From the American Journal of Botany
Inexpensive tidal simulator allows ecological studies of tidal marsh plants
Rachel MacTavish is growing salt marsh plants in microcosms that replicate the tide. She assembled them in an outdoor greenhouse at the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve in Georgia, USA, with buckets from a hardware store, aquarium tubing, and pumps. Her tidal simulation units could be an important tool for preserving and restoring environmentally important wetlands, because they enable researchers to investigate tidal marsh plant growth in a controlled setting.
“Tidal wetlands are often influenced by many factors, and controlled experiments allow researchers to isolate and untangle the roles of individual variables,” explains MacTavish, a graduate student in the Department of Biology at Georgia Southern University. “I was inspired to construct and test this tidal simulation method as a way to examine the effects of added nutrients and salt in the water on salt marsh plant nutrient uptake.”
The design by MacTavish and coauthor Dr. Risa A. Cohen opens new doors for wetland research by overcoming limitations of previously developed tidal simulators. Each unit costs less than US$27.00, takes up less than two square feet of space, and does not rely on any external plumbing.
The simulators also support plant growth as well as real tidal flushing. MacTavish and Cohen compared the growth of the tidal cordgrass Spartina alterniflora in field sites and microcosm units. Their results indicated no significant difference in height, stem density, or above- and belowground biomass between the natural and simulated tidal treatments. The new tidal simulator protocol and the comparison of S. alterniflora growth in real tidal conditions versus the simulator are published in the November issue of Applications in Plant Sciences (available at http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.3732/apps.1400058).
“Salt marshes have incredible value, protecting coastal populations from high wave energy during storms, sequestering large amounts of carbon, and serving as nursery habitat for many commercially important fishes,” explains MacTavish. “They are extremely productive ecosystems, providing nutrients and organic carbon to nearby coastal waters and beaches.”
Oil spills, heavy metals, and other sorts of water pollution continuously threaten tidal ecosystems. This new and simple mechanism to simulate the tide will enable researchers everywhere to uncover solutions to these and other hazards.
“I’m already using [the tidal simulator] in one of my experiments to study the concurrent effects of altered water column ammonium and salinity on S. alterniflora nitrogen uptake,” says MacTavish. “Another colleague at Georgia Southern University is also using it to examine the effects of sediment amendments on S. alterniflora growth under different soil organic matter concentrations to improve salt marsh restoration strategies.”
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Rachel M. MacTavish and Risa A. Cohen. A simple, inexpensive, and field-relevant microcosm tidal simulator for use in marsh macrophyte studies. Applications in Plant Sciences 2(11): 1400058. doi:10.3732/apps.1400058.
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Reblogged this on Norah4you's Weblog and commented:
Why am I not surprised? As time goes by and the low quality of other so called scholars studies been presented, one by one, I have reached a conclusion. IPCC and their “scholars” are persons of Faith not persons of solid sound science….
It didn’t take long for the warmists to go from Thesis using Fallacies instead of Theories of Science to the present situation where IPCC acts same way as Christian Church leaders did in Medival Age and up to present. Of course(?) Humans must be the ones around which the sun and universe rotate 😛
IPCC preparing ‘most important’ document on climate change,bbs science environment 30 October 2014
10 important findings from the IPCC-reports, 350.org homepage Where have all the money gone?
9 significant scientific findings too recent to be included new IPCC-report, “World resorces institute”October 30 2014 Haven’t anyone of them studied more than Fallacies in subject Theories of Science? Who told them that Fallacies were/are legitim sound science????
Pseudo scientists are by no mean true to Theories of Science quote from The new faith of IPCC: Humans are Universe centre, Norah4you 204/10/31
as I wrote in comment below: Someone ought to have sent the so called scientists in question on a Theory of Science course….. had been cheeper and had at least had a chance leading up to better knowledge….
As an addendum maybe she can reuse the set-up to figure out how what conditions might help kill off Phragmites australis?
Kudos. Great idea. Should help to expand research and save the final tests for the real/expensive/time consuming natural environment. I walk around a salt water marsh twice a day and love the environment. Eel grass seems to be taking over though….don’t know if that’s good or bad.
It’s disheartening to read the negative comments here.
We have a researcher who, rather than sitting at a computer conjuring scenarios that have the potential to result in multiple (probably useless) publications by simply altering variables, has gone to the ‘greenhouse’ and field to get some actual data.
In my experience, simple and inexpensive initial experimentation can result in the formulation of important questions that can then be explored in greater detail.
Katio1505 , when you present a paper for PEER REVIEW it will be looked at sceptically. It’s not about being nice, it’s about keeping bad science out. This simulator has failed to take into account all factors. The paper itself mentions that the simulator can be used to see the effects of sea level rise. IT CANNOT.
Changing water levels each 6 hours does not replicate the tides … all it does is vary the depth of water, which is one element of the action. Most importantly, the incoming water brings nutrient and fresh water to the plants and the outgoing water flushes away the old nutrients and detritus.
Oh, by the way, worked on an artificial wetland construction a couple of years back for nitrate reduction at a sewerage plant that really did replicate tidal motion … incoming water, slack water, outgoing water.
Evaporation adds some costs to that $27 , you can’t just top off the bucket with tap water. You need an R/O unit or a source of “fresh” saltwater.
With this experiment , how did they replicate “salt” (fresh water ) connected to ground state? When you look at a tree, do you only see what is above ground ? Have you ever stop to think how a trees root system looks like a frozen negative lightening strike, and above ground looks more like a positive lightening strike. The reason trees are so important to man is that they are one of the pathways the earth interacts with the atmosphere via point charge. Trees are a fistula that release heat ( electric potential) from growing.
Last word should be “ground”
Trees transport water against gravity on the day side like a wick . Here’s a thought if plants grow because of photosynthesis (light) then how does it start life in the dark? Here’s my thoughts , a seed ejects a packet of energy (green photons????) It’s shot into the atmosphere and we call them shoots. Once the shoot reaches the surface the photoelectric effect takes over.
Photosynthesis will never feed the world, only fossil fuels can accomplish that.
Now, now.
I’ll politely disagree … a little bit.
Photosynthesis will ALWAYS feed the world.
But fossil fuel will reap that harvest, process it, store it, preserve it, and distribute it to the hungry many.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mod2.html
What a “vivid” discussion. The only thing I wonder if it was worth citing. Not because a 27 dollar experiment is less citation-worthy than a 27 million one, but I think the experiment is nothing that not any high school student with e.g. an Arduino interface and an interest in Aquaponics could not also have arranged but never thought of as, as some commenters noted, the plants don’t seem to depend much on tidal influences to grow well.
I can replicate the greenhouse effect with a plastic bag and thermometer,[doesn’t] mean it’s worth anything though
As a biologic experiement it sucks! As an experiement to study tide it’s pseudoscience. To be able to understand the natureforce gravitation one need to understand not only the most elementar parts of Theories regarding Energy. One also need to understand why string-theory’s 2nd string theory isn’t sufficient. In order to do that one need to understand everything from why energy is conserved up to theories of multi-room within the 2nd string theory AND why any experiment in order to study only graviditation needs to be able to be used not only in one dimension but in multidimension.
To explain half of the basic around that might help to understand Tide – but then we only looked at less than 1% of the premisses needed to be proven true of a part of the Graviditation theories still lacking a general explination of what Graviditation really is….
This can’t be real science .
What real scientist would not ‘ milk ‘ the public for a huge grant ?
Recall Feynman dipping Space Shuttle seals in a glass of ice-water at a Senate hearing following the “Challenger” disaster: NASA disbursed an exorbitant $10-mm+ on complex engineering studies, indeterminate and thereby perversely worthless. Like Galileo’s inclined planes, subtle concepts typically lend themselves to rudimentary mechanical evaluation.
With no external plumbing (they say), how do they provide for the input of new nutrients and removal of old effluents.
While tides may be just surface height bulges out in the deep oceans, they are decidedly in and out stream flows, in the presence of land.
How do you do that in a bucket with no external plumbing ??
The majority of comments make me embarrassed to be a WUWT reader. To the poster who thinks that any taxpayer-funded research is theft by force of his hard-earned income, that’s a philosophical argument that has nothing to do with this paper, and I guess you are prepared to throw away 90% of scientific discoveries of the past century including most cancer treatments, most modern antibiotics, nutrition, energy conservation, and everything else. As it happens, this paper was not funded by taxpayer dollars, you just have to read the acknowledgment footnote on the first page.
And no, it’s not a perfect tide simulator, and the authors discuss at least 7 other published tidal simulators. The problem is that if you want to study, for example, the effect of 5 different pollutants at 5 different doses, that’s rather hard to do if you only have one tidal simulator that uses 2-3000 liter water tanks, or that draws water from and discharges to a natural tidal basin. It’s a model system, and it will allow a lot of research to be done inexpensively and with good results. (A petri dish is not a realistic environment for most pathogenic bacteria, but you can’t deny that an awful lot of important science is done in petri dishes.)
And no, this has nothing to do with AGW or climate change or anything else, except that the authors mention they can easily simulate drought or sea level rise by changing the height of the water. Which is of course totally obvious, but one of the things you often say in the discussion sections of scientific papers.
It’s just a good bit of citizen science by a smart graduate student who wants to study tidal environments from a landlocked university.