Several papers co-authored by Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Aaron Strong have been published in recent months.
He was the lead author of a paper titled “Response of Lower Sacramento River phytoplankton to high-ammonium wastewater effluent” that appeared in Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, an open-access journal from the University of California Press.
Strong and his colleagues at Stanford University, Applied Marine Sciences, and the University of California Santa Cruz assessed the effects of high NH4+ versus NO3− concentrations on in situ phytoplankton communities from the Lower Sacramento River in order to bring scientific clarity to nutrient management of that area of the river.
“Synoptic assessment of coastal total alkalinity through community science” focused on the potential of community science to contribute to carbonate system monitoring. The article was published in Environmental Research Letters from IOP Publishing, part of the Institute of Physics.
Strong’s co-authors included researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the Boston and Narragansett, R.I., areas Narragansett, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as from several colleges and universities and other organizations in coastal areas of the Northeast.
Another article was published online in Ecosystem Services from Science Direct. “Benefits, costs, and feasibility of scaling up land conservation for maintaining ecosystem services in the Sebago Lake watershed, Maine, USA” was written with researchers from the University of Maine and the Highstead Foundation and Harvard Forest.
The paper presented the results of a study showing that the benefits of conservation outweigh the costs and that it could be economically feasible to invest in forest conservation for much of the watershed.
Most recently, Strong co-authored an article titled “Incorporating blue carbon sequestration benefits into sub-national climate policies” that appears online in the peer-reviewed international journal Global Environmental Change, also from Science Direct.
He and fellow researchers at the University of Oxford, Stanford, and the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain studied the economic value of sequestered carbon in California’s coastal habitat. Blue carbon generally refers to the carbon sequestered and stored in coastal vegetated habitats, including mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and tidal marshes.
“Sub-national blue carbon policy can help countries keep Paris Agreement commitments” and “valuation of sequestration helps governments meet commitments to greenhouse gas goals,” they noted.
