SAV recovery and estuarine nutrient cycling

The Susquehanna Flats SAV beds cover nearly 25 square kilometers. Each square meter contains about 150 g of plant material. When you do the math, that’s a LOT of biomass! True to our ecosystem ecology roots, we want to know how much carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus the SAV beds are retaining and how much sediment they are trapping.

Role of SAV in estuarine inorganic carbon cycling

We know that SAV are “blue carbon” ecosystems, but can they also modify the inorganic carbon system in ways that affect how much carbon is sequestered?

Role of benthic cyanobacteria in a recovering SAV system

For as long as we’ve been studying SAV in the upper Bay, we’ve mostly ignored the persistent mats of stringy macroalgae tangled with the SAV. Not anymore.