Introduction
America Adapts, the Climate Change Podcast and its host, Doug Parsons, visited Schoodic Institute to learn more about our conservation science. Over the next several months, we’ll be sharing with you edited interviews (click to listen) from the podcast; find the full podcast episode here.
We are continuing this month with Schoodic Institute Marine Ecology Director Dr. Hannah Webber.
Doug Parsons (DP): It might seem obvious, but can you describe your role as the Marine Ecology Director? What does a day-to-day look like for you?
Hannah Webber (HW): Of course, just like everyone else here at Schoodic Institute, my day-to-day is highly varied whether I’m in the field — which for me means being in a salt marsh or being in seaweed or being in a tide pool — or looking at the data that comes from all of those in-the-field moments. Or it’s working with my partners on the various and sundry research and monitoring efforts that we have. So there’s no one typical day. All of them are awesome, though.
DP: What are some of the coastal ecosystems that you work with in your region?
HW: We’re based in Downeast Maine, although we have research that spans the entire state of Maine, entire coast. So largely, it’s rocky intertidal, it’s mudflats, and it’s salt marshes. Maine has, of course, an enormously huge coast. With all of the nooks and crannies, it’s well over 3,000 miles long.
DP: There’s a long history of natural resource use in Maine, and of course, immediately I think of lobster. What are some additional resources there?
HW: Maine does have a rich history of natural resource-based economies. Aside from lobster fishing, we do have clamming from the mudflats, and that is the second most lucrative fishery in the state. We also have a marine worm harvest, only one of two that are in the nation. So we have a marine worm harvest, and that also happens in the mudflats, as well as seaweed harvest, which happens in the intertidal zone as well as elsewhere, but largely in the intertidal zone. And I’m mentioning that as wild harvest, not as aquaculture. We do also have a growing, of course, oyster harvest and largely that’s aquaculture, but there has been now some wild seed that has managed to set up and people are going out and largely at this moment it’s foraging, but there is also some harvest for it as well, the commercial scale. There are some smaller species that people harvest for, whether it’s small snails or other smaller organisms, but really in the intertidal zone, it’s clams, it’s seaweed, it’s marine worms.
DP: Can you tell us a bit about the Mapping Mud project and how you’re working with local harvesters on it?
HW: The Mapping Mud Project came about because some of our resource harvesting partners are very concerned about the effects of extreme storms and the effects of a rising sea level on an exposed intertidal zone, an exposed mudflat and how sea level rise and how extreme storms are changing the way a mudflat operates. Compounded with that, they are of course worried about the effect of invasive green crabs on natural resources, most specifically softshell clams, but not entirely softshell clams. In the Mapping Mud Project, we are looking at what mudflats look like before storms and after storms. And we’re looking at them with drone-based technology. We’re using multi-spectral imagery and we’re using LIDAR to understand what a mudflat looks like. And we’re also putting people out on the flats to collect biotic samples. What do we find out in those flats for worms? What do we find for clams? What do we find for horseshoe crabs, which are always cool? And then what do we find for invasive green crabs? We’re doing that before and after storms because some of our harvest partners have said after big storms they’re seeing that the mud moves, the sediment moves, the sand moves, the gravel moves, and with that moves the animals that can be harvested. If you only have a low tide to go out and harvest and make your living you need to know where those resources are to be most efficient, and if they’re moving with extreme storms, we want to know that. Our goal is to not only understand what’s happening before and after storms, but also to see if we can develop some sort of an index where if we see something particular on a drone image, then we can relate that to what we would see for biota in the field.
DP: Tell me a bit about rockweed. I think it’s a very unique thing.
HW: Well, that’s a pretty big can of worms. That’s what I did my Ph.D. on, and so it is a species near and dear to my heart. Rockweed is a foundation species in the intertidal zone, which means that it’s super abundant. And because of its abundance, it really regulates light and temperature and water movement. It controls the abiotic environment where it exists in the intertidal zone. And it also then acts as the backdrop against which interactions occur: eat and get eaten; the hide and seek of competition and predator-prey interactions happen against a backdrop of rockweed. So it’s critically important for the functioning of the intertidal zone. It’s also a harvested species. It’s used in agriculture to reduce the amount of chemical fertilizers and to reduce the amount of water that is put on crops. It’s considered a biostimulant. So rockweed is critically important to this really unique habitat, the intertidal zone, but it also has these agricultural uses. Balancing those takes work. It takes management. It takes an understanding of how much can be removed to maintain an ecosystem, but also allow this sort of use by humans of this resource. I could go on and on, but it’s a balancing act and it’s one that requires active management and really falls deeply within that sort of ecosystem-based management spectrum because we have to manage for more than just a single species.
DP: You have this project, high-tech, low-tech rockweed project. And so, again, I think the drones are part of this. Has any of that work led to management changes yet, or is it still too early? What’s going on there?
HW: There are miles and miles of coastline along the coast of Maine, very nook and cranny-ish. And it’s very difficult to understand how much rockweed there is along the coast of Maine. But again, for sustainable management, it’s rather critical. It’s just like any other fishery where you need to know the standing stock to make good management decisions. And we didn’t know basically what the standing stock of rockweed is, which is not just the area that rockweed covers, but it’s also the biomass, the actual amount that’s in those areas. And so we embarked on this study to understand if can we use drone technology to be able to distinguish one type of seaweed, rockweed, from another type of seaweed, bladderwrack? And then can we also use drones to get at that biomass question, not just the area, but the biomass? And we’re finding that, yes, we can use that technology. And at the same time, we developed a citizen science effort or participatory science effort called Project ASCO, Assessing Seaweed Through Community Observations, where we were working with volunteers to go out and actually weigh seaweed along the coast of Maine. The rockweed biomass from drone data is accessible on a platform called CMAP, and the participatory science data is also available through a platform called Anecdata. And it’s absolutely critical to have the data be accessible to people on the scales that they need it. Managers and regulators might need it on a sector-wide piece of the coast or a statewide scale. But people who own waterfront property and smaller-scale managers, say a land trust or another conservation organization, might want to think about or manage their rockweed on a different scale. And so it’s critical to have data that can span scales. And we found that between the drone tech work and our participatory science effort, we’re able to serve up data at scales that range from small to large.
DP: Your geographic region obviously is much larger than just thinking about Acadia National Park. Is the state thinking about climate change when it comes to the coastal zones?
HW: Oh, absolutely. I cannot give you line and verse of everything that my state is doing to adapt to a changing climate, to be resilient in the face of a changing climate, to ensure that Maine coastal communities as well as the inland communities are ready for not just what’s happening in the future, but what’s happening now. Whether it’s the coastal squeeze, rising sea level that’s bumping up against development, whether it is these extreme storms that we have with sea level rise, the state is exceptionally active in this regard. And I think there are a lot of organizations in the state of Maine that are tackling this as well, a lot of nonprofits. We have a very active community here in the state of Maine focused on the way our climate is changing and what that means for everyone, both on the coast and inland.
DP: What’s your favorite spot in Acadia National Park?
HW: The intertidal zone. I did have one of my Ph.D. research sites here at Acadia. It’s one of my control sites. It was not a harvested site. It’s a place right here on Schoodic Peninsula that looks out over Mount Desert Island and is covered with absolutely gorgeous seaweed. On my last field day at this particular site, six o’clock in the morning, I was standing on one of these big, beautiful flat rocks, and I was just getting ready to start my sampling. I took a big, deep breath. And as I exhaled, a minke whale rose up out of the water between my site on Schoodic Peninsula and Mount Desert Island. And as I exhaled, the whale exhaled and then went back under the water and I didn’t see it again.