PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — July 30, 2013 — For biologists who have been studying birds in East Coast tidal marshes, Superstorm Sandy couldn’t have come at a better time.
Just two months before Sandy pummeled New Jersey and New York last October, a research team completed the field work of a study looking at bird populations at risk due to the loss of tidal marshes from sea level rise. With that pre-storm data in hand, the researchers are now comparing the abundance of marsh plants and birds before and after Sandy in those same marshes, from Maine to Virginia.
Conclusions cannot be drawn yet, but it’s clear that Sandy devastated many marshes, said Brian Olsen, a University of Maine professor and a co-principal of the study, along with professors from the universities of Delaware and Connecticut and a biologist from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.
‘‘Some of the places we've gone to, they used to be tidal marshes and now they’re sand dunes or now they’re open water,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s kind of extreme, but there are places where the tidal marshes are gone.’’
The project, funded by a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, will assess how well animal and plant populations in coastal marshes can weather change. The study specifically looks at whether the ability of certain plants and birds to withstand an extreme disturbance, such as a hurricane, is greater or less in marshes that are subjected to other stresses, such as sea level rise, development, pollution and invasive species.
Over the past three months, trained technicians visited 1,700 spots in hundreds of marshes where they listened to bird calls and wrote down their observations. They also used speakers and portable music players to play the calls of birds that don’t sing very often but will do so if they hear their own song. The technicians visited each place three times, and also took vegetation measurements during one of those visits to determine which plant species have been affected.
The data will be analyzed in the coming months, and the findings will become available next year.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Boston Globe