Co-lead Dr. Michael Weintraub and the team of researchers at COMPASS-FME are answering the question of what our coastal ecosystems are going to look like in a future with changing water levels.
Started in 2021 and run by the U.S. Department of Energy, the project COMPASS-FME stands for Coastal Observations, Mechanisms and Predictions Across Systems and Scales: Field, Measurements and Experiments. Led by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the coastal research initiative COMPASS was split into two parts, one of which is COMPASS-FME and the other being COMPASS-GML, which focuses on Great Lakes Modeling. COMPASS-FME centers its work around two locations: Chesapeake Bay and the coasts of the Great Lakes. Weintraub and the researchers at the University of Toledo are leading a research section specifically on the Great Lakes area.
“We’re trying to understand how changes in water levels affect coastal systems,” Weintraub said.
When water levels rise, they cover land that is not used to being underwater. This causes changes to the soil, bacteria and plants in that area, ultimately affecting the animals and humans in that region. The more waters rise, the more severe the changes can get, and the less land that is available for plants, animals and humans to live. Even if water levels were to lower again, changes incurred often remain. Weintraub and his team are looking at the effects of rising and falling water levels, and what changes actually occur.
Lake Erie’s water levels began dropping at the end of the 1990s and continued to do so until 2014 when the lake saw a fast increase in water levels and reached its highest point in 2020. According to Weintraub, the water levels rose 10 times faster than the mean sea level rise.
“But while mean sea level rise continues to monotonously go upward, changes in Great Lakes water levels are a lot less predictable,” Weintraub said. “If they rise and fall again too frequently, well, that might prevent trees from coming back. It takes years for trees to reestablish, and they can be pretty sensitive to flooding … How are changes in flooding, magnitude, frequency and duration going to affect coastal environments?”
The team is looking at three different sites that consist of two main areas each: high, forested land that doesn’t get flooded, and lower wetland environments that are more prone to flooding. These areas are called synoptic gradients. The three areas being studied are the Old Woman Creek National Estuarine Research Reserve, the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge at Crane Creek and parts of the Portage River.
At each site, researchers collect data on different parts of the soil and environment. They hope to use improved models to help them understand coastal landscapes and how they work. They are looking at different areas — including how flooding affects greenhouse gases such as methane — and how soils respond to a loss of oxygen.
“We’re learning a lot more about how microbes in flooded soils respond,” Weintraub said. “So we are collecting now millions of data points a month, and we have implemented these coastal environments like a patient in the ICU, and an important thing is just developing that technology.”
They also found that at the synoptic sites, methane – a greenhouse gas – is coming out of tree trunks in larger amounts than methane coming out of the ground.
“The scientific community is just starting to appreciate that there’s a fair bit of methane coming straight out of wood,” Weintraub said. “We’re seeing that to be of a higher magnitude than what’s coming out of the soil. And so that’s kind of an interesting and surprising finding.”
Weintrab and his team are also making new discoveries about water below the ground, finding that the water levels changed a lot more than they originally thought. The groundwater table – the ground beneath the surface that holds water – between the different sites varied by about 20 feet throughout the year. With such a large change in water levels, many different organisms were affected, especially trees.
“That’s no joke,” Weintraub said. “We’ve got a much stronger water year happening that we don’t see. That can really stress trees as well. It opens up to questions about where these trees get their water from when things get really dry.”
At one of their sites, the researchers are seeing certain trees develop high stress levels quickly after being exposed to saltwater. The high sensitivity could lead to more species dying even before harsh flooding events have occurred, and the overall forest starts declining.
However, after years of just gathering data, Weintraub and his team aim to move forward with their plan.
“Now we’re planning on moving from observations to manipulation,” Weintraub said. “What we’re going to do is flood one of these sites.
Through collaboration with the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, they plan on flooding a portion of one of the main locations at Crane Creek. They will be able to take the data they get from the experiment and compare it with other data collected at a separate site flooded with freshwater or a mixture of fresh and salt water.
“One of the things that’s exciting about this project is we can connect the dots between freshwater and saltwater flooding in a way that hasn’t really been done before,” Weintraub said.
The team’s plan is to get everything in place and the flooding equipment installed by 2026 for a test flood in the winter. They hope to start the official flood around early August of 2027.
Aside from all the research, though, Weintraub’s favorite part is the people he gets to work with.
“[There are] really awesome, talented people who are just so dedicated and hard working and enthusiastic. And you know that for sure is the best part,” Weintraub said. “It’s the successes of other people on the team and the junior team members that are really the most exciting thing for me. And you know, when they’re having a good time and they’re enthusiastic, I’m having a good time.”
All in all, the research that Weintraub and his team are doing will help them better understand the local environment, especially in times of a rapidly changing climate and environment. However, for Weintraub, the project means a whole lot more to him than just the research and new discoveries.
“[I hope that] we grow this scientific area, this area of study, not just our one research site, but
ideally, I’d love to see the infrastructure we’re building continue and then people will maintain it, and it’ll keep going,” Weintraub said. “[We need to] continue this kind of work and this kind of study: making advances and making sure that the things that we learn get communicated.”
