a spotted drum fish were among the aquatic treasures Northeastern divers found on their expedition to Cozumel, Mexico. The drum fish was an especially lucky discovery—drums are nocturnal feeders that rarely leave the protection of...

Science and politics: The relationship is hotly debated in the news these days, with both lawmakers and the public noting a great divide between support for research among Republicans and Democrats.

But two papers by Northeastern researchers point to a subtler—more conciliatory—...

Northeastern co-hosted a Capitol Hill briefing on coastal sustainability on Wednesday afternoon, convening a panel of stakeholders to discuss the threats facing coastal communities and the best practices for keeping them secure.

Transforming the Mississippi River to its current state has been like domesticating a wild wolf. The river today is generally calm, easy to navigate, and friendly to people living and farming nearby. But without billions of dollars in engineering over hundreds of years, we’d be dealing with a...