Piehler Lab graduate student Mollie Yacano was recently awarded the North Carolina Sea Grant-Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership graduate fellowship for her project “Impacts of Invasive Phragmites australis on Nitrogen Processing in the Albemarle-Pamlico System”. We are very proud and excited!
It is hard to believe that summer’s end is approaching. It has been productive and fun, and the time has come for the annual lab photo. This year we did something a little different and coupled it with our traditional stand by the Old Well pose. Thanks to Joe Gould, Adam Gold, Suzanne Thompson, Olivia Torano, and Mollie Yacano for great ideas and hard work!
Adam Gold has had a remarkable Spring. He successfully defended his thesis, was awarded the prestigious UNC Impact Award, and had his first paper published in Ecological Engineering. Well done!
We are just months away from the end of the DCERP project! It is hard to imagine not having regular meetings with this great group. We are fortunate to have been supported by SERDP for nearly 10 years to conduct research on the delivery and processing of nutrients and carbon at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. It is an exciting time in the project with a large number of papers, and a huge amount of information to support coastal decisions being produced.
Hannah West did a great job on her undergraduate independent research project “Assessing Saltmarsh Efficacy as a Nutrient Sink in Multiple Shoreline Types”. She measured nutrient fluxes in several marshes including: natural, restored, seaward of a bulkhead, landward of a granite sill, landward of an oyster reef, and down stream from a wastewater treatment plant. Her results showed that marsh sediments in all of the settings she sampled denitrified pulses of nitrate.
Kathleen Onorevole successfully defended her thesis, giving a fantastic seminar to a standing room only crowd in the IMS seminar room. She did not rest on her laurels, the next week she published this great article about hurricane research at IMS (read it here). Well done Kathleen!
Students at IMS’s 2016 field site will take on a big challenge in this year’s Capstone class. Led by the Piehler Lab, the class will conceive, design, build, and test a nature-based product to enhance coastal resilience. While the target product will be determined by the students during the scoping phase, opportunities such as retrofits for bulkheads, islands to provide structure and diversity on shorelines that have lost their structured habitats, and devices to ameliorate stormwater impacts are high on the list of candidate projects. This will be fun!
Another great summer is just about in the books. The Piehler Lab 2016 includes (from right to left) Kathleen Onorevole (graduate student in Marine Sciences), Olivia Torano (graduate student in CEE), Suzanne Thompson (lab manager extraordinaire), Adam Gold (graduate student in CEE) and Mike Piehler. (Photo credit – Nathan Hall)
Piehler lab graduate student Adam Gold and Lab Manager Suzanne Thompson have undertaken an ambitious field campaign to assess the effectiveness of stormwater control measures (SCM) at removing nitrogen. They have designed and initiated this project in close collaboration with former Master Sergeant Mike Taylor – now a stormwater specialist at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. Information generated by this work will improve our understanding of the efficacy of coastal SCMs and will inform stormwater management. Photo credit to Susan Cohen!