Integration and Application Network

Marsh grass sample (Image and Video Library)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:12:00 -0500

a sample of marsh grass found in the surrounding marsh of the Choptank River, Maryland

choptank,herbacious,grasses,flora,sample

Sewage outfall (Image and Video Library)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:11:00 -0500

Sewage outfall into a water source in Virginia, USA

run off,waste,water quality,water,river,management,marine,human

UMCES Horn Point Lecture Hall (Image and Video Library)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:10:00 -0500

Ben Fertig prepares to make a presentation at the UMCES Horn Point lab, in Cambridge, Maryland, regarding how nitrogen levels in oyster tissue can be used as an indicator of estuary nitrogen sources.

ben,fertig,nitrogen,speach,human,conservation,education

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 7- Examples of Flooding in the United States (Blog)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:00:00 -0500

Let me talk about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in southern Louisiana. It was scheduled that some Louisiana people were going to come up to work with us the day that Katrina hit, then we re-scheduled for us to go down to Louisiana the day Rita hit. So we decided that we’d wait until hurricane season was over. So we went down there, into a room full of angry people. They were very angry that nobody had been listening to them, so we started off talking about how to reduce flood damage, and then we moved into enhancing the landscape integrity, so basically, the story there is that about a kilometer and a half of lateral marsh results in about thirty centimeters less storm surge. So, these marshes are horizontal levees.

The dikes, pumps, diversions and dams that are a part of the levee system in Coastal Louisiana.

That was the rationale that we were building. Then we started the societal discussion of do you restore, or do you retreat? Retreating wasn’t a very good option in Louisiana because it’s a major fishery for the U.S., (the biggest fishery other than Alaska) and oil and gas. People were in harms way because of the offshore gas and offshore fisheries. So, that wasn’t going to be a total retreat, but a managed retreat. So that set the scene.

The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Credit: Wikipedia Commons/Jeremy L. Grisham)

Satellite view of Hurricane Katrina (credit: NOAA)

The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Credit: AP Photo,U.S. Coast Guard, Petty Officer 2nd Class Kyle Niemi)

One other point I want to make: there were fourteen hundred deaths. It was truly tragic. New Orleans just reached fifty percent of its population pre-Katrina. You would walk down the streets in the French Quarter, and every third shop is boarded up. It had a devastating impact: billions of dollars in damage. So what are they doing now? I just did an overflight in December before I came here and I got to see the damage. They are building this huge levee in billion dollar sections with federal government money to protect New Orleans and putting in huge pumps. So the entire New Orleans surrounds is now going to be protected by this levee with the allegedly biggest pump in the world. They then took the canals that were allowing the excursion of water in, and they are plugging them up. So they’re damming the canals, and they’re building hardened structures offshore to protect the barrier islands as well. So, they’re doing a lot of diking, pumping, diversions, dams, and billions of dollars of hard infrastructure. Interestingly, they’re now turning their attention, in the next year, to developing this master plan. This is where they take the Mississippi River water, which is sediment laden, because it drains half of North America, and they’re going to divert it into the marsh and let that sediment settle out, accumulate, and be used for marsh creation. Now they are arguing over who gets the dirt. So the contentious thing is prioritizing the diversions.

This blog post was created from a presentation by Bill Dennison, delivered at the historic Customs House in Brisbane, Australia on 8 July, 2011 (see previous blog posts). The full powerpoint presentation can be accessed on IAN Press.

Virginia Wetlands (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:18:00 -0500

Looking out over the the wetlands in Virginia, USA

water,wetland,marsh,river,ecosystems,marine

Chesapeake Bay Bridge (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:18:00 -0500

The Chesapeake Bay bridge is located on the northern part of the Chesapeake Bay. It connects Maryland's eastern and western shores.

bridge,maryland,transport,car,infrastructure,car,human

Virginia Wetlands (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:17:00 -0500

Looking out over the the wetlands from a vehicle in Virginia, USA

wetland,marsh,virginia,grass,water,ecosystems,tourism

Hard Shoreline (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:41:00 -0500

This concrete wall creates a hard shoreline, which is detrimental to wildlife, and causes sedimentation

shore,hard vs soft,management,erosion,maryland

Osprey Nest (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:41:00 -0500

Osprey flying over nest found on the Choptank river, Maryland

bird,hawk,sea hawk,choptank,river,Pandion haliaetus,bird of prey,fish-eating,nesting

Oyster Hatchary Tank (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:41:00 -0500

This tank was found at the Oyster Hatchary, at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge, Maryland. The Horn Point oyter hatchary produces over five-hundred oyster larvae for reasearch, educational projects, and oyster restoration in the Chesapeake Bay and surrounding rivers.

estaury,mollusc,bivalve,crassostrea gigas,chesapeake bay,marine,brackish,larvae,spat,restoration

Pandion haliaetus (Osprey) (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:41:00 -0500

An Osprey, also known sea hawk or fish hawk, found nesting in the Choptank River.

hawk,sea hawk,choptank,bird,chordata,aves,north america

Tractor (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:39:00 -0500

Tractor cultivating farmland

human,maryland,cultivation,crop,farming,farmland,farm,corn

Blue Angels (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:39:00 -0500

The U.S. navy's flight demonstration squad, performing a flyover

maryland,flight,plane,navy,f/a-18 hornet,flyover

Rana catesbeiana (American Bullfrog) (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:38:00 -0500

The American bullfrog is native to the Southeastern, and far western regeions of North America. It inhabats water bodies such as ponds, swamps and lakes.

frog,amphibian,native,species,north american,marsh

Assateague Island public beach (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:38:00 -0500

Tourists swimming and sitting beachside on the ocean-side beach of Assateague Island, Maryland

ocean-side,sand,shifting sands,ocean,civilian,tourists

Assateague Island public beach (Image and Video Library)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:38:00 -0500

Tourists beachside on the ocean-side beach of Assateague Island, Maryland

ocean-side,sand,shifting sands,ocean,civilian,tourists

2mL Cryogenic Vial (Discussion Forum)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:36:00 -0500

Based on the Corning 2mL internally threaded, self standing cryogenic vial

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 6- Global Initiatives in Response to Flooding (Blog)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:00:00 -0500

Let’s take a trip around the world and look at five examples. I’m going to do two examples from North America that I have been working with; the Chesapeake Bay on the east coast, and coastal Louisiana–the mouth of the Mississippi River with marshes and the city of New Orleans. Let’s look at the two major floods and how people have responded to those floods. They happened in 2003 for the Chesapeake and 2005 for Louisiana. In the Chesapeake there was a large hurricane called Isabel. It was a category 5 when it was in the Caribbean, but lost a lot of energy when it came across land. It made landfall at Cape Hatteras and went up to the west of the bay. There was lots of flooding in downtown Washington, downtown Baltimore and downtown Annapolis, as well as flooding in agricultural and other rural areas. Once again, we could have predicted this flood. This had a very similar track and magnitude of a hurricane that happened in 1933, before they named the hurricanes. They called it the ‘Storm King’. It was a massive storm, like Isabel, with the same barometric pressure, same wind speeds, and same flood height. So, we could have predicted this, but we didn’t, and we lost thousands of cars in my county alone. With any preparation we could have driven the cars up to a higher ground.

Residents paddling the streets in Baltimore during Hurricane Isabel (Credit: Mike Memoli/The Greyhound (Loyola College-Maryland)) and in Brisbane during the 2011 floods (Credit: Paul Harris).

The storm surge record, based on the tide gauge, where we can see the graphs from the storms in 1933 and 2003 are almost identical. You have a tide surge down at the mouth, and then up the bay, a later and larger surge. Now, this is where the learning moment came about. This gave us an opportunity to start talking about climate change and sea-level rise. This was during a period when our federal government and our state government were climate deniers and didn’t want to talk about it. We weren’t even allowed to use the word ‘climate change’. You see our newsletter was Hurricane Isabel and Sea-Level Rise. No ‘climate change’ in that. We kept it out of that. We tracked, through the tide gauge in Baltimore, that the tide height was thirty centimeters higher over a hundred-year period.

Net rise of Sea-level of the Chesapeake Bay over a 100 year period

There was even a guy who, with a pencil, marked on his kitchen wall, the height of the 1933 storm surge. He didn’t wash or paint the wall. In 2003, he marked it again and there was a considerable difference. I showed you already that it was the exact same storm. What was different was sea-level rise. Sea-level rise is something that people in Chesapeake are accustomed to. We’re losing lots of marsh, about a half meter, linearly, per year. We’ve had thirteen occupied islands with farms, with schools, with houses, with banks and stores that are now gone. They are underwater. Sharps Island in the 1930′s is now just a shoal and a lighthouse. So, people have been migrating off these islands for some time now.

Diagram Illustrating sea-level rise, relative to the coast. From "Isabel and Sea-level Rise" newsletter and IAN image library.

So that allowed us to really get into this sea-level story, and then take it to climate adaptation. Here we weren’t arguing about the causes of climate change, and we weren’t talking about IPCC kinds of issues, we were just saying “Look, we’re going to have to deal with sea-level rise in these low lying areas, and we are going to have to prepare ourselves.” So that allowed us to get involved in a discussion that needed to happen in society. We also took the opportunity to put public signage in prominent places. So you go to downtown Washington and Alexandria area, or downtown Baltimore, or on the piers. We have photographs and we have messages that talk about the flood. Don’t forget. That’s why those brass plaques down the street are good reminders. More places to remind people that this is a flood prone area. Then we were able to take from this initial sea-level rise, we were able to add much more agricultural adaptation strategies; talk about impact assessments which will result in the mitigation strategy for CO₂emissions. That was also because we had state and federal governments willing to talk about climate change, and things were able to move more quickly. But the point was that we were even able to start that discussion using the 2003 event. We also had a conference a year after the event, and we wrote a book, and that is something that makes sense for Southeast Queensland as well.

Assateague Island National Seashore Natural Resource Condition Assessment - Executive Summary (Report) (IAN Press Publication)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:31:00 -0500

This is a 12-page Executive Summary of the Assateague Island National Seashore Natural Resource Condition Assessment.

Sediment runoff (Image and Video Library)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:18:00 -0500

Photo demonstrating sedimentation, found in the War at the Pacific National Historical Park in Guam.

sediment,tropical,guam,sediementation,dirt,coral,ploom

Line Fishing Tackle (Image and Video Library)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:59:00 -0500

Tying fishing tackle for catching striped bass

tackle,bait,line,fishing,arrangement,pole

Fish Seining (Image and Video Library)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:55:00 -0500