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Happy Spring!
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Hannah Orton and Sam Kelsey working on the high marsh tower at Nelson Island. Photo by Zoe Cardon.
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Announcements
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Things are warming up at PIE as we are gearing up for the field season. If you are a PIE researcher and require housing or boat use, please complete the Boat & Housing Request Form. The houses are filling up fast, so complete the form as soon as you know your plans! For more information on the resources we offer to researchers, please visit our website.
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Emma Rosser and Nell Bowen installing wells for water level loggers at Shad. Photo by Risa McNellis.
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The low marsh eddy flux tower at Shad was successfully installed the first week of April by the PIE team. The tower measures net ecosystem exchange of carbon, heat, and water vapor. Due to the harsh winter conditions at Shad, the tower is constructed every spring and deconstructed every November.
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Low marsh eddy flux tower at Shad. Photo by Sam Kelsey.
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Congratulations to Mingyu Zhang, a PIE PhD student at Yale, on receiving an LTER Site Exchange Fellowship! Mingyu will be traveling to Virginia Coast Reserve LTER this summer to improve models of carbon transport and compare methods for measuring air-water gas exchange.
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PIE hosted a listening session in October and a follow-up in March to form a collaboration between scientists and shellfishers in Plum Island Sound. The meeting put shellfishers at the center of the conversation as part of a larger effort supported through the Advancing Public Engagement Across LTERs’ (APEAL) project to strengthen connections between LTER scientists and the communities living in and around the ecosystems we study. The event sparked ideas for research projects and collaborations that we had to act quickly on in order to implement for this summer's field season.
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A major concern of local shellfishers is the declining abundance and commercial harvest landings of soft-shell clams (Mya arenaria). Thanks to quick work by the PIE team, we were able to build 24 screened boxes (a la Dr. Brian Beal) to deploy into mudflats at a local oyster farm, The Great Marsh Shellfish Company, to explore whether this decline is caused by recruitment limitation or predation (with a focus on European green crabs). REU students will lead the collection and processing of box and control area samples throughout the growing season at The Great Marsh Shellfish Company. In addition to testing the relative importance of recruitment limitation and predation within the Plum Island Estuary, this preliminary experiment will also provide the oyster farm with knowledge on the feasibility of using the same procedure to sustainably farm soft-shell clams.
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The PIE team building boxes. Photo by Jane Tucker.
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Jim McClelland and Lindsey Wishart (The Great Marsh Shellfish Company Manager) deploying boxes. Photo by David Kimbro.
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Boxes installed on the mudflats at The Great Marsh Shellfish Company. Photo by David Kimbro.
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Slice of PIE
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Meet our graduate student reps!
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I am a Masters student in the Weston Lab at Villanova University. In order to further close the N budget of the PIE LTER, I am determining the heterotrophic N2 fixation rates at an estuarine scale by incubating intact cores from the rhizosphere of two high-elevation and two low-elevation marshes. The incubations were completed in May, July, and October of 2023 using the acetylene reduction activity (ARA) technique as a proxy for N2 fixation. A calibration with 30N2 was used to convert the acetylene reduced to nitrogen that would be fixed. I also analyzed how soil biochemical characteristics, such as organic matter content, ammonia availability, and temperature, may affect the marshes’ efficiency to fix N2.
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I am a second-year PhD student in the Bowen Lab at Northeastern University. I am broadly interested in microbial ecology and plant-fungal interactions. At PIE, I am working to understand the role of Spartina-fungal interactions as potential drivers of carbon cycling in New England salt marshes. My goal is to first understand fungal community composition within plants and associated soils then eventually fungal metabolisms. By developing a better understanding of Spartina-fungal interactions we can further contextualize salt marsh carbon cycling.
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Network News
The LTER Network Office is hosting a career forum on May 7 from 1:00-3:00 PM EST to meet scientists working around the United States and learn about their career paths, work challenges and benefits, ‘a day in their life,’ and advice they wish they had known as early career scientists. The forum will focus on the role of environmental scientists in state agencies, non-governmental organizations, for-profit organizations, and tribal communities.
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The LTER Network Office invites graduate students and postdocs to join the Entering Mentoring Community of Practice to discuss and find support around the challenges that arise during mentoring. The community is designed so that participants can pick up effective practices from others and to share your own successful strategies. The series will consist of 1 hour, monthly virtual meetings from May 22 through September 25. Each session will be led by one of LTER’s trained facilitators and will focus on working through a ‘problem of practice’—challenges that you and your colleagues are currently dealing with—or case studies that capture common challenges in ecology and field science.
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Recent Publications
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International Journal of Geographical Information Science
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Robert Gilmore Pontius Jr, Thomas Francis & Marco Millones
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Sergio Fagherazzi, Giovanna Nordio, Jacopo Boaga, Giorgio Cassiani, Holly A. Michael, Dannielle Pratt, Tyler C. Messerschmidt, Matthew L. Kirwan, Stephanie Stotts
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Martha E. Mather, Ryland B. Taylor, Joseph M. Smith & Kayla M. Boles
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Julia A. Guimond, Emilio Grande, Holly A. Michael, Dannielle Pratt, Elizabeth Herndon, Genevieve L. Noyce, Nicholas D. Ward, Inke Forbrich, Peter Regier, Matthew J. Berens & Bhavna Arora
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Jarrett E. K. Byrnes, Laura E. Dee
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Journal of Shellfish Research
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Suzanne G. Ayvazian, Kenneth Miller, Sinead C. Grabbert, Ani J. Hanian, Samara R. Hanian, Linda A. Deegan
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The PIE LTER Newsletter is a forum for sharing news, opportunities, and activities from across the PIE LTER Community. If you have an announcement, workshop, job opportunity, or recent publication that would interest our community, please send them to pie_im@mbl.edu.
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