Name: The Secret Life of Wetlands: Finding Solutions to Environmental Threats at UMD
Uploaded: 2020-06-01T07:42:45.000Z
Duration: 4 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

Ariana: A wetland is a unique ecosystem that is the bridge between terrestrial ecosystems

and aquatic ecosystems, so for example, a forest and a stream.

They have plants that are adapted to living in those wet conditions, and then they have

Fernando: Wetlands control large parts of the hydrologic cycle, but they also control

It's got a lot of mass, a lot of biomass because there's so much water that it can grow very

Ariana: These systems are incredibly productive systems.

And so they are a very impressive what we call “natural carbon sink” that is helping

Fernando: Wetlands are able to store as much or even more carbon than forests.

Ariana: They're great recreational opportunities, too.

People like to go bird watching in wetlands, for example, or they're some of the most fun

So they can be very magical, wonderful places to do recreation as well.

VOICEOVER: Wetlands also help improve water quality and protect coastlines from flooding.

But landowners and governments have not always recognized the value of wetlands.

Fernando: Wetlands were seen as essentially swamps—things that you wanted to get rid

So wetlands were systemically destroyed and then converted to urban land in the case of

And the same has been happening in other wetland systems around the world.

VOICEOVER: Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, Ariana Sutton-Grier and their colleagues at the University

of Maryland's Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center are learning about threats to wetland

ecosystems, and working to find solutions.

Ariana: When we destroy coastal wetlands, that carbon that was locked up in that soil

very rapidly gets lost back to the atmosphere.

So what was a really important natural carbon sink has suddenly become a new human-caused

Fernando: The constant and frequent flooding that occurs in Florida is because wetlands

were there to prevent that from happening.

You get rid of the wetlands, you start flooding.

VOICEOVER: Miralles-Wilhelm recently contributed to a National Academies report on the restoration

Fernando: And essentially climate change has two key effects on Everglades restoration.

The Everglades are very low-lying wetlands, which means that they're very susceptible

Salt is able to move in and displace fresh water.

Climate change probably will decrease the amount of rain that goes in, so when you have

less rain coming in and sea water moving through, what you create is what I like to refer to

as a sandwich effect, where basically fresh water is being squeezed out on both ends.

VOICEOVER: Sutton-Grier recently co-authored a study in the journal Frontiers in Ecology

and the Environment that found coastal wetlands to be exceptionally good at storing carbon.

Ariana: We get asked all the time, why are you only talking about wetlands?

Coastal blue carbon is the carbon taken up and stored in coastal wetlands: mangroves,

salt marsh and tidal marshes, and also sea grasses.

The answer on corals, kelp, and on fish is they are very important habitats.

They are, however, not long-term carbon sinks.

VOICEOVER: The University of Maryland has a large part to play in the future of wetlands

Fernando: I think as we move forward with increasing threats of climate change, we really

need a new generation of practitioners and professionals, to attack these problems that

are going to be probably much more severe than they are today.

Ariana: I get to work here with faculty at University of Maryland and I also sit at the

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

My position really allows me to bridge a lot of worlds so that I am really at that science

and policy nexus, really thinking about how is the science we're doing getting used

Fernando: The fact that we've gotten better and better at measuring wetland biomass from

space, using remote sensing satellite technology, is what has enhanced in a very short period

of time—and I'm really looking at the last 10 years—our understanding of wetlands as

So if you look at the University of Maryland, within a five-mile radius you will find the

highest concentration of Earth system remote sensing scientists in the world.

And that is what we bring to the table very effectively in the area of wetlands.