Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Science and Research Highlights

There was a lot of great science and research at SERC in 2024 across different labs and projects. Jump to the project you are most interested in learning about using the hyperlinked list or continue scrolling to read through them all. 

The list is organized alphabetically by topic, highlighting distinct projects in which volunteers, students, and community members played a key role. 

In addition to distinct projects, there are several volunteers who support SERC research in a variety of other ways. Many of these volunteers have been with SERC for years, and nearly all SERC labs have at least one long-term volunteer. These volunteers contribute hundreds of hours of their time to making SERC science possible. A huge thank you to all those volunteers--we appreciate all of your time, energy, creativity, and dedication! 

Environmental Archaeology Lab

The Environmental Archaeology Lab is a completely volunteer-led and run lab. Jim Gibb heads the lab, and in 2024 there were 168 volunteers contributing over 6,540 hours to archaeological activities and research! Many of these volunteers joined the lab for the first time at one of the seven public digs days. 
There was lots to celebrate, including:

• The lab published three peer-reviewed publications in 2024! Congratulations to Ray Sarnacki, Abigal Kennedy, and Aidé Coyle on getting their work out there. 
• Emily Allen submitted her first paper on the 1900s Eastern Shore shell button industry for peer-reviewed publication.
• Mike Eybel, Tate Stevens, and Jorge Gracia completed their first draft of a publication on copper mining sites throughout Maryland. 
• A team of volunteers led by Josefa O’Malley finished data collection and moved to the analysis and writing stage for a project studying how local blacksmiths shifted from creating their own materials to purchasing manufactured parts in the late 19th-century. 

Additionally, the Woodlawn team, which is now part of the Environmental Archaeology Lab, grew to include 15 volunteers who contributed 282 hours! They welcomed SERC visitors to the Woodlawn History Center, discussed the exhibits there, and supported a new monthly talk series.

If you’d like to get involved, check SERC's event calendar for the next public dig day or the next free talk hosted by the Environmental Archaeology Lab at the Woodlawn History Center.

Chesapeake Water Watch

In 2024, Chesapeake Water Watch (CWW) had an incredible year of milestones, conferences, trainings, and data collection! CWW is a joint project between SERC and the City College of New York (CCNY) that aims to improve how we monitor the health of the Chesapeake Bay and coastal waters around the world. Essentially, they use water quality observations and samples to “calibrate” satellites that pass over the Bay.

The project wouldn’t be possible without CWW’s partner organizations and volunteers around the Bay. In 2024, 52 people uploaded 1,400 observations (that’s a lot!) into Fieldscope, where all the project’s data is open-access, bringing the project total observations to 3,532 (which as of writing this increased to 3,582). 

Huge shout out to the volunteers who made data collection such a success by being sample testers during Sample Drop off events: Patterson Clark, Kathy Gramp, Bay Hanson, Sarah Ryan Hudson, and Mike Stricker. 

 “Having volunteers step up to be sample testers is incredibly important because it opens up more areas to be drop-off locations in the future so even more volunteers can get involved!” –Rachel “Ray” Terracina

On top of all of that, CWW published its first peer-reviewed publication that validated the project methods, in particular a tool for measuring water clarity: the Hydrocolor App. A huge shout out to volunteer Beth Paquette, one of the paper’s authors, for making that publication possible!  

Oyster Cam

Oyster Cam connects SERC scientists from the Fisheries Conservation Lab with communities interested in monitoring oyster reef restorations, giving volunteers the tools to see what's going on beneath the water's surface. The project was born out of a need by communities to monitor their oyster restoration projects but didn’t have sufficient time, money, and specialized skills like scuba diving to effectively monitor. With the Oyster Cam protocol, all you have to do is attach Go Pro cameras to PVC pipe, lower it off the side of your boat, and take some videos of the surrounding reef. 

Since the projects inception in 2023, 29 volunteers through partner organizations spent 180 hours getting trained and then taking videos out on the Bay. The project has also engaged 315 students at South River High school who have helped test out protocols classifying the images from the videos taken on the GoPros. 

Thanks to funding from Smithsonian’s Life on a Sustainability Planet Initiative, Oyster Cam was able to expand beyond Maryland and share the methodology with collaborators and teachers in Virginia, Florida, New York, and California. Additionally, we were able to bring on an intern, and Blue Riggins joined the team! 

Blue worked on multiple science communication pieces about the project, including designing a cosplay dress to bridge the gap between scientists and cosplayers. Learn more in a video Blue produced about their process making the dress and sharing it at a local convention.  

COMPASS Project

A big 2024 highlight for the Biogeochemistry Lab was the progression of the Coastal Observations Mechanisms and Predictions Across Systems and Scales (COMPASS) project. COMPASS is funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) and looks at how the effects of climate change affect the ecosystems at the interface of land and water. The project includes sites around the Bay (including SERC’s Edgewater campus) and the Great Lakes. 

The COMPASS project gives a shout-out to two volunteers: Linda Davidson and Sam Wright. Since 2023, Linda has prepared sample materials weekly for the team to head out to transects that are set up across four sites that run from open water, through marsh, marsh-transition zone, and up to the forest upland. 

“We could not make it through the field season without her hard work and dedication.” – Alice Stearns

Since 2022, Sam has been volunteering with TEMPEST (Terrestrial Ecosystem Manipulation to Probe the Effects of Storm Treatments), the experimental portion of COMPASS where they annually flood experimental forest plots with freshwater and saltwater. TEMPEST's goal is to simulate sea level rise, increased coastal storm events, and storm surges to better understand how coastal forest ecosystems will response to these climate change events. Sam has been a part of every flood event, helping measure how much carbon dioxide and methane is emitted by the trees and soil.

"Having Sam as a Green House Gas Team lead during TEMPEST events over the years has been invaluable." – Alice Stearns

Marsh Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change

The Global Change Ecology Lab combines biogeochemistry and microbial ecology to better understand how wetlands and other ecosystems respond to changing environments. Thanks to the efforts of volunteers they were able to wrap up some experiments and set-up/maintain new ones!

In winter 2024, volunteer Phil Christenson helped the lab finish processing biomass samples from their experiment determining the impacts of flooding and warming on methane emissions from marshes. 

Then, in summer 2024, the Lab built a brand-new facility in the experimental garden called a “mesocosm.” A mesocosm is outdoor experimental system in which you can control conditions of interest, in this case heat and water. The Global Change Ecology Lab is using this facility to determine the impacts of episodic events, like heat waves and flooding, on greenhouse gas emissions from marshes.

Breathe Baltimore

Breathe Baltimore is a collaborative effort co-led by EJJI, SERC’s Public Engagement Team, and the Technology in Ecology Lab. The project’s goal is to create a low-cost air quality monitoring network that can provide data to support communities who are experiencing poor air quality in South Baltimore.

The project is in its first phase of setting up and testing 15 sensors—most are in South Baltimore with others around the city. As of February 6, we have active sensors installed at 6 sites.

These sensors measure particulate pollution, ozone, and other emissions, and the data will be made available to the public. 

Want to learn more? Check out Breathe Baltimore’s first video by the EJJI team or visit the project website. 

Bluebird Nestboxes

This past year was a great year for the SERC Bluebird Trail, a trail of 40 Eastern Bluebird Boxes on SERC’s Edgewater campus. Ann Johnson, the volunteer who does most of the checking and maintenance, reported that there were 57 new bluebird nestlings and 24 nestlings from two other species: Carolina Chickadees and Carolina Wrens. 

Ahead of the 2025 season, Ann has done a lot of prep work, from moving nest boxes away from encroaching trees (tress = snakes, one of the Eastern Bluebird’s most aggressive nest predator) and cleaning out nest boxes for any birds or critters who need winter shelter. Once the temperatures start to warm up and the Bluebird pairs choose their 2025 boxes, sometime around April, Ann will be back on the trails. 

Want to get involved? Sign up for our the Parti Sci email list! We hope to recruit a volunteer to help get the nest records uploaded into a participatory science project’s database, NestWatch.

Bird Banding

Since Fall 2023, the Migratory Bird Center at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute has banded resident songbirds on SERC’s campus to better understand what it takes to support bird populations.

SERC is one of three banding stations, and the scientists hope to use resighting data, aka observations of color-banded songbirds, to piece together their survival and compare across the stations. They’ll then be able to link survival to habitat characteristics, which could inform conservation and restoration strategies land managers use to support birds.

The team, which is led by Tara Snedgen and Brian Evans, started to recruit volunteers in Fall 2024 to help with the banding efforts on a bi-weekly basis. With help from Robyn Deykes and Tommy Rhoades, the team has banded 31 songbirds.

We’ll soon invite SERC visitors and bird enthusiasts to help us resight birds with color bands. Stay tuned by signing up for our email list. 

Project Owlnet

Project Owlnet had another successful year for its 8th season! This project is entirely volunteer-led and run by Melissa Boyel Acuti and her fellow banders: Kerry Wixted, Chelsea Kenworthy, and Bradley Wilkinson. 

From October 20 – November 27, the team of more than 35 volunteers, SERC interns, and SERC staff banded eleven Northern Saw-whet Owls with a surprise Eastern Screech Owl guest. The data they collected continues to add to long-term data collected by a network of Northern Saw-whet Owl banding stations across the United States and Canada that helps illuminate the timing, intensity, and migration pace of these cute owls. 

Melissa’s favorite highlight from the season: one of the owls banded at SERC in 2022 visited a banding station in Quebec, Canada on October 14, 2024. This station is nearly 600 miles away from SERC! 

Chesapeake Bay Parasite Project

The Chesapeake Bay Parasite Project celebrated its 11th season with volunteers in 2024! There were 72 amazing volunteers who came out on the docks to process traps and/or go through collected samples in the lab, contributing 595 hours!

The project’s goal is to better understand how a parasitic barnacle Loxothylcus panopaei ("Loxo” for short) affects the white-fingered mud crab, a native species in the Bay. These crabs are small scavengers that live in oyster reefs and woody debris. But when Loxo infects them, it takes over, preventing the crab from reproducing, and producing its own parasite offspring instead.  

When the team isn’t out in the field, they are in the lab processing all the collected data. Thanks to a small crew of dedicated lab volunteers, they are making great progress identifying collected crabs and whether they have or do not have signs parasite infection. 

Rhode River Parasite Survey

The Rhode River Parasite Survey celebrated a successful 6th year in 2024! The survey’s goal is to track yearly changes in variety and abundance of local shrimp, snail, and bivalve parasites, and determine what their impacts are on the Rhode River ecosystem. The Coastal Disease Ecology Lab worked with volunteers to collect samples in the field, processed those same samples in the lab, and entered data. The project is looking forward to investigating parasite interactions and interactions on shrimp behavior in 2025 thanks to new regional collaborations with other East coast labs. 

Urban Otter Project

For the Urban Otter Project, a project that is part of the Chesapeake Bay Otter Alliance, the Coastal Disease Ecology Lab is analyzing the data they have from river otter scat. They worked with several local partners to collect the scat from river otter latrines (places on shore or boat docks where otters repeatedly visit and poop) in the Bay region, and are seeking to use the data to better understand river otter diet and parasite loads. The lab also collected a ton of camera footage—over 200,000 photos—to study otter behavior. However, they found that otter behavior can’t be captures by images, even images taken in succession, and are working on a new way to analyze the images.  

Classroom Cultivation

Classroom Cultivation celebrated its first successful year in 2024! Classroom Cultivation is a new iteration of the previous program, Orchids in the Classrooms, and is a collaborative project by the Plant and Molecular Ecology Lab, Public Engagement team, and Smithsonian Gardens.  

Classroom Cultivation aims to get students and teachers involved in real research, turning classrooms into botany labs. In spring 2024, Project Coordinator Shatiyana Dunn worked with 10 teachers and 466 students to conduct experiments on the Grass Pink Orchid (Calopogon tuberosus), a Maryland-native orchid species that is endangered in Maryland and extinct in the District of Columbia.  

Each classroom planted 32 orchids and then collected data on their growth and survival to find out what type of soil and fungus best support their growth. Each class tested four treatments: simple soil with fungus, simple soil without fungus, complex soil with fungus, complex soil without fungus. Figuring out how best to grow orchids inside is an important part of the process for restoring orchids to ecosystems where they are currently absent.  

From the first round of experiments in spring 2024, the students and teachers found that on average more orchids survived in the complex soil (type 2), with or without fungus. Check out the bar graph, that shows the average number of surviving orchids (across 10 schools) was 1 orchid greater in soil type 2 than in soil type 1.

However, this difference is very small. To gain more confidence in these results, we are repeating this experiment again in 2025 with 13 schools in the Maryland and DC. 

Thanks to numerous partners, Classroom Cultivation has also expanded to include fourteen classrooms in three other states: Delaware, Minnesota, and Alaska. Those classrooms are studying how best to grow orchids as well (comparing different types of fungus and soil types), but are specifically studying orchid species that are native to their state.  

Want to learn more? Check out an article about the project in the Shorelines blog. 

Huge thank you to Smithsonian’s Together We Thrive grant that made this work possible!  

Pollinator Cameras

The Plant and Molecular Ecology Lab studies many aspects of plant ecology, including the relationships between orchids and other organisms. In 2024, the lab had two big participatory science program highlights.

The first highlight was a successful Classroom Cultivation experiment in Spring 2024 with Maryland and DC classrooms. Check out the Classroom Cultivation section in this report to learn more. 

The second highlight was Aaron’s Saenger’s work on programming and setting up pollinator cameras. The lab uses pollinator cameras to figure out what organisms pollinate native orchid species. For many orchids, we don’t know what pollinates them, and it’s impossible to sit there and watch them day and night! The Lab uses custom day and night cameras, placed inside protective boxes, and set them up facing the orchid during flowering. Aaron is critical to the project, helping program the cameras and set them up with solar panels to keep them running longer in the field.

Soybean Experiment

The Terrestrial Ecology Lab studies how global change affects the relationships between living organisms. This past year, the lab set-up a soybean experiment to find out if the number of soybean rhizobial species matters when it comes to environmental stress and plant resilience. In other words, if you provide soybeans with more types of nitrogen fixing bacteria, are they more resilient to stress, such as extreme heat?

To document experimental heat stress on the soybeans, the lab used thermal imaging cameras. In the first photo, one of the warm treatments with heat lamps, the leaves of the plants are orange-yellow, indicative of higher temperatures. In the second photo, the control treatment with no heat lamp, the leaves are more blue-purple and are not hot, unlike the surrounding containers and ground. 

Data processing is still underway—so stay tuned for results! But the experiment was a success in large part due to the efforts of intern Matt Lepper and volunteer Jullie Anne. They cared for and measured over 600 soybean plants in the summer. Jamie Pullen, the Head Technician in the Terrestrial Ecology Lab, said, “It was an enormous amount of work, and we could not have done it without them!” 

Beetle Census

More than 25,000 beetle species call North America home, and they play vital roles that we and the places we live in depend on. Unfortunately, in many places, we don’t know what beetles are even there. Since 2018, volunteer entomologists Charlie and Sue Staines have conducted annual surveys so that we know which beetle species share our Edgewater campus.

This past year, we were thrilled to celebrate a very exciting milestone: the 1,000th identified beetle species! And the duo didn’t stop there. Thanks to the passion and energy of a new team member, volunteer and then intern Erin Allen, the team surpassed the milestone and brought the total SERC beetle species identified count to 1,090 beetle species. 

In 2025, Charlie will spearhead the survey again, checking traps weekly or biweekly from March to September depending on the weather. That’s no small feat! He expects to find and collect many more ground beetles thanks to his continued collaboration with the Spatial Ecology and Conservation Lab. The Lab and Charlie are collaborating on a project seeking to understand the relationships between heat, beetle variety, and forest restoration at SERC’s BiodiversiTREE site, where a 100-year-long experiment is being done see if the variety of tree species (more or less) during restoration affects the ecosystem. 

Want to learn more? Check out SERC’s Shorelines Blog.

Box Turtle Study

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the first year of SERC’s Box Turtle Study! 39 iNaturalist users have joined the project, including SERC staff and volunteers, who collectively made 53 observations!! Shoutout to iNaturalist user obenhan, with the last 2024 observation on December 3, 2024. 

Eastern Box Turtles are common in Maryland, but still face significant threats of habitat loss, road mortality, and poaching. Andy Royle, a Senior Scientist at USGS Eastern Ecological Science Center (Patuxent) has set out on a project to right this wrong. Turns out, each box turtle has a unique shell pattern and we can tell from photos! Andy plans to use machine-learning algorithms to identify individuals from the photos you submit, estimate the box turtle population density at SERC, and then compare the population to other populations in the region. 

Science and Faith Initiative

An initiative years in the making, the Science and Faith Initiative has two goals: 1) supporting environmental education for young people in Baltimore and 2) scientific understanding of the impacts of environmental restoration.  

In 2024, the Initiative’s coordinator Rylee Wernoch facilitated collaboration between two SERC labs, Spatial Ecology and Conservation Lab and Watershed Ecology, four faith-based institutions, and Temple X. More than 80 students collected insect and heat data as a part of existing church programming and a high school internship through Temple X.  

A big shout out to everyone who collected data, and a special shout out to everyone who made preliminary data analysis possible at the Stillmeadow Community Fellowship: Canopy Crew, Chesapeake Conservation and Climate Corps, Maryland Service Year members, and several additional groups of youth and young adults.  

Based on over 300 heat measurements at Stillmeadow, we found that on the hottest days, the heat stress index (which measures impact of weather on the human body) was 7% higher outside the forest than inside the forest.   

Huge thank you to Smithsonian’s Together We Thrive grant that made this work possible!   

Forest Ecology Protocols and Posters

The Forest Ecology Lab is run by retired SERC scientist, Geoffrey “Jess” Parker and seeks to understand the structure, growth, and function of forest ecosystems. Thanks to the efforts from Chris Buck, a volunteer who has worked with the Lab for over a decade, the Lab was able to share their work on SERC’s website and via posters on the wall outside their lab.

For many years, the Forest Ecology Lab worked to develop a simple, repeatable protocol for measuring tree growth using dendrometer bands. Now this method is available to anyone and everyone who wants to use on SERC’s website.

Additionally, Chris put together posters and visualizations to highlight long-term studies, including a study on how sea level is influencing flooding in the Annapolis area.