91ÉçÇø¸£Àû

Ph.D. students Keqi He, Rafaella Lobo honored for their respective scholarship.

Meet the Silliman Lab, learn more about its research focus, a PhD student's experience in the lab and the opportunities the lab offers Duke students.

Maintaining a water level between 20 and 30 centimeters below the local water table will boost southern peatlands’ carbon storage and reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they release back into the atmosphere during dry periods by up to 90%, a 91ÉçÇø¸£Àû study finds.

Brian R. Silliman, Rachel Carson Distinguished Professor of Marine Conservation Biology at 91ÉçÇø¸£Àû’s Nicholas School of the Environment, has been elected a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America (ESA).

Duke leaders rise to face the challenges of climate change.

The National Science Foundation and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation have awarded a $1.2 million grant to support a new initiative aimed at boosting ecosystem restoration and climate resilience along North Carolina’s coast.

Rewetting and restoring 250,000 acres of southern pocosin peatlands that had been drained for farming but now lie fallow could prevent 4.3 million tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide, now stored in their soils, from oxidizing and escaping back into Earth’s atmosphere each year, a 91ÉçÇø¸£Àû study shows. That amount equals 2.4% of the total annual reductions in CO2 emissions needed for the United States to be carbon neutral by 2050.

Human activities such as marsh draining for agriculture and logging are increasingly eating away at saltwater and freshwater wetlands that cover only 1% of Earth’s surface but store more than 20% of all the climate-warming carbon dioxide absorbed by ecosystems worldwide. A new study published May 5 in Science by a team of Dutch, American and German scientists shows that it’s not too late to reverse the losses.

Coastal marshes that have been invaded by feral hogs recover from disturbances up to three times slower than non-invaded marshes and are far less resilient to sea-level rise, extreme drought and other impacts of climate change.

Joel Dunn (MEM’04) Helps Create America’s First National Marine Sanctuary in 20 Years

Recent Duke grad Alexandra DiGiacomo (BS ’20) is using drones to better understand how rising seas, warming waters and rapid development are killing protective saltmarshes at our coast, and what can be done to reverse the losses.

Sixteen years after the restoration of Upper Sandy Creek began, hundreds of species, some rare, now call the once-heavily eroded and degraded stream home, and nitrogen pollution flowing off Duke’s campus into downstream waters has been slashed by 75%.

When it comes to storing carbon during prolonged periods of drought and heat, wooded peatlands at low-latitudes have a three- to five-fold advantage over other peatlands. An ancient class of slow-growing fungi is the reason why.

Salt marshes, seagrass meadows and other coastal ecosystems are in rapid decline around the world. Restoring them is expensive and often unsuccessful. But an international team of researchers has discovered a way to sharply increase the odds of success by using biodegradable mats.

High-intensity fires can destroy peat bogs and cause them to emit huge amounts of their stored carbon into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, but a new 91ÉçÇø¸£Àû study finds low-severity fires spark the opposite outcome.