A new study of Colorado grasshoppers shows that, while the answers are complicated, biologists have much of the knowledge they need to make these predictions and prepare for the consequences.

The findings, published Jan. 30 in the journal PLOS Biology, come thanks to the serendipitous discovery of 13,000 grasshoppers all collected from the same Colorado mountain site between 1958 and 1960 by a biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder). After that scientist’s untimely death in 1973, the collection was rescued by his son and donated to the CU Museum, where it languished until 2005, when César Nufio, then a postdoctoral fellow, rediscovered it. Nufio set about curating the collection and initiated a resurvey of the same sites to collect more grasshoppers.

The newly collected insects allowed Nufio and his colleagues — Caroline Williams of the University of California, Berkeley, Lauren Buckley of the University of Washington in Seattle and postdoctoral fellow Monica Sheffer, who has an appointment at both institutions — to assess the impact of climate change over the past 65 years on the sizes of six species of grasshopper. Because insects are cold-blooded and don’t generate their own heat, their body temperatures and rates of development and growth are more sensitive to warming in the environment.

Despite much speculation that animals will decrease in size to lessen heat stress as the climate warms, the biologists found that some of the grasshopper species actually got larger over the decades, taking advantage of an earlier spring to fatten up on greenery. This worked only for species that overwinter as juveniles — a stage called nymphal diapause — and thus can get a head start on chowing down in the spring. Species that hatch in the spring from eggs laid in the fall — the egg diapausers — did not have this advantage and became smaller over the years, likely as a result of vegetation drying up earlier.

“This research emphasizes that there will certainly be species that are winners and losers, but subgroups within those species populations, depending on their ecological or environmental context, will have different responses,” Sheffer said.

The authors of the new study predicted much of this based on the life cycles of the grasshoppers and the environmental conditions at the site.

“We sat down and looked at all that was known about the system, such as elevational gradients and how that should modify responses and how different grasshoppers might respond, with all the wealth of information we knew about their natural history. And while not all our predictions were supported, many of them actually were,” said Williams, the John L. and Margaret B. Gompertz Chair in Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley.

“Understanding what species are likely to be winners and losers with climate change has been really challenging so far,” Buckley said. “Hopefully this work starts to demonstrate some principles by which we can improve predictions and figure out how to appropriately respond to ecosystem changes stemming from climate change.”

Rescued grasshoppers

The 65-year-old grasshopper collection was assembled by entomologist Gordon Alexander of CU Boulder over three summers. He not only collected and mounted the specimens from plots in the Rocky Mountains near Boulder but also documented the timing of six different life stages of the grasshoppers. His death in a plane crash in 1973 left the specimens, pinned in neat rows in 250 wooden boxes, in limbo until Nufio came across them in 2005 and recognized their value if they could be compared to grasshoppers today.

Museum collections have become invaluable for long-term studies of the effects of climate change, as exemplified by a survey of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians conducted between 1904 and 1940 by Joseph Grinnell of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Recent resurveys of the same areas 100 years later that Grinnell visited helped biologists document the effects of climate change on California wildlife.

Nufio and many others eventually collected about 17,000 new grasshopper specimens from the same or similar sites around Boulder. While the new paper is the first to report the grasshopper size changes between 1960 and 2015, the authors leveraged previous studies in the lab and from experimental plots to understand why they found the patterns they did.

The insects were from a large group of non-descript grasshoppers in the Acrididae family that are so-called short-horned grasshoppers. Most were generalized grazers, though some specialized in grasses. Two species (Eritettix simplex and Xanthippus corallipes) were nymphal diapausers, achieving adulthood as early as May; two (Aeropedellus clavatus and Melanoplus boulderensis) were early season egg diapausers, maturing in mid-June; and two (Camnula pellucida and Melanoplus sanguinipes) were late season egg diapausers, maturing in late July.

The researchers found that the nymphal diapausers increased in size at lower elevations, around 6,000 feet, while the early and late emergers from overwintering eggs decreased in size over the decades at these elevations.

“For those that come out in late August, when it’s very crispy and dry and we get very hot temperatures, we saw the most negative impacts of climate change,” Williams said.

One thing that surprised the researchers, however, was that none of the species increased in size at higher elevations, up to about 13,000 feet, despite the fact that summer warming due to climate change is greater at higher elevations. This may be because, at higher elevations, snow inhibits early season greening up, reducing the food supply. The results confirm what the team found when it caged grasshoppers at various elevations to see how they adapted to elevational changes in heat and dryness.

“The data are consistent with grasshoppers either being able to take advantage of warming by getting bigger and coming out earlier, or for grasshoppers to experience stress and get smaller,” Buckley said.

Other experiments performed by Buckley on butterflies show some of the same trends.

“We find a pretty similar message with butterflies, which is hopeful to me, in that if we can consider some basic biological principles, we really increase our ability to predict climate change responses,” she said.

The team is continuing its collaboration to understand the metabolic, biochemical and genetic changes that underlie the size changes.

“Using those museum collections allowed us to go back in time to compare exactly the same sites — there hadn’t been any changes in the land use over this 60-year period of warming — using exactly the same methodology,” Williams said. “Having those unique historical specimens enabled us to look at the changes through time.”

Other co-authors of the study are Julia Smith of the University of Washington; Simran Bawa of UC Berkeley; and Ebony Taylor, Michael Troutman and Sean Schoville of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation (DEB-1951356, DEB-1951588, DEB-1951364).

MIT chemists have now come up with a new way to determine those 3D genome structures, using generative artificial intelligence. Their technique can predict thousands of structures in just minutes, making it much speedier than existing experimental methods for analyzing the structures.

Using this technique, researchers could more easily study how the 3D organization of the genome affects individual cells’ gene expression patterns and functions.

“Our goal was to try to predict the three-dimensional genome structure from the underlying DNA sequence,” says Bin Zhang, an associate professor of chemistry and the senior author of the study. “Now that we can do that, which puts this technique on par with the cutting-edge experimental techniques, it can really open up a lot of interesting opportunities.”

MIT graduate students Greg Schuette and Zhuohan Lao are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Science Advances.

From sequence to structure

Inside the cell nucleus, DNA and proteins form a complex called chromatin, which has several levels of organization, allowing cells to cram 2 meters of DNA into a nucleus that is only one-hundredth of a millimeter in diameter. Long strands of DNA wind around proteins called histones, giving rise to a structure somewhat like beads on a string.

Chemical tags known as epigenetic modifications can be attached to DNA at specific locations, and these tags, which vary by cell type, affect the folding of the chromatin and the accessibility of nearby genes. These differences in chromatin conformation help determine which genes are expressed in different cell types, or at different times within a given cell.

Over the past 20 years, scientists have developed experimental techniques for determining chromatin structures. One widely used technique, known as Hi-C, works by linking together neighboring DNA strands in the cell’s nucleus. Researchers can then determine which segments are located near each other by shredding the DNA into many tiny pieces and sequencing it.

This method can be used on large populations of cells to calculate an average structure for a section of chromatin, or on single cells to determine structures within that specific cell. However, Hi-C and similar techniques are labor-intensive, and it can take about a week to generate data from one cell.

To overcome those limitations, Zhang and his students developed a model that takes advantage of recent advances in generative AI to create a fast, accurate way to predict chromatin structures in single cells. The AI model that they designed can quickly analyze DNA sequences and predict the chromatin structures that those sequences might produce in a cell.

“Deep learning is really good at pattern recognition,” Zhang says. “It allows us to analyze very long DNA segments, thousands of base pairs, and figure out what is the important information encoded in those DNA base pairs.”

ChromoGen, the model that the researchers created, has two components. The first component, a deep learning model taught to “read” the genome, analyzes the information encoded in the underlying DNA sequence and chromatin accessibility data, the latter of which is widely available and cell type-specific.

The second component is a generative AI model that predicts physically accurate chromatin conformations, having been trained on more than 11 million chromatin conformations. These data were generated from experiments using Dip-C (a variant of Hi-C) on 16 cells from a line of human B lymphocytes.

When integrated, the first component informs the generative model how the cell type-specific environment influences the formation of different chromatin structures, and this scheme effectively captures sequence-structure relationships. For each sequence, the researchers use their model to generate many possible structures. That’s because DNA is a very disordered molecule, so a single DNA sequence can give rise to many different possible conformations.

“A major complicating factor of predicting the structure of the genome is that there isn’t a single solution that we’re aiming for. There’s a distribution of structures, no matter what portion of the genome you’re looking at. Predicting that very complicated, high-dimensional statistical distribution is something that is incredibly challenging to do,” Schuette says.

Rapid analysis

Once trained, the model can generate predictions on a much faster timescale than Hi-C or other experimental techniques.

“Whereas you might spend six months running experiments to get a few dozen structures in a given cell type, you can generate a thousand structures in a particular region with our model in 20 minutes on just one GPU,” Schuette says.

After training their model, the researchers used it to generate structure predictions for more than 2,000 DNA sequences, then compared them to the experimentally determined structures for those sequences. They found that the structures generated by the model were the same or very similar to those seen in the experimental data.

“We typically look at hundreds or thousands of conformations for each sequence, and that gives you a reasonable representation of the diversity of the structures that a particular region can have,” Zhang says. “If you repeat your experiment multiple times, in different cells, you will very likely end up with a very different conformation. That’s what our model is trying to predict.”

The researchers also found that the model could make accurate predictions for data from cell types other than the one it was trained on. This suggests that the model could be useful for analyzing how chromatin structures differ between cell types, and how those differences affect their function. The model could also be used to explore different chromatin states that can exist within a single cell, and how those changes affect gene expression.

Another possible application would be to explore how mutations in a particular DNA sequence change the chromatin conformation, which could shed light on how such mutations may cause disease.

“There are a lot of interesting questions that I think we can address with this type of model,” Zhang says.

The researchers have made all of their data and the model available to others who wish to use it.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Lithium-ion battery recyclers source materials from two main streams: defective scrap material from battery manufacturers, and so-called “dead” batteries, mostly collected from workplaces. The recycling process extracts lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, manganese, and aluminum from these sources.

The study quantified the environmental footprint of this recycling process, and found it emits less than half the greenhouse gases (GHGs) of conventional mining and refinement of these metals and uses about one-fourth of the water and energy of mining new metals. The environmental benefits are even greater for the scrap stream, which comprised about 90% of the recycled supply studied, coming in at: 19% of the GHG emissions of mining and processing, 12% of the water use, and 11% of the energy use. While it was not specifically measured, reduced energy use also correlates with less air pollutants like soot and sulfur.

“This study tells us that we can design the future of battery recycling to optimize the environmental benefits. We can write the script,” said William Tarpeh (BS ’12), assistant professor of chemical engineering in the School of Engineering and the study’s senior author.

Location, location

Battery recycling’s environmental impacts depend heavily on the processing facility’s location and electricity source.

“A battery recycling plant in regions that rely heavily on electricity generated by burning coal would see a diminished climate advantage,” said Samantha Bunke, a PhD student at Stanford and one of the study’s three lead investigators.

“On the other hand, fresh-water shortages in regions with cleaner electricity are a great concern,” added Bunke.

Most of the study’s data for battery recycling came from Redwood Materials in Nevada — North America’s largest industrial-scale lithium-ion battery recycling facility — which benefits from the western U.S.’s cleaner energy mix, which includes hydropower, geothermal, and solar.

Transportation is also a crucial factor. In the mining and processing of cobalt, for example, 80% of the global supply is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Then, 75% of the cobalt supply for batteries travels by road, rail, and sea to China for refining. Meanwhile, most of the global supply of lithium is mined in Australia and Chile. Most of that supply also makes its way to China. The equivalent process for battery recycling is collecting used batteries and scrap, which must then be transported to the recycler.

“We determined that the total transport distance for conventional mining and refining of just the active metals in a battery averages about 35,000 miles (57,000 kilometers). That’s like going around the world one and a half times,” said Michael Machala, PhD ’17, also a lead author of the study.

“Our estimated total transport of used batteries from your cell phone or an EV to a hypothetical refinement facility in California was around 140 miles (225 kilometers),” added Machala, who was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy at the time of research and is now a staff scientist for the Toyota Research Institute. This distance was based on presumed optimal locations for future refining facilities amid ample U.S. recyclable batteries.

Patent advantage

Redwood’s environmental outcomes do not represent the nascent battery recycling industry’s overall environmental performance for recycling used batteries. Conventional pyrometallurgy, a key refining step, is very energy intensive, usually requiring temperatures of more than 2,550 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 degrees Celsius).

Redwood, however, has patented a process called “reductive calcination,” which requires considerably lower temperatures, does not use fossil fuels, and yields more lithium than conventional methods.

“Other pyrometallurgical processes similar to Redwood’s are emerging in labs that also operate at moderate temperatures and don’t burn fossil fuels,” said the third lead author, Xi Chen, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford during the time of research and now an assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong.

“Every time we spoke about our research, companies would ask us questions and incorporate what we were finding into more efficient practices,” added Chen. “This study can inform the scale-up of battery recycling companies, like the importance of picking good locations for new facilities. California doesn’t have a monopoly on aging lithium-ion batteries from cell phones and EVs.”

Looking ahead

Industrial-scale battery recycling is growing, but not quickly enough, according to senior author Tarpeh.

“We’re forecast to run out of new cobalt, nickel, and lithium in the next decade. We’ll probably just mine lower-grade minerals for a while, but 2050 and the goals we have for that year are not far away,” he said.

While the U.S. now recycles about 50% of available lithium-ion batteries, it has successfully recycled 99% of lead acid batteries for decades. Given that used lithium-ion batteries contain materials with up to 10 times higher economic value, the opportunity is significant, Tarpeh said.

“For a future with a greatly increased supply of used batteries, we need to design and prepare a recycling system today from collection to processing back into new batteries with minimal environmental impact,” he added. “Hopefully, battery manufacturers will consider recyclability more in their future designs, too.”

Published in Science Immunology, the study revealed that the endurance of these stem-like T cells is fuelled by a protein called ID3, expressed by a gene of the same name. These ID3+ T cells have a unique ability to self-renew and resist exhaustion, giving them the power to sustain immune responses far longer than other T cells that don’t express ID3.

The University of Melbourne’s Catarina Gago da Graça, PhD Candidate at the Doherty Institute, said the research highlights how ID3+ T cells hold the key to overcoming one of the biggest challenges in treating chronic diseases — immune exhaustion.

“ID3+ T cells have the remarkable ability to resist burnout and maintain a powerful immune response over time, making them particularly effective in the face of chronic infections or cancer,” said and co-first author Gago da Graça.

The research also found that certain signals in the body could increase the number of ID3+ T cells, paving the way for improved treatments like CAR T cell therapy. While CAR T therapy has been transformative in treating certain cancers, its effectiveness can wane over time due to T cell exhaustion.

Professor Ricky Johnstone, Executive Director Cancer Research at Peter Mac and co-lead author of the study, said enhancing ID3 activity could strengthen the endurance of these cells, making therapies more effective and long-lasting.

“We discovered that ID3+ T cell formation could be promoted by specific inflammatory cues, potentially offering new strategies to boost the number of immune cells that excel at fighting cancer in patients,” said Professor Johnstone.

“This could lead to better treatments for cancer patients and improve clinical immunotherapy outcomes.”

The University of Melbourne’s Dr Daniel Utzschneider, Laboratory Head at the Doherty Institute, said the findings could lead to advancements in immunotherapy treatments and the development of vaccines that provide long-lasting protection.

“Exhausted immune cells remain one of the biggest challenges in treating chronic diseases,” said Dr Utzschneider.

“This research provides a roadmap for how we might reinvigorate the immune system to improve health outcomes for people living with cancer or chronic infections like HIV or hepatitis B and C, thanks to these stem-like T cells, the immune system’s secret power.”

This research is the result of a collaborative effort between the Doherty Institute, Peter Mac, La Trobe University, Northwestern University (USA), the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute, the University of Birmingham (UK) and the University of Melbourne.

The partially-visible fresco, identified by Cambridge University historian Dr Federica Gigante, almost certainly depicts a real tent, now lost, which the artist may have seen in the same church. The brightly coloured original tent, covered in jewels, could have been a diplomatic gift from a Muslim leader or a trophy seized from the battlefield.

Gigante’s research, published today in The Burlington Magazine, also suggests that a high-profile figure such as Pope Innocent IV — who gifted several precious textiles to the Benedictine convent church of S. Antonio in Polesine, Ferrara, where the fresco was painted — may have given such a tent.

“At first, it seemed unbelievable and just too exciting that this could be an Islamic tent,” said Dr Gigante. “I quickly dismissed the idea and only went back to it years later with more experience and a braver attitude to research. We probably won’t find another such surviving image. I haven’t stopped looking but my guess is that it is fairly unique.”

The fresco provides crucial evidence of a medieval church using Islamic tents in key Christian practices, including mass, the study suggests.

“Islamic textiles were associated with the Holy Land from where pilgrims and crusaders brought back the most precious such Islamic textiles,” Gigante said. “They thought there existed artistic continuity from the time of Christ so their use in a Christian context was more than justified. Christians in medieval Europe admired Islamic art without fully realising it.”

While it is well known that Islamic textiles were present in late medieval European churches, surviving fragments are usually found wrapped around relics or in the burials of important people. Depictions of Islamic textiles survive, in traces, on some church walls in Italy as well as in Italian paintings of the late medieval period. But images of Islamic tents from the Western Islamic world, such as Spain, are extremely rare and this might be the only detailed, full-size depiction to be identified.

The fresco was painted between the late 13^th and early 14^th centuries to represent a canopy placed over the high altar. The artist transformed the apse into a tent comprising a blue and golden drapery wrapped around the three walls and topped by a double-tier bejewelled conical canopy of the type found throughout the Islamic world.

“The artist put a lot of effort into making the textile appear life-like,” Gigante said.

The background was a blue sky covered in starsand birds, giving the impression of a tent erected out in the open. In the early 15^th century, the fresco was partly painted over with scenes from the lives of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. This later fresco has captured the attention of art historians who have overlooked the sections of older fresco. Gigante identified the depiction of Islamic textiles when she visited the church ten years ago but ittook further research to prove that the fresco represents an Islamic tent.

Depiction of a real tent used as altar-curtains

Gigante argues that the fresco depicts an Islamic tent which actually existed and that at some point in the 13^th century, may even have been physically present in the convent church, providing a direct reference point for the artist.

It is already known that medieval churches used precious textile hangings to conceal the altar from view either permanently, during Mass or for specific liturgical periods. And when studying the fresco, Gigante noticed that it depicts the corner of a veil, painted as if drawn in front of the altar. Gigante, therefore, believes that the real tent was adapted to serve as a ‘tetravela’, altar-curtains.

“If the real tent was only erected in the church on certain occasions, the fresco could have served as a visual reminder of its splendour when it was not in place,” Gigante said. “The interplay between painted and actual textiles can be found throughout Europe and the Islamic world in the late medieval period.”

Gigante’s study notes that the walls of the apse are studded with nails and brackets, and that they could have served as structural supports for a hanging textile.

Gigante points to the fresco’s ‘extraordinarily precise details’ as further evidence that it depicts a real tent. The fabric shown in the fresco features blue eight-pointed star motifs inscribed in roundels, the centre of which was originally picked out in gold leaf, exactly like the golden fabrics used for such precious Islamic tents. A band with pseudo-Arabic inscriptions runs along the edge of both the top and bottom border. The textile also features white contours to emphasise contrasting colours reflecting a trend in 13^th-century Andalusi silk design.

The structure, design and colour scheme of the tent closely resemble the few surviving depictions of Andalusi tents, including in the 13^th-century manuscript, the Cantigas de Santa Maria. They also match one of the few potential surviving Andalusi tent fragments, the ‘Fermo chasuble’, which is said to have belonged to St Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Gigante also compares the jewels depicted in the fresco with a rare surviving jewelled textile made by Arab craftsmen, the mantle of the Norman King Roger II of Sicily (1095-1154), which was embroidered with gold and applied with pearls, gemstones and cloisonné enamel.

Spoils of war

In the 13^th century, it was common for banners and other spoils of war to be displayed around church altars in Europe.

“Tents, especially Islamic royal tents were among the most prized gifts in diplomatic exchanges, the most prominent royal insignia on campsites and the most sought-after spoils on battlefields,” Gigante said.

“Tents made their way into Europe as booty. During anti-Muslim expeditions, it was common to pay mercenaries in textiles and a tent was the ultimate prize. The fresco matches descriptions of royal Islamic tents which were seized during the wars of Christian expansion into al-Andalus in the 13th century.”

Gift from a Pope?

From the 9^th century, Popesoften donated Tetravela (altar-curtains) to churches and papal records reveal that by 1255, Pope Innocent IV had sent ‘draperies of the finest silk and gold fabrics’ to the convent of S. Antonio in Polesine.

“We can’t be certain but it is possible that a person of high-profile such as Pope Innocent IV gifted the tent,” Gigante says.

An Andalusi tent taken from the campsite of the Almohad caliph Muhammad al-N?sir was sent to Pope Innocent III after 1212 meaning that there was an Islamic tent in St Peter’s Basilica at some point prior to the painting of the fresco.

Gigante suggests that the tent could also have been part of a diplomatic gift made to the powerful Este family which brokered alliances between the Guelfs and Ghibellins, factions supporting the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor respectively. The convent was founded in 1249 by Beatrice II d’Este.

“Many people don’t realize how extraordinarily advanced and admired Islamic culture was in the medieval period,” Gigante said.

Last year, Dr Gigante identified the Verona Astrolabe, an eleventh-century Islamic astrolabe bearing both Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions.

Federica Gigante is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of History and the Hanna Kiel Fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

A new study of satellite imagery and high-resolution climate model data by scientists at the University of Rochester upends previous assumptions and provides insight about how those surface and ocean weather patterns interact. Scientists formerly believed atmospheric wind had a damping effect, slowing the eddies, but the study, published in Nature Communications, offers a new theory that better explains the complexities of how atmospheric wind affects eddies.

“It’s actually more interesting than what people had previously thought,” says Hussein Aluie, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Mathematics and senior scientist at the University’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics “There’s a marked asymmetry in how the wind affects these motions, and it depends on the direction they spin.”

Aluie says that prevailing winds that move longitudinally across the globe, such as the westerlies and trade winds, will slow the eddies when they move in the opposite direction but energize them if their spin is aligned.

In between the swirling eddies are intricate tangles of ocean weather patterns known as strain. While strain patterns aren’t as easily distinguished by the naked eye, Aluie says they account for about half of the ocean’s kinetic energy and are damped or energized by wind in similar ways as eddies.

“The new energy pathways between the atmosphere and the ocean that we discovered can help design better ocean observation systems and improve climate models,” says Shikhar Rai ’23 PhD (mechanical engineering), first author of the study and a postdoctoral investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In addition to improving climate modeling, being able to better predict the ocean’s weather patterns could have practical applications for fisheries and help better direct commercial ships where to go.

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, focused largely on the mechanical interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean. In future studies, Aluie plans to investigate the role eddies play in transporting energy between the oceans and atmosphere.

Researchers examined soil core samples taken from two constructed freshwater wetlands and compared them to data from previous studies of the same wetlands over 29 years to determine how well human-made wetlands sequester — or capture and store — carbon as they age.

Findings showed both wetlands captured similar amounts of carbon over the decades, but neither has shown a net gain or loss since year 15.

But their value in sequestering carbon is remarkable, the researchers said.

“Wetlands are generally thought of as the kidneys of our world because they can clean water naturally and sequester carbon well,” said Jay Martin, a distinguished professor in food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study. “As we try to combat climate change, they also provide habitat for many species that are important to us.”

The researchers analyzed data from the Schiermeier Olentangy River Wetland Research Park (ORWRP), a site ideal for long-term study due to the overwhelming amount of environmental data it generated over the past three decades.

Previous studies of the park revealed that its soil has shown an increase in carbon levels. But by using detailed measurements taken in the wetland’s 29th year post-construction, Martin’s team found that wetlands’ ability to sequester carbon diminishes as they mature.

The study was recently published in the journal Ecological Engineering.

Under current conditions, the wetlands have become a stable ecological force, and this equilibrium isn’t expected to change anytime soon.

“When you first construct a wetland, the initial plant growth is often what causes carbon to be sequestered so quickly,” said Daniel Ruane, a former master’s student in ecological engineering and the lead author of the study. “But it just isn’t possible to have infinite growth.”

Although there are limits to how much atmospheric carbon artificial wetlands can effectively store, since their carbon sequestration and storage rates are still far greater than other ecosystems, they still represent a potential solution to counter climate change, said Ruane.

As a result, future research into the health of the ORWRP is likely to analyze the various plant communities that grow within the area as well as investigate methane emission levels to determine how long the land can function as a carbon sink.

“The benefits that wetlands provide are increasingly positive,” said Martin. “Our findings emphasize that these ecosystems should be looked at in a better light now than ever before.”

Due to an increase in urban and agricultural land use, more than 50% of Earth’s natural wetlands have disappeared over the last few centuries. This decline has impacted ecosystem services all around the U.S., but most notably in the Midwest, said Martin.

In Ohio, for example, projected wetland loss is closer to 90%, jeopardizing many essential processes that humans rely on, like water quality improvement and flood mitigation.

This provides even more reason why policymakers should be trying to build and maintain wetland ecosystems, Ruane said.

“If we started to create and restore more wetlands now, that could solve a lot of our problems down the road,” he said.

Co-authors of the study include Michael Brooker and William Mitsch of Ohio State, Blanca Bernal of Greencollar US Inc., Chris Anderson of Auburn University, and Robert Nairn of the University of Oklahoma.