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SEVENSEAS Beach Cleanup & Coral Restoration Events in Marine Protected Areas

In July 2023, SEVENSEAS Media conducted two impactful events in Krabi, Thailand. The Monthly Beach Cleanup Event at Ao Sew Beach saw enthusiastic volunteers remove a staggering 150.6 kilograms of trash, underscoring the pressing issue of marine pollution and the significance of sustainable practices like reducing, reusing, and recycling waste. The organization stressed the importance of proper waste management to protect coastal ecosystems.

Meanwhile, in the face of an unexpected storm, SEVENSEAS Media’s Coral Nursery & Restoration team demonstrated unwavering dedication, rescuing and relocating 75 corals to safer locations, bolstering their chances of survival and growth. The team outlined a comprehensive plan for continued coral recovery missions and data collection efforts throughout the year. The recent storm served as a stark reminder of the urgency to safeguard coral reefs from climate change impacts. We would like to express our gratitude for the support received from individuals and communities in this conservation community. We would not be able to do it without your support. You can make a tax-deductible donation here to keep our publications and Thailand Cleanup Project afloat.

You can either make a direct financial contribution to SEVENSEAS Media through The Ocean Foundation website or connect us with potential donors by sending an email to  Giacomo Abrusci, our Editor-in-Chief.

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The FREE Weekly Conservation Post and Jobs List

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Since 2004, the Global Marine Community (Formerly DCMC) has fostered an informal and non-partisan platform to promote understanding of key issues and challenges while building partnerships across an increasingly diverse group of marine conservation professionals and students.

Our mission is to promote communication and build partnerships across the Global Marine Community and to identify and address gaps in the community’s work. The Global Marine Community achieves this through multimedia promotion and partnerships. The community consists of a diverse and growing group of participants, including non-governmental organizations, government agencies, foundations, bilateral and multilateral agencies, fellowship programs, and independent consultants and academia/students.

If you are interested in contributing or getting involved, email Here. 

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MSU Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering researcher Ehsan Ghane receives $1.2 million MDARD funding for continued water quality research

For about two decades, annual algae blooms – fed primarily by nutrient runoff from sources like agricultural fields, animal facilities and wastewater treatment plants – have developed in the western portion of Lake Erie.

Algal blooms occur when nutrients (primarily phosphorus in Lake Erie), warm water and adequate light create optimal growing conditions, producing visible colonies in ponds, lakes and other water bodies.

Some types of algal blooms, referred to as harmful algal blooms (HABs), produce toxins that are harmful to human health and wildlife and threaten the water quality of the lakes. In the Western Basin of Lake Erie, blooms of blue green algae called cyanobacteria can produce toxins that can kill fish, mammals, birds, and can cause human illness.

According to a study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, harmful algal blooms cause approximately $82 million annually in economic losses in fishing and tourism in the Great Lakes region.

Together with farmers and agricultural stakeholders across Michigan, and supported by partnerships with the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) and Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE), MSU AgBioResearch scientist Ehsan Ghane is exploring practices he hopes will assist Michigan farmers in abiding by what he calls, “the golden rule of drainage – drain only what is necessary for crop production and not a drop more.”

Ghane, associate professor and MSU Extension specialist in the Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering, focuses his research and outreach efforts on agricultural water quality and quantity. His goal is educating stakeholders (e.g. producers, drainage contractors, crop advisors, conservation professionals, and agency personnel) to increase the performance and profitability of subsurface drainage systems, while reducing harmful water-quality impacts.

Ghane and his research team recently received a $1.2 million grant from MDARD to continue a project called “Edge-of-Field” with the objective to investigate the effectiveness of conservation drainage practices.

“There is good understanding and best management practices around addressing the movement of surface runoff from farmland, but this is not so true for water moving through tile lines,” said MDARD Environmental Stewardship Division (ESD) Director James Johnson. “The important research being done by Ehsan Ghane and his team at MSU is helping us to better understand tile-line movement of nutrients in water. This will allow for the development of a best management plan that advocates for drainage control structures, as well as a management system for controlling the release of water from those structures.”

ESD plans to use information gleaned from the study to develop farmer education to better control nutrient and water releases in the short term, and ultimately use these plans as part of the Michigan Agriculture Environmental Assurance Program verification process, Johnson added. 

The grant will fund continued data collection and management implementation on three partner farms in the River Raisin Watershed. Ghane’s project is testing the effectiveness of two types of water management systems – controlled drainage and saturated buffers – to see how they are best implemented and how much phosphorus can be reduced and kept out of surface water.

“We want to show how effective these practices are and show farmers how beneficial they are, so we can encourage people to implement them. We eventually want farmers to adopt these practices voluntarily to improve water quality and their crop yield,” Ghane said.

Partnering with Michigan farmers

The project consists of two sites with controlled drainage and one site with a saturated buffer. The project will monitor nitrate, total phosphorus and dissolved reactive phosphorus in subsurface drainage discharge from each drainage system to compare to a control field consisting of free drainage systems.

“Our research is conducted on privately owned farmland and we partner closely with the landowners, the farmers, and the producers,” Ghane said. “We share data with them and they share their farming practices with us, so we both learn from each other. Our partnership with the farmers is a critical component of this research.”

John Tuckerman, a fifth-generation corn, wheat and soybean farmer from Lenawee County, has partnered with MSU researchers since the early 1980s.

Tuckerman, an MSU graduate in Food Systems Economics and Management, said his partnership with MSU AgBioResearch and MSU Extension has helped his operation grow and modernize, as well as provided an opportunity to participate in research aimed at improving Michigan’s land and environment.

“I have concern about the phosphorus load Michigan’s farms are contributing to Lake Erie, and because of that, I was a happy participant in this project,” Tuckerman said. “I’d like to learn how to do things better to help figure out how to mitigate the situation. I think by doing this research and proving that it won’t hurt yields and that we save phosphorus, we will be able to get more buy-in from other farmers.”

Controlled drainage – the process of adjusting the outlet elevation of a drainage system to control the volume of water leaving the field and reduce nutrient loss – provides the capability to better manage water resources on the farm.

Saturated buffers use the same principles as controlled drainage systems, but in addition the system intercepts water from the tile drainage and reroutes and treats it through soils and vegetation before exiting into an adjacent waterway.

Data collection from the previous five years on partner farms has shown as much as 25% phosphorus loss reduction using these drainage methods compared to control fields. Researchers believe these methods have potential to capture even more than the initial studies indicate.

MDARD partnership key to future success

Joe Kelpinski serves as a program manager for MDARD’s Environmental Stewardship Division leading the Michigan Agricultural Environmental Assurance Program. His team works closely with Michigan’s agriculture communities and commodity groups to “promote agricultural growth in a way that’s going to be protective of the environment and specifically of our state’s water resources.”

“Our mission is to work with farms of all types, sizes, and commodities to promote a voluntary, proactive environmental program to protect the environment and our water,” said Kelpinski, who provides guidance to the state’s agricultural communities on implementation of effective drainage and conservation methods and techniques. “Michigan is a water rich state, and the Great Lakes are part of our economy, culture and identity, so it’s vital for the state to support efforts to protect the lakes. MDARD appreciate the ongoing research partnership with MSU.”

Variations in rainfall, temperature and numerous other factors impact nutrient loads entering surface water each year. More years of data collection will lead to more effective practices being implemented with the goal of ultimately reducing the phosphorus load entering Lake Erie by 40%.

“I know everyone would love to see the algae bloom issues fixed yesterday. I want them fixed yesterday; but the reality is, Ehsan is doing the fundamental research to answer questions to help us make real change in Michigan’s portion of the Western Lake Erie Basin or in Saginaw Bay. This partnership helps us get a deeper and connected handle on water quality issues that are so important to us all,” Kelpinski said. “Michiganders identify with the Great Lakes. It’s woven into our culture and it’s a fundamental piece of who we are, and so keeping the lakes clean is important to everyone and we’re committed to making a real, substantial difference.”

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By Steve Koppes

An international team led by Purdue University scientists has created the first spatial database of planted forests in East Asia by combining data collected on-site and via satellite. Produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence, the database contains forest location maps at a resolution of one kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) and lists the most common tree species growing there, such as pine and eucalyptus.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that East Asia holds 36% of the world’s planted forests. Africa, meanwhile, has 19%; Europe, 7%; and the United States, 9%. Within East Asia, 87.0% of planted forest is in China, followed by 11.1% in Japan, 1.0% in South Korea and 0.9% in North Korea.

Previous maps of East Asia’s planted forests covered only parts of the region spanning China, Japan, North Korea and South Korea. And the data sources for those maps are inconsistent and unverified.

“We used an AI approach to help us understand a massive amount of data, measured both from the ground and also from remote-sensing sources,” said Jingjing Liang, associate professor of quantitative forest ecology at Purdue. “This study complements the research portfolio of the Institute for Digital Forestry with an international perspective, enriching our understanding of global forest ecosystems and their sustainable management.”

A collaboration consisting of Liang, lead author Akane Abbasi, a PhD student in forestry and natural resources, and 15 co-authors recently presented their results in the journal Scientific Data.

The project collaborators are members of Science-i and the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative (GFBI). Science-i is a web-based platform involving more than 300 scientists worldwide. GFBI has built a database of 1.3 million sample plots and 55 million trees.

“At Land & Carbon Lab, we believe what gets measured gets managed,” said study co-author Nancy Harris, research director of Land & Carbon Lab and Global Forest Watch at World Resources Institute. “Our partnership with Purdue and FAO embodies our mission to deploy breakthroughs in geospatial monitoring that power solutions for sustainable landscapes. Seeing where these different types of forests are on a map revolutionizes the options for interpretation and decision-making that go beyond simply knowing how much forest is in a country.”

Integrating the various data sources was one of the project’s big challenges. The team started with data that came in different formats, types and spatial extents.

“Some data cover only China. Some data cover only Japan. Some data cover China and South Korea,” Abbasi said. One dataset based on satellite images covered China, Japan and South Korea but not North Korea. “They differ in spatial extent. They also differ in relatability in terms of whether it’s measured on the ground or from space.”

The researchers integrated data collected on-site, by satellite and through an approach called “ensemble machine learning.” This method entailed using AI to train three different machine learning models.

“The ensemble machine learning method is developed to account for imperfections in both data and the model,” said Liang, who also is co-director of the Forest Advanced Computing and Artificial Intelligence Lab (FACAI).

The team used the Bell Community Cluster at Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing to process and analyze the massive amount of data involved in the project.

“When I say I study forest ecology, people assume that I go to the forest, measure something, then come back and analyze the data,” Abbasi said. “But this is not what we’re doing here. We deal with very large spatial extents, and we study nature using cutting-edge AI and machine learning.”

Scientists know from official, country-led estimates that East Asia by far contains the world’s largest proportion of planted forest, said study co-author Javier Gamarra of FAO. “Yet most of the region has traditionally tended to be less prone to follow open data policies about forest information, which makes the exercise of estimating such area particularly challenging,” he said.

The results confirm previous data shown by the FAO’s Global Forest Resource Assessment (FRA). “But in this case, we can obtain spatial locations of where forest plantations exist at small resolutions, something that FRA cannot show,” Gamarra said.

Gamarra lauded Purdue’s use of AI to combine data collected both via satellites and on the ground to produce robust estimates that could prove especially useful in making vast amounts of forest resource information widely available.

“In fact, FAO’s Forestry Division is actively collaborating with Professor Liang’s FACAI Lab and the World Resources Institute to expand the use of artificial intelligence to obtain ecozone-based estimates of forest growth across the globe,” he said.

China has planted more forest in recent decades than any other nation, covering an area of more than 324,000 square miles. That area is greater than the square mileage of the states of Texas and New York combined. Japan and South Korea, meanwhile, planted many of their forests 50 or 60 years ago.

After World War II and the Korean War, demand was high for forest products, so people started planting forest plots. “That was a huge contribution to most of the planted forests in those countries,” Abbasi said.

Sandstorms regularly pelt Beijing, which stands less than 60 miles from the nearest desert. This has led the Chinese government to begin planting trees on sand dunes, a costly and labor-intensive process.

“Learning from what China did would be one thing we can do to help the world plant more trees to stem deforestation,” Liang said.

The co-authors include Purdue’s Ankita Mitra, a PhD student in forestry and natural resources; and Mohammad Jahanshahi, associate professor in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering.

This work received funding from the World Resources Institute and Purdue’s Department of Forestry and Natural Resources.

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