Mapping Out Solutions

New Technology Gives Pat Halpin and Colleagues the Tools to do Better Science and be Better Resource Managers p.2

James Clark, H.L. Blomquist Professor, is developing wireless remote sensing networks to study and predict biophysical changes in forest ecosystems on a scale previously impossible. Dean L. Urban, professor of landscape ecology, uses geospatial network theory to study habitat connectivity and land-use change.

Marie Lynn Miranda, associate research professor, uses spatial modeling and GIS analysis to create more accurate ways to assess the risks posed by lead exposure and other environmental health hazards. Prasad Kasibhatla, associate professor of environmental chemistry, has developed three-dimensional chemical transport models to delineate natural and manmade impacts on Earth’s atmosphere.

A cadre of Nicholas School marine scientists, including Scott Eckert, Larry Crowder, David Hyrenbach, Andrew Read, Catherine McClellan, Andre Boustany and Halpin, use GPS tags, satellite telemetry and other new technologies to track the long-distance migrations of sea turtles and other endangered marine species. Nicholas School social scientists like Karen Eckert, Lisa Campbell and Michael Orbach apply the findings to international policy and conservation management.

And the list goes on and on.

Students participate in these projects, and in many cases they play significant roles in developing or refining new applications for the technologies being used.

A case in point is the work by Halpin’s lab to help Environmental Defense develop an integrated conservation management plan to restore the spawning habitat of river herrings in eastern North Carolina.

Though little known outside of eastern North Carolina, the Chowan River once was the center of the East Coast river herring fishery. Originating at the Virginia border, the river flows southeast for 50 miles through a low-lying region of vast hardwood swamps and meandering coastal creeks before emptying into Albemarle Sound near the colonial port town of Edenton, one of North Carolina’s first permanent settlements.

As recently as the 1970s, commercial fishermen hauled in more than 12 million river herrings annually from the Chowan’s shallow, tea-colored waters. Two species of herring, the blueback and the alewife, call the river home. Both are anadromous species—that is, they live as adults in the open ocean but swim back to the freshwater streams of their birth to spawn each spring.

The population and commercial harvest of the herring have declined drastically in the last 20 years in response to a complex interaction of factors, including pollution, loss of riparian buffers, and the construction of dams, culverts and other obstructions that block or limit the fish’s access to spawning grounds up the river. But it is still a spring tradition for locals to hold festivals where they fry this so-called “fish of little flesh” to a crisp and eat it bones and all.

“For such a little fish, the river herring has had a big economic, environmental, cultural and historic significance in eastern North Carolina,” Halpin says.

Restoring the species has more than just local importance, he adds. While at sea, the herring are an important prey species for other fish from New York to Florida.

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