Crab Consumer Fronts

Dr. Serina Wittyngham, now faculty at U. of North Florida, along with her advisor David S. Johnson and other VIMS researchers have been in the media recently talking and writing about crabs (specifically Sesarma reticulatum, purple marsh crab) and their impact on salt-marsh carbon storage . This work is from Serina’s excellent research on the Virginia Coast Reserve (VCR) and serves as a platform for some of our research going forward on the VCR. 

 David Johnson had a nice segment entitled “Marsh Madness” regarding the research on the  With Good Reason radio program April 6. You can hear it at: https://www.withgoodreasonradio.org/episode/shellfish-unfiltered/?t=0&autoplay=1#s0

Serina’s work was also highlighted in the Bay Journal.

There is also an awesome paper in Ecology (Matt Kirwan and Yaping Chen, also at VIMS are co-authors).

In other news from the VCR, Serina just published her final chapter from her dissertation about how grazing by these crabs can shape Spartina traits.

Karen McGlathery honored with Elizabeth Zintl Leadership Award

The Elizabeth Zintl Leadership Award is presented in memory of Elizabeth Zintl, an accomplished writer and journalist who served as Chief of Staff in the Office of the President at the University of Virginia. The Zintl Award celebrates the leadership that is found in many areas and positions at UVA. This year’s recipient is Karen McGlathery in recognition of her high degree of professionalism, creativity, and commitment that best reflect Elizabeth Zintl’s significant contributions to the University. You can learn more about Karen in the article linked below.

https://news.virginia.edu/content/uvas-storm-watching-optimist?utm_source=DailyReport&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news

CBS Story on Ghost Forests

VCR/LTER Investigator Matt Kirwan was featured in a segment of CBS Mornings on April 21, 2023. You can view it at:

New VCR LTER Data Visualization App

With the goal of making VCR data accessible to stakeholders in the community and to eventually facilitate bringing VCR data into the classroom, VCR Graduate student Sean Hardison has created a new data visualization app for interactively viewing data from the Oyster Meteorological  and Tide Stations  http://vcr.uvadcos.io/ .   The interactive app allows you to view up to two variables simultaneously vs time. The variables available for viewing include, temperature (air and water), relative tide level, wind speeds and precipitation events.   They can be aggregated by the month, week, day and hour.   The underlying technology is the open source Shiny  R package that generates on-the-fly visualizations from the latest VCR/LTER data.