Category: Global Change

One fish, two fish: merging marine animal tracking with fishing fleet movements

Post author By jcoker
Post date August 20, 2020

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VT News | August 19, 2020

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The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated in 2018 that 34.2 percent of the world’s fish stocks were overfished, a worrying trend that has significant impacts on ocean environments and the fishing industries that utilize them.

Satellite technology has increased the capacities of researchers and scientists to collect data about marine animals while tracking the movements of commercial fishing vessels, two crucial drivers in the effort to maintain a healthy ocean ecosystem.

Virginia Tech collaborated with Stanford University and Global Fishing Watch to host “Fish and Ships,” an online workshop connecting researchers from around the world to discuss ways in which the merging of these two data sets might answer critical questions about human impacts on ocean biodiversity and sustainability. Participants brainstormed research approaches on overlapping species habitat maps with the data for national fishing fleet positions and discussed how emerging technologies can better model ocean dynamics.

“We’re in a new age in fisheries management,” said Assistant Professor Francesco Ferretti, of Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment, who coordinated the workshop. “Just a few years ago we had to rely mostly on what the fishers were telling us. Now we have a huge amount of data from satellites that track marine fishing vessels. From that data we can use models to track, predict, and characterize fishing operations around the world.”

Much of the fishing vessel data discussed was provided by Global Fishing Watch, which used the automatic identification system to track the movements of approximately 70,000 industrial fishing vessels from 2012 to 2016, resulting in the first “footprint map” of fishing fleet movement around the world. This map provides a crucial perspective on both the reach of commercial fishing and what drivers are potentially influencing the industry.

At the same time that fishing vessels are “pinging” data about where they are fishing, electronic tags on broad-ranging fish, such as tuna, swordfish, and sharks, are giving scientists new information about the movements of marine animals across the world’s oceans.

“We’re starting to do overlaps of these two data sets to see how much they cross paths,” explained Ferretti, a faculty member in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation. “One goal is to develop a landscape of interactions so we can understand the ways that fishing impacts fish populations. From that information, we can go further, perhaps developing guidelines to help manage the fishing industry and provide data that will improve its efficiency while allowing ocean marine animal populations a chance to recover.”

Ferretti notes that workshop participants particularly enjoyed the opportunity to work collaboratively: “This first workshop has been a great success. We created a consortium of more than 70 scientists from academic institutions, national and international management bodies, and nongovernment organizations, all willing to play ball in making the ocean a more transparent place to use resources and benefit from its services.”

The July workshop served as the kickoff meeting; Virginia Tech is planning to host a second workshop to address the inventorying and integration of large data sets and ongoing analyses.

“We are currently taking steps to invite all these scientists to Virginia Tech,” Ferretti said. “While COVID will likely impact our plans, we are considering numerous hosting options, from our Innovation Campus in Washington, D.C., to our marine facilities on the Chesapeake Bay, to our beautiful campus in Blacksburg. The goal will be a full immersion into the technical aspects of the projects brainstormed during the kickoff meeting.”

Ferretti noted that Virginia Tech has a role to play in protecting and preserving our oceans and hopes that the Fish and Ships venture will prove to be a flagship project towards that effort. The Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation is currently bolstering its research and educational opportunities in marine fisheries, ecology, and conservation.

“We are a technical university, and right now the ocean requires technical solutions,” said Ferretti, who is affiliated with the Global Change Center housed in Virginia Tech’s Fralin Life Sciences Institute. “There is a great deal of marine technology being developed to understand our oceans better, and Virginia Tech can play a big role in that domain.”

Written by David Fleming

CONTACT:

Krista Timney
540-231-6157

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Biodiversity Blog Global Change IGC Interfaces of Global Change IGEP Postcards Research Water

Postcard from a Fellow: Daniel Smith’s summer obsession with flumes, fake roots, and Psych

Post author By jcoker
Post date August 13, 2020

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By Daniel Smith | August 9, 2020

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Hi GCC community and friends! Daniel Smith here; I’m a fourth year PhD candidate within the Biological Systems Engineering (BSE) Department and I’ve been an IGC fellow since spring 2019. While at Virginia Tech, my research has focused on how plant roots protect streambank soils from fluvial (water) erosion. I am interested in understanding which plant root processes/mechanisms have the most influence on streambank erosion. I’m excited to share some of the tools I have been using and testing out this summer that will be used to measure soil erosion in my future experiments.

First, let me introduce the epic, room-sized (26 ft long by 3 feet wide) flume. This flume, housed in ICTAS II (the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science), was designed and built to represent water flow within a stream channel. However, a major distinction must be acknowledged between the manmade flume and a natural streambank. The bottom and sides of this flume are made out of smooth, plexiglass material while streams typically have rough bed sediments and grainy bank soil. Many streams also have visible plant roots growing along the streambank face, adding an extra layer to the grainy soil material. Consequently, to measure the effect of plant roots on streambank erosion in the flume, I need to better represent the boundary conditions found in natural streambank settings.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”50732″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Part of this modification was already done from a previous student’s research project. That student built four “flume inserts” made out of a wooden frame and 1-inch thick PVC sheeting. Sand particles were glued onto the PVC sheets, giving them a grainy texture, and a hole was cut into one of the panels so a soil sample could be placed there for erosion testing. For my experiment, I worked with Allen Yoder in the BSE department to make the testing holes larger, replace some broken and/or missing parts, and fix any worn out sections of the frame. Once inside the flume, these updated walls would represent streambank soil that had no vegetation.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50729″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50763″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]While the sand wall is a good representation of an unvegetated streambank, I still needed something that matched vegetated streambank soils with roots facing the stream channel. As a result, more PVC sheeting had to be purchased, cut to the correct size, and covered in sand particles. To represent the roots of grassy plants, I decided to use different diameters of flexible, 100% polyester thread. Here’s the fun part: given the size of my PVC sheets, field data from another study revealed I would need ~1500 roots glued onto each insert in order to match what was typically found in the field! Armed with a hand drill, scissors, thread, and E6000 glue, I drilled 200 holes into each PVC sheet, cut and tied different thread diameters together, and individually glued these fake root bundles into each hole. Once complete, these walls can be drilled on top of the sand wall inserts when I am testing rooted soil planted with grassy-type vegetation. Between the tediously long hours of cutting and gluing, I’ve been able to watch multiple documentaries and an unknown amount of the show Psych![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”50898″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]But wait…there’s still more! The sand walls will be used to test erosion in unvegetated soil samples and the polyester threaded walls will be used to measure erosion in soil samples planted with grassy vegetation. What about the woody plants? You guessed it– I’ll need to make another set of walls with fake root material that represents woody (e.g. more rigid) roots. Once that task is completed, I will run some preliminary tests in the flume to make sure the walls are working as desired before the real experiment starts. Needless to say, by the end of this summer, it’s likely that I’ll have watched so many episodes of Psych some of them will start blending together in my head…[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”50741″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][vc_single_image image=”50738″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_column_text]In addition to the glorious and time-consuming task of gluing near 800 root bundles (~6000 fake roots in total), I am also taking care of some real plants this summer in the Hahn Horticulture Garden greenhouses. My future experiment will look at using switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) and silky dogwood (Cornus amomum) to represent grassy and woody plant roots. This summer I am testing to see how they grow in these PVC pipe chambers to see if any modifications will need to be made later. So far things are growing nicely![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_single_image image=”50767″ img_size=”large” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”44646″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Daniel Smith is an Interfaces of Global Change fellow working with Dr. Tess Thompson in Virginia Tech’s Department of Biological Systems Engineering. He is studying how plant roots and soil microorganisms impact streambank soil resistance to fluvial erosion.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator style=”shadow”][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Biodiversity Blog Geology Global Change IGC Interfaces of Global Change IGEP Postcards Research

Postcard from a Fellow: Ernie Osburn’s year of two summers

Post author By jcoker
Post date July 23, 2020

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By Ernie Osburn | July 23, 2020

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Hello everyone! I hope this postcard finds you healthy and safe. If you don’t know me already, I’m Ernie, an IGC fellow from the Biological Sciences department. My research focuses on how landscape history influences soil microbial communities and their ecosystem functions. My goal today is to entertain you with stories about my summer research adventures. Only one problem – this summer has been a weird one. Not sure if you guys have heard, but there is a global pandemic going on right now that has messed up everyone’s summer plans, including my own. As a result, I find myself most days in an empty lab in a mostly empty building doing tedious, mind-numbing lab work. Nothing too exciting to write about, unfortunately . . . However, I was fortunate enough this year to experience two summers: the current northern hemisphere summer as well as the austral (southern hemisphere) summer while doing field work in Antarctica during January and February. Antarctica is much more interesting than Derring Hall, so I’ll write about my time “on the ice.”

My lab mate Sarah and I began our Antarctic adventure on December 12^th2019. Our travels began with about 24 consecutive hours of airline flights from Roanoke, VA to Washington D.C. to Houston, TX, to Auckland, New Zealand, and finally to Christchurch, New Zealand. Because of time zone changes, we lost a day in transit and landed on December 14^th. The next day, I attended some training sessions and was issued my extreme cold weather gear (ECW) at the U.S. Antarctic Program facility in Christchurch, NZ. Normally, the flight down to “the ice” is scheduled for the following day, but because of weather delays, we did not fly out until December 17^th. The flight was a loud, uncomfortable, 8 hour trip in jump seats on a C-130 with my legs interlocked with those of the people across from me. After the plane landed on the Ross Ice Shelf, we were transported to McMurdo Station.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50356″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50357″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]While in Antarctica, about half of my time was spent living at McMurdo station and processing samples in the lab facility there. McMurdo station is located on Ross Island just off the coast of the Antarctic continent and is the central base of operations for the U.S. Antarctic Program. McMurdo is the most populated place in Antarctica and is essentially a functioning town, complete with a fire department, a water treatment facility, a waste management facility, a library, a hair salon, a general store, and three bars. At its busiest, there were more than 1,200 residents at McMurdo, a mixture of researchers, support staff, and military personnel. Everyone on station eats meals in “the galley,” a big cafeteria. The food is generally all frozen and non-perishable, with fresh food available very rarely. So not the best. People live in very close quarters at McMurdo – everyone is assigned a dorm room with 1-3 roommates and bathrooms are all communal. Also, social life at McMurdo is surprisingly lively. Nearly every night of the week there are events, often involving live music. Most notably is the annual New Year’s Eve concert/party called ‘Ice Stock.’ One interesting quirk of McMurdo is that people like to dress up in silly costumes for these events. There are lots of costume options readily available on station (for reasons unknown to me), so I decided to participate a couple of times after coming across some fun animal costumes. In general, if you thought living in Antarctica would be an isolating experience, you would be very wrong! If you’re interested in learning more about life at McMurdo station, check out the ‘Antarctica: A Year on Ice’ documentary, which is free with Amazon Prime.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50359″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50367″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The other half of my time in Antarctica was spent living at field camps in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. The Dry Valleys are the largest ice-free areas in Antarctica. For about two months of every year during the austral summer, temperatures get high enough that ice melts, forming streams. These streams flow from glaciers up in the mountains to freshwater lakes at the bottom of each basin. Most of the lake surfaces are covered by a layer of permanent ice, though liquid water ‘moats’ form around the edges of the lakes in the summer months. Most of the lake basins are ‘endorheic,’ meaning they do not have an outflow to the ocean. This causes minerals to accumulate over time, which causes the lakes to form saline layers.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50354″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50358″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50368″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50369″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The Dry Valleys are located on the Antarctic continent across McMurdo Sound and are only accessible by helicopter. My first trip out to the Dry Valleys was my first time flying in a helicopter and it’s a thrilling experience! While living at the field camps, I slept in a tent each night, which is very difficult with 24 hours of daylight. In fact, I did not see the sun set during my entire two month stay in Antarctica! The field camps also have permanent structures, including small lab spaces and a heated living space with a gas or solar powered appliances such as stoves, ovens, refrigerators, and freezers. The field camps even have wi-fi! The only amenity missing from the field camps is running water, but otherwise living in the camps is surprisingly comfortable. While in the Dry Valleys, Sarah and I hiked to various locations in multiple lake basins to sample soils and microbial mats. These microbial mats are the “forests” of the Dry Valleys and are the most conspicuous life found there. The mats form in lakes, streams, and wet soils, and there are green, red, orange, and black mat varieties, each composed of different microbial taxa. Our goal with these samples is to understand how differences in soil nutrient availability due to the unique geologic histories of the different lake basins has influenced the structure and ecosystem functioning of microbial communities present in these environments.

By mid-February, the Antarctic winter was well on its way and it was time for our field season to end. Sarah and I flew back to Christchurch on a US Air Force C-17 and we were then lucky enough to spend a couple of week travelling around New Zealand before coming back to the U.S. As you might imagine, New Zealand is a very different environment from Antarctica and maybe even more stunningly beautiful. It was interesting adjusting back to a more normal society and being surprised at seeing normally mundane things that were not present in Antarctica, such as trees, dogs, children, and the night sky. Then, nearly immediately after arriving back in the U.S., the COVID crisis began and I was stuck in my apartment for a few months working on data analysis and writing.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50371″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50372″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Now that my 2^nd summer is here and our lab has re-opened, I spend most days doing lab processing and analysis of the soil samples we collected in Antarctica and from other projects. My lab work consists of various chemical analyses of soils as well as DNA-based analyses of soil microbial communities. These DNA analyses involve isolation of DNA from the samples and lots of PCR (check out my growing collection of PCR plates below!). The lab work isn’t particularly exciting, but at least it is going smoothly thus far. Anyways, this might be the longest post card in history, so I’m going to stop it here (I’m impressed if you actually read this far!). I hope everyone is doing well during these challenging times and I hope to see everyone soon.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50373″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50374″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”50375″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Ernie Osburn is an Interfaces of Global Change fellow working with Dr. Jeb Barrett in Virginia Tech’s Department of Biological Sciences. He is studying the impacts of Rhododendron removals on soil microbial communities and nitrogen cycling in Appalachian forests.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator style=”shadow”][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Blog Geology Global Change IGC Interfaces of Global Change IGEP Postcards Research

Postcard from a Fellow: Junyao Kang in the lab with ancient rocks

Post author By jcoker
Post date July 11, 2020

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By Junyao Kang | July 10, 2020

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”47782″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Hey folks! I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy. I’m Junyao Kang, a second year Ph.D. student from Department of Geosciences, and one of the newest IGC fellows. This summer, I’m working to analyze some 720-1000-million-years-old carbonate and shale samples, which I gathered in North China last summer. My research focuses on the oceanic environmental changes in deep time and their relationships with the evolution of life. To reconstruct the paleoenvironment and its related change, we rely on the sedimentary rocks forming at that time. The chemical and isotopic compositions of these rocks will tell us what has happened in the seawaters and sediments.

This time interval (about 539-1000 million years ago) is a critical one because it witnessed various eukaryotic innovations and even the origin of animals. Knowing the environmental context will help us better understand what has caused these major evolutionary events and also how the life co-evolved with the environment.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]As I analyze samples this summer, I’m most interested in different iron species incorporated into rocks, because iron is really sensitive to the redox (reduction-oxidation) conditions of the water column. When the water is oxic, iron is mostly incorporated as Fe silicates. However, as it becomes increasingly anoxic, the relative proportion of Fe oxides and Fe carbonates would increase in ferruginous conditions (anoxic and containing free ferrous iron), whereas the relative proportion of Fe sulfides would increase in sulfidic conditions (anoxic and containing free hydrogen sulfide, as is happening deep in the Black Sea right now). Hence, I’m using an iron sequential extraction method to analyze different species of iron preserved in the rocks, which will reflect contemporaneous oceanic redox conditions.

As for isotopic compositions in the samples, I mainly focus on the carbon and sulfur isotopes. Isotopic fractionation will happen during photosynthesis (carbon isotopes) and bacteria using organic matters to reduce sulfate (sulfur isotopes). So isotopic analysis will help us better understand the biogeochemical cycle of carbon and sulfur in ancient oceans. Furthermore, of these two processes, photosynthesis and sulfate reduction, one is directly related to oxygen production while another one actually prevents oxygen being consumed by organic matter oxidation. Therefore, isotopic composition can offer us some information about net oxygen production during that time.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”50203″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_shadow_border”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Fortunately for me, the COVID pandemic didn’t change my plans too much. But it’s impossible that this pandemic has no effect on my research plan… and quarantined life sometimes drives me crazy :). Because I need to use facilities in different labs within or outside of our department and some of them are still closed, I have needed to modify my research timelines. Also, as a second year student, I’m still learning a lot of lab skills, but the current situation makes it difficult to have some in-situ learning. I hope others are doing well, despite these challenges![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50204″ img_size=”500×400″ add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50206″ img_size=”500×400″ add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50233″ img_size=”500×400″ add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”50234″ img_size=”500×400″ add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”50211″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Junyao Kang is an Interfaces of Global Change fellow in the Geosciences Department under the advisement of Dr. Shuhai Xiao. Junyao hopes to look to the past of the Earth history in order to understand the magnitude, causes, and consequences of global scale anoxia events, which will help to obtain a long view of dead zones, to make long-term predictions, and to develop sustainable strategies to mitigate environmental threats such as dead zones.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator style=”shadow”][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Blog Faculty Spotlight Global Change Water

VT researcher uses billions of data points to examine how increased flooding due to climate change impacts US waterways

Post author By jcoker
Post date June 30, 2020

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From CALS VT News | June 30, 2020

There’s a tendency in modern America to think of flooding as nothing but dangerous, a threat to homes, farms, roads, and bridges. But flooding — when the waters of a river rise above the banks and inundate the nearby land — is a natural phenomenon that benefits wildlife habitat and has been crucial for human civilizations ever since the first ones relied on the flooding of the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers to irrigate their crops.

Durelle Scott, an associate professor of Biological Systems Engineering affiliate of the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech, is the lead author of a paper recently published in the academic journal Nature Communicationsthat examines flooding in the continental United States in nearly unprecedented detail. Scott and his co-authors looked at what Scott calls “everyday” flooding in streams and rivers of all sizes, using data from 5,800 flood monitoring stations operated by the United States Geological Survey. With measurements typically taken every 15 minutes or every 30 minutes, that amounted to more than 2 billion individual measurements. For every station, the team performed 1,000 realizations of flooding thresholds to capture uncertainty, applying statistical techniques on a large computer server.

“The big picture is that flooding across the world is increasing with climate change, but not all flooding is bad and catastrophic,” said Scott, who is in both the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering. “We wanted to do an analysis where we captured the variability in annual flooding that occurs within small streams to larger rivers.”

Most flood studies are focused on single river basins or geographic regions, he said. By studying the entire lower 48 states, Scott and his team can examine flooding in both large and small rivers and conclude the entire nation could better manage its floodplains.

Among the paper’s findings: smaller streams flood more often than larger ones, but for shorter durations. The more frequent flooding means that smaller streams serve as a conduit between the landscape and the adjacent stream.

That’s a mixed blessing: “Delivery of nutrients and sediment to floodplain environments is partially why you have very rich soils and agriculture set up along river systems,” Scott said. But the movement of nutrients and sediment goes both ways, and when it moves from the floodplain into the river, it can be harmful to water users downstream.

“When excess nutrients get into a stream or river and are delivered downstream, you end up with algae blooms and the like, and that has implications whether it’s related to human health or detrimental to commercial or recreational fisheries,” Scott said.

One of Scott’s findings is that the exchange of sediment and nutrients between rivers and floodplains depends not just on the levels of flooding, but on how long a flooding event lasts.

“If you have very short floods, you’ll end up having more net delivery from the floodplain into a river than removal of a specific nutrient or sediment,” Scott said. “That was unique in our study. We were able to quantify approximately how long water was on these floodplains and found for small streams the inundation is usually much less than a day, so there’s not usually an opportunity for removal of nutrients.”

This has implications for wetland restoration intended for water quality benefits. There has been much money and effort spent in recent decades to return rivers and floodplains to something resembling their natural state. This type of restoration, Scott said, must go beyond simply reconnecting a stream to a floodplain, by removing channels or levies that once contained the stream. If the water only tops the stream banks during high flows, flooding will be short and heavy, which could send more harmful material downstream. Instead, restoration within mid-sized rivers may produce more gradual flooding, to achieve what Scott called “the balance of optimal inundation time and nutrient supply for water quality benefits.”

Scott’s research could also have lessons for how we manage rivers to prevent catastrophic flooding. Serious flooding is certainly something to be prevented, but we may be over-protecting ourselves against moderate flooding to enable construction on low-lying floodplains.

“We’ve put in lots of levies to reduce infrastructure damage,” Scott said. “The flipside is if you put up a levy in a town and a town downstream doesn’t have as big of a levy, you’re making it worse for the downstream community. With more frequent flooding on the horizon, future water management needs to balance economic development within flood-prone areas relative to the societal costs of post-flood reconstruction.”

Written by Tony Biasotti

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Blog Drinking water Environmental Justice Faculty Spotlight Global Change Outreach Pollution Water

VT researcher working to provide clean water to Appalachia

Post author By jcoker
Post date June 22, 2020

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From CALS VT News | June 20, 2020

More than 2 million Americans live without access to safe drinking water or adequate sewer sanitation, according to a 2019 study by the U.S. Water Alliance. That includes around a quarter-million people in Puerto Rico and half a million homeless people in the United States. The biggest chunk, though — around 1.4 million people — are United States residents who live in homes that don’t have proper plumbing or tap water.

They are clustered in five areas: California’s Central Valley; predominantly Native American communities near the four corners of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico; the Texas-Mexico border; the Mississippi Delta region in Mississippi and Alabama; and central Appalachia. Virginia alone has around 20,000 homes without plumbing.

Leigh-Anne Krometis, an associate professor of biological systems engineering which is in both the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, is one of the foremost experts on water quality and availability in Appalachia. And while the basics of her work seem, well, basic — “I just spent a decade proving that not having sewers is a bad thing, which we’ve known for literally thousands of years,” she said — the implications are more complex.

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Often, the best minds in American civil and environmental engineering are looking abroad, at how to bring clean water to remote villages and slums in developing countries. The crisis over lead in the tap water in Flint, Michigan, was a reminder that all over the United States, people lack access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.

In the past three years, Krometis has authored a series of studies of water quality and availability in the Appalachian region. In 2017, she published “Tracking the Downstream Impacts of Inadequate Sanitation in Central Appalachia” in the “Journal of Water and Health.”

That article looked at what happens to streams when homes near them don’t have proper plumbing. Usually, that means a “straight pipe” that carries untreated sewage into an unlined hole in the ground, which drains either directly or indirectly into a stream. Krometis and her team found E. coli bacteria consistent with untreated human waste in those streams, in spots that were correlated with their proximity to homes without proper sewage systems. Sometimes the contamination carried as far as six miles downstream.

Krometis’ newest article on the subject, “Water Scavenging from Roadside Springs in Appalachia,” published in May 2019 in the “Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education,” connects her earlier research on wastewater to the issue of drinking water. Some untold number of people in Appalachia drink untreated water from springs or streams — often the same streams that are close to straight sewage pipes. Krometis and her team tested the water at 21 springs used for drinking water, and more than 80 percent of them tested positive for E. coli.

Krometis also surveyed people who drink untreated spring water, and found that most of them do have running water in their homes, often from wells. They said they preferred the spring water because it tastes better than their tap water, or because they don’t trust the quality and reliability of the water in their homes.

Fixing these two interrelated problems, of wastewater and drinking water, isn’t easy. The homes that use straight pipes and roadsides springs tend to be far away from the nearest municipal sewer and water systems, and often separated by mountains and ravines. It could cost $50,000 or more to hook one of these homes up to a sewer system, even if there is one nearby, Krometis said. Septic tanks are usually unsuitable because the soil isn’t deep enough.

“These are legitimately challenging engineering problems, and they require a lot of money, and these places don’t have a lot of money,” she said. “We haven’t figured out ways to get water and sewer to extremely rural areas, and there are also huge issues with the homeless and the working poor in urban areas.”

There are cheaper and easier solutions, of the type used in developing countries. Public water kiosks for drinking water are one, and are already in use in some parts of Kentucky and West Virginia; small water or sewer treatment devices installed for each home or cluster of homes are another option. Krometis supports these tactics, though she sees the political and cultural obstacles to using them in the United States.

“The technologies that are best practices in Africa or Southeast Asia, we don’t use in the United States. They’re unacceptable because we’re a developed country,” she said. “But in my mind, if you have somebody who’s impoverished and doesn’t have access to clean water, that’s a problem that we need to address.”

People are hesitant to give residents of Appalachian mountain hollows or California’s dry and dusty farm town water and sewer systems that aren’t up to the standards of their fellow Americans in cities and suburbs. Krometis understands that hesitation, but she also understands that many of those poor Americans are going without any access to reliable, clean water.

“I see both sides of the coin,” she said. “The problem is, we’re not even having that debate.”

Written by Tony Biasotti

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Faculty Spotlight Geology Global Change Ideas Seminars, Workshops, Lectures

Creativity, collaboration are key for online instruction

Post author By jcoker
Post date March 27, 2020

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From VT News | March 25, 2020

A mass shift to online instruction has pushed Virginia Tech faculty to develop new ways to teach—a dynamic perhaps nowhere more evident than in GCC affiliate Michelle Stocker’s Morphology of the Vertebrates class in the Department of Geosciences.

Before spring break and the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, Stocker’s class met during big blocks of lab time Mondays and Wednesdays to examine pieces of skeleton laid out on trays across six tables. Students used handouts with figures, a list of appropriate terms, and definitions for specific features and morphological processes seen in the displayed bones.

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“They used the figures, terms, and actual specimens to learn the material,” said Stocker, assistant professor of geobiology. “Some can learn by looking at the specimens intensely, and others take to drawing it all out. A lot of students have notebooks in which they draw the different skull elements or specific anatomical views.”

That in-person environment presented a challenge to Stocker when figuring out how to best replicate the class in a distance-learning format. “This class is very much in-person, looking at physical objects,” Stocker said. “It’s quite a transition to be making. I think it’s actually going to work pretty well for the future.”

That successful transition didn’t happen on its own, though. Making it happen took talent, networking, and good old-fashioned Hokie hustle.

“We went into scramble mode a little bit,” Stocker said. “I grabbed the specimens I thought would be most interest or most useful for students to see for the rest of course. I can do in-person demonstrations for them, pointing out different features.”

By “in-person demonstrations,” Stocker is talking about streaming video from her home. As she spoke, the professor was sitting in her basement, surrounded by boxes of bones. As she talked, Stocker plucked specimens and held them up to her web camera.

“Here’s dog skull that’s been prosected by the vet school so we can look at cranial nerves,” Stocker said. “Here are boxes of articulated and disarticulated snakes. An armadillo. Lizards, and other crocodylians. I’ve got a box of hands and feet of mammals on floor, and 3D prints of platypus parts.”

Stocker has built on that foundation of physical specimens with online tools. She’s networked with a colleague at the University of Florida to tap into oVert, a multi-institutional project funded by the National Science Foundation that aims to make available CT scans of all genera of vertebrates, as well as Duke University’s MorphoSource, which has published roughly 27,000 published 3D models of biological specimens.

Stocker and her teaching assistant, Ph.D. candidate Christopher Griffin, are not only drawing on these resources to benefit her students, but they are synthesizing them with her lab demonstrations to develop an engaging distance-learning experience. And she’s doing this while balancing schedules with her husband, Sterling Nesbitt, assistant professor of geobiology in Virginia Tech’s Department of Geosciences, and parenting their three-year-old.

“Flexibility and persistence is what it’s about right now,” Stocker said.

As evolving to the changing landscape of higher education during a pandemic, Stocker and other Virginia Tech faculty are adapting on the fly and building new ways to teach students while also providing a sense of reassurance.

“We want to take care of the students and make sure they’re learning what you want them to learn, but also in times like this we want to make sure they have some sense of normalcy,” Stocker said. “For the group right now, every Monday and Wednesday, we come in and look a skeletons together. We’re keeping that going. We’re doing our job as professors and teachers, and getting them to learn the material, but also just being there for the students.”

In doing so, Stocker and others are showing how Virginia Tech’s motto of Ut Prosim (That I May Serve) not only endures but thrives, even during a pandemic.

For more information about Virginia Tech and its approach to the coronavirus, please read the university’s page on the topic.

— Written by Mason Adams

CONTACTS:
Steven Mackay
540-231-5035

Lon Wagner
540-231-6468

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Biodiversity Conservation Disease Faculty Spotlight Global Change Research

Pathogen levels in the environment drive disease outbreaks in bats

Post author By jcoker
Post date March 26, 2020

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From VT News | March 16, 2020

Since 2005, millions of bats have perished from white-nose syndrome, a disease caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans. Although the disease has been found throughout much of the world, severe population declines have only occurred in North America — and now researchers at Virginia Tech know why.

In a new study led by Joseph Hoyt, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Science, researchers have found that the pathogen levels in the environment play a major role in whether bat populations are stable or experience severe declines from white-nose syndrome.

Hoyt and his international team of researchers published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 16.

“This study shows that more contaminated environments, or potential ‘hot spots,’ are going to result in higher disease impacts. By understanding the relationship between how much pathogen is present in the environment and the size of an outbreak, we can know exactly how much environmental sanitization is needed to reduce the epidemic potential,” said Hoyt.

When infectious diseases first arise, it is crucial to understand how the disease is being transmitted. With a pathogen like Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which can exist outside of the host, researchers looked to the environmental pathogen reservoir — or the habitat in which a pathogen persists or grows in the absence of hosts.

Pseudogymnoascus destructans is a cold-loving fungus, which resides on the walls of caves, mines, and other subterranean environments. Every year, as the cold and debilitating winter draws near, bats hibernate in these infected sites until they can return to the landscape in spring. And it is during this time that bats contract white-nose syndrome.

As Hoyt and his team journeyed out to find the historical origin of this disease, they were the first to find that the pathogen has already been present in Asia for thousands of years. In an even more astounding discovery, they found that European and Asian bat populations face little to no impacts from white-nose syndrome compared to bats in North America.

A cluster of greater horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus ferrumequinum) roosting in a cave at the end of winter in Jilin province, China. They are tightly packed, and one bat is flying away from the cluster and towards the camera. — A cluster of greater horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus ferrumequinum) roosting in a cave at the end of winter in Jilin province, China. Photograph courtesy of Joseph R Hoyt.

This unprecedented study revealed that the environmental pathogen reservoir in European and Asian sites decayed over the summer months, which left a smaller amount of pathogen in the environment for bats to come into contact with the following winter. In contrast, there was no decay of the pathogen in sites over the summer in North America, which resulted in widespread infection and mortality.

“The fact is that bats are experiencing much less severe infections at the beginning of the hibernation season across Europe and Asia. As a result, they are still getting infected but the process of infection is delayed relative to North American bats. So, they are experiencing far lower transmission from the environment than bats experience here in North America,” said Kate Langwig, the second author of this paper and an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Science and an affiliated faculty member of the Global Change Center, housed under the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. “The differences in the environmental reservoir are really important for driving the dynamics of the disease across space.”

With lower transmission of the pathogen and some time on their side, bats will be able to emerge from their infected roosts in just enough time to escape certain death.

“Because the pathogen decays in the environment over summer in Europe and Asia, most bats don’t become infected until mid- to late- winter, which is too late for the infections to manifest into mortality. If you have delayed transmission, then bats are able to emerge in the spring and clear infection before it can ever result in death,” said Hoyt.

This is one of the first papers to link the extent of the environmental reservoir to the size of an outbreak, the number of individuals that become infected, the severity of those infections, and population impacts.

Hoyt hopes that this paper will highlight the importance of environmental pathogen reservoirs in driving infectious disease outbreaks.

“The environmental pathogen reservoir has the potential to be really important. The idea that as you get a more contaminated environment, that scales with the degree of population impacts, is something that hasn’t really been demonstrated before,” said Hoyt.

Hoyt and his team are now trying to use findings from Eurasian bat populations to help North American bats. More specifically, they are trying to reduce the amount of pathogen in the environment in North America over summer when bats are absent from these sites.

“We are trying to replicate the pathogen decay that is happening in Europe and Asia, and delay transmission. If we can push bats to not get infected until later in the winter, then they might be able to survive until spring,” said Hoyt.

This project received a majority of funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Additional funding was provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Program for Introducing Talents to Universities, Jilin Provincial Natural Science Foundation, Mongolian State University of Education, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI.

– Written by Kendall Daniels

CONTACT:
Kristin Rose
(540) 231-6614

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Announcements Conservation Food & Agriculture Global Change Other Sponsored Lectures Seminars, Workshops, Lectures

Innovative conservationist and business entrepreneur to present public lecture in Blacksburg on March 20

Post author By jcoker
Post date March 11, 2020

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From VT News | March 10, 2020

**UPDATE March 11, 2020: POSTPONED due to Virginia Tech COVID-19 mitigation strategy and large event cancelation policy (more info here).

Leigh-Kathryn Bonner, a fourth-generation beekeeper and founder and CEO of Bee Downtown, will visit Virginia Tech on March 20.

Bonner will give a 4 p.m. distinguished public lecture titled “Moments that Matter: Leadership Through the Eyes of a Beekeeper” at the Lyric Theatre in downtown Blacksburg. The lecture will be followed by a question and answer session.

Honeybees are one of nature’s most important workers, and they pollinate $15 billion worth of crops in the United States each year. However, honeybee populations — and the services they provide to ecosystems and society— are quickly declining.

To do her part in addressing this pressing global issue, Bonner founded Bee Downtown during her junior year of college. The company installs and maintains beehives on the roofs and campuses of corporations to rebuild honeybee populations in urban areas. Additionally, Bee Downtown offers educational programs, events, and leadership exercises to increase employee engagement in the workplace.

What began as a school project has grown to provide employee engagement and leadership development at more than 50 corporations like Delta, Chick-Fil-A, AT&T, and IBM. Bee Downtown now maintains more than 200 hives to house more than 12 million honeybees.

“Running a successful business is just like running a successful beehive,” Bonner said. “One honeybee makes a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her whole life. But together a hive can generate over a hundred pounds of honey in a matter of months. If we — as leaders, as a community — can work together, like a honeybee hive, we can collectively create a lasting change in the world that we are all proud to be a part of.”

By integrating sustainability with a corporate business model, Bonner engages employees in beekeeping while enabling them to “think outside the hive” on their leadership journey.

Bonner holds a beehive pallet, which is covered swarming with bees. She is wearing a grey tee-shirt with a bee on it, as she holds the pallet with her arms stretched far out. Courtesy: Bee Downtown. — Bonner with a beehive pallet. Courtesy: Bee Downtown.

Bonner is a storyteller, environmental steward, and empowering leader. She is a 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur, a 2018 Inc Magazine 30 Under 30 Rising Star, a Southern Living Southerner of the Year, and a TEDx speaker. Top media outlets, such as Forbes, BBC, Inc Magazine, and the New York Times, have featured Bonner’s work.

Bonner’s visit represents the seventh lecture in the public Distinguished Lecture Series sponsored by the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech. The lecture series brings some of the world’s leading scholars to the Blacksburg community to discuss critical environmental and societal issues in an open forum.

“The environmental problems we face today are so complex that it’s easy to become overwhelmed, leaving many to ponder how they can possibly make a positive difference. Leigh-Kathryn Bonner exemplifies the fact that every one of us can contribute toward solving the world’s most urgent challenges,” said William Hopkins, director of the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech and professor of fish and wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment. “She has taken her passion for protecting pollinators and turned this into a highly successful business model that teaches corporate leaders and their employees about sustainability and social responsibility. She is an inspirational example of how we can each contribute to a sustainable future.”

Coordinated by the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech, the event is free and open to the public, thanks to joint funding efforts from the Fralin Life Sciences Institute, College of Natural Resources and Environment, Apex Center for Entrepreneurs, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Virginia Tech Graduate School.

“There is a big focus on entrepreneurship in the technology sector right now and we think it’s really important for students to understand all of the different ways that they can be innovative and successful. The hands-on, community-based business model that Bee Downtown has launched in the corporate realm is an excellent example of this. We’re thrilled to support bringing these types of leaders to Virginia Tech and the Blacksburg community,” said Sean Collins, director of the Apex Center for Entrepreneurs at Virginia Tech.

For more information about the event, please contact the Global Change Center at 540-231-5400 or visit its website.

The Lyric Theatre is located at 135 College Ave. in Blacksburg. Doors will open at 3 p.m. Metered parking is available on the street as well as in the Kent Square garage. Anyone parking on the Virginia Tech campus before 5 p.m. will need a permit.

– Written by Rasha Aridi

CONTACT:
Kristin Rose
(540) 231-6614

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Biodiversity Blog Faculty Spotlight Geology Global Change Research

Virginia Tech paleontologists identify 1 billion-year-old green seaweed fossils, ancestors to modern land plants

Post author By jcoker
Post date February 25, 2020

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From VT News | February 24, 2020

Virginia Tech paleontologists have made a remarkable discovery in China: 1 billion-year-old micro-fossils of green seaweeds that could be related to the ancestor of the earliest land plants and trees that first developed 450 million years ago.

The micro-fossil seaweeds — a form of algae known as Proterocladus antiquus — are barely visible to the naked eyed at 2 millimeters in length, or roughly the size of a typical flea. Professor Shuhai Xiao said the fossils are the oldest green seaweeds ever found. They were imprinted in rock taken from an area of dry land — formerly ocean — near the city of Dalian in the Liaoning Province of northern China. Previously, the earliest convincing fossil record of green seaweeds were found in rock dated at roughly 800 million years old.

The findings — led by Xiao and Qing Tang, a post-doctoral researcher, both in the Department of Geosciences, part of the Virginia Tech College of Science — are featured in the latest issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution. “These new fossils suggest that green seaweeds were important players in the ocean long before their land-plant descendants moved and took control of dry land,” Xiao said.

A computerized depiction of ancient green seaweed in the ocean, with the fossilized plants in the foreground. — In the background of this digital recreation, ancient microscopic green seaweed is seen living in the ocean 1 billion years ago. In the foreground is the same seaweed in the process of being fossilized far later. Image by Dinghua Yang.

“The entire biosphere is largely dependent on plants and algae for food and oxygen, yet land plants did not evolve until about 450 million years ago,” Xiao said. “Our study shows that green seaweeds evolved no later than 1 billion years ago, pushing back the record of green seaweeds by about 200 million years. What kind of seaweeds supplied food to the marine ecosystem?”

Shuhai said the current hypothesis is that land plants — the trees, grasses, food crops, bushes, even kudzu — evolved from green seaweeds, which were aquatic plants. Through geological time — millions upon millions of years — they moved out of the water and became adapted to and prospered on dry land, their new natural environment. “These fossils are related to the ancestors of all the modern land plants we see today.”

However, Xiao added the caveat that not all geobiologists are on the same page – that debate on the origins of green plants remains debated. “Not everyone agrees with us; some scientists think that green plants started in rivers and lakes, and then conquered the ocean and land later,” added Xiao, a member of the Virginia Tech Global Change Center.

There are three main types of seaweed: brown (Phaeophyceae), green (Chlorophyta), and red (Rhodophyta), and thousands of species of each kind. Fossils of red seaweed, which are now common on ocean floors, have been dated as far back as 1.047 billion years old.

“There are some modern green seaweeds that look very similar to the fossils that we found,” Xiao said. “A group of modern green seaweeds, known as siphonocladaleans, are particularly similar in shape and size to the fossils we found.”

Photosynthetic plants are, of course, vital to the ecological balance of the planet because they produce organic carbon and oxygen through photosynthesis, and they provide food and the basis of shelter for untold numbers of mammals, fish, and more. Yet, going back 2 billion years, Earth had no green plants at all in oceans, Xiao said.

Geobiology professor Shuhai Xiao, right, poses for a portrait with his postdoctorate Qing Tang in Derring Hall. — Geobiology professor Shuhai Xiao (right) and postdoctorate researcher Qing Tang in their Derring Hall lab.

It was Tang who discovered the micro-fossils of the seaweeds using an electronic microscope at Virginia Tech’s campus and brought it to Xiao’s attention. To more easily see the fossils, mineral oil was dripped onto the fossil to create a strong contrast.

“These seaweeds display multiple branches, upright growths, and specialized cells known as akinetes that are very common in this type of fossil,” he said. “Taken together, these features strongly suggest that the fossil is a green seaweed with complex multicellularity that is circa 1 billion years old. These likely represent the earliest fossil of green seaweeds. In short, our study tells us that the ubiquitous green plants we see today can be traced back to at least 1 billion years.”

According to Xiao and Tang, the tiny seaweeds once lived in a shallow ocean, died, and then became “cooked” beneath a thick pile of sediment, preserving the organic shapes of the seaweeds as fossils. Many millions of years later, the sediment was then lifted up out of the ocean and became the dry land where the fossils were retrieved by Xiao and his team, which included scientists from Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China.

Virginia Tech-led study finds oldest footprints of bug dating back 540-plus million years

CONTACT:
Steven Mackay
540-231-5035

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