Healthy estuaries support the vitality and livelihoods of coastal communities. We gather with friends at estuaries to go fishing, kayak and spend quality time with each other. But we don’t always show estuaries as much love as they show us.
In college, I spent my days staring into my microscope at what can only be described as other-worldly – tiny stars, sunburst shaped disks and alien-like critters. I was examining plankton collected from a nearby estuary—these microscopic larvae would grow up to be crabs and oysters, which spend the beginning of their lifecycle in estuaries, the nurseries of the ocean. Estuaries provide essential habitat for marine life, including over 75% of commercially caught fish in the United States, and support recreational fisheries too.
Beginning my science career at The Evergreen State College, I was fascinated by the natural world. After graduating, I wanted to figure out how to use my science to help communities impacted by environmental challenges. This led me to apply to the Roger Arliner Young Marine Conservation Diversity Fellowship on the ocean acidification team at Ocean Conservancy. The position gave me the opportunity to learn exactly how science can help inform public policy. One of my cornerstone projects for the fellowship has been examining the impact of ocean acidification in estuaries, and how ocean acidification interacts with other environmental stressors and processes
Located near densely populated areas, estuaries are influenced by both human and environmental stressors. Impacts like nitrogen run-off can often lead to harmful algal blooms (HABs), which are dangerous for people and fish. Also, ocean acidification has been measured in the open ocean, but it’s much harder to detect in estuaries and coastal zones because of converging processes like pollution, erosion and upwelling. If scientists can’t precisely measure how water chemistry is changing in these ecosystems, the effects are difficult to prepare for. Adding even more complexity, estuaries themselves are constantly changing as freshwater meets saltwater, tides rise and fall and species change seasonally. We simply don’t know yet how all of these factors influence each other in estuarine environments.
