The field season in our wetland ecology lab is punctuated by a lot of trips to Mansfield supply (the local hardware store) and Home Depot. One rainy afternoon last summer, after I had gotten drenched surveying plants at the restored wetlands where I work, I hopped from hardware store to hardware store on Cape Cod trying to find a piece of foam. I finally found a package of foam insulation small enough to fit into my car. Then I headed back to my father-in-law’s workshop to transform the foam into a floating platform for a static chamber. Static chamber is a fancy name for a section of capped PVC piping. PVC, with scientific names, figures prominently in my field work. We use static chambers to measure the accumulation of greenhouse gasses (carbon dioxide – CO2, nitrous oxide – N2O, and methane – CH4) over time. The chamber has two parts. The bottom is just a plain section of PVC with two small holes drilled in the sides. This summer, I used 4” diameter pipe that was cut into 15 cm (~6 in) pieces, but chambers come in many different sizes. The bottom of the chamber gets partially buried in the ground. When there is standing water that is too deep, we cannot use the chamber base, and that is where the floating foam comes in. When we are ready to sample, we place the chamber top on the base or into a hole in the foam and create an airtight seal. The top of the chamber is a PVC cap into which we drill holes and install two ports. One of the ports allows us to use a syringe and needle to extract gas from inside the chamber and put it into a sealed vial. The contents of the vial can then be tested by a machine in the lab that tells us the concentration of greenhouse gasses. My research is on former cranberry farms (also called cranberry bogs) that have been restored back into wetlands. Most cranberry farms in Massachusetts were originally built on wetlands, many with rivers flowing through the bog. One component of my work focuses on whether the restored wetlands can help decrease the amount of nitrogen pollution that reaches coastal estuaries downstream. Too much nitrogen in the estuaries can lead to excess growth of algae and lead to the death of fish and other marine organisms. One of the greenhouse gasses measured from the chambers, nitrous oxide, is a form of nitrogen that can give us information about whether the wetlands are helping remove nitrogen from the system. It can be disappointing to see no accumulation of gas after spending a lot of time making, testing, and sampling the chambers and running the samples in the lab, and I found no accumulation of nitrous oxide in my chambers. Nitrous oxide is a very potent greenhouse gas, almost 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so it is, ultimately, good that the restored wetlands are not emitting additional greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. We are still working on different methods to understand what is happening with the nitrogen in the system. There will definitely be more PVC in my future as I continue to attempt to answer that question.
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