Genevieve Noyce sees the future through marsh experiments

The world’s climate is changing, and we have a rough idea of where it’s going, but how do we know what these changes will mean for the health of our families, farms, and future? We can’t know for sure, but we can artificially create the conditions we expect to see and observe what happens—at least in small batches.

At the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Maryland, this kind of future-casting is happening right now in the Global Change Research Wetland (GCReW) project.

GCReW takes place along the Chesapeake Bay, on a marsh unlike any other in the world. This marsh is not just tricked out with boardwalks like those you find in nature preserves to help you navigate wetlands with dry socks. It also features machinery and electronics that help SERC scientists like Genevieve Noyce meet their goal, which, Genevieve explains, is to “take little parts of marsh and turn them into the future and see what happens."

Genevieve is a primary investigator on GCReW, which means she’s helping lead a team of environmental futurists that’s either heating up the wetland or adding carbon dioxide to the air to produce the conditions we expect to see 100 years from now. The team is studying what will happen to the ecosystem so communities can make more informed decisions on how best to protect their land.

Genevieve will be the first to tell you about why marshes are so important to our ecosystem and our livelihoods. First, marshes supply groundwater to quench our thirst. They also serve as a buffer between land and sea: in times of high tide and heavy rain, they protect our coasts from flooding and erosion. Meanwhile, the plants that live in the marsh produce food for marine wildlife, and the soil sequesters carbon. Genevieve studies many of these effects, digging into her expert knowledge in a broad scientific field called biogeochemistry.

“Biogeochemistry is exactly what it sounds like,” Genevieve told Eye on Science. “It’s biology, geology, and chemistry all at the same time. Plants, which are the biology, are living in the soil, which I’d consider geology. As the plants grow, they’re adding chemicals to the soil, hence the chemistry. The chemicals affect microorganisms (again biology) feeding back into broader effects on the ecosystems.”

Genevieve was hired in 2015 as part of the first team to operate the experiments that involve artificially warming up portions of the marsh. She continues a legacy established in 1987, when GCReW began under plant physiologist Bert Drake. Genevieve described how she might one day take over the experiment from current director Pat Megonigal, an experiment that’s been running about as long as Genevieve has been alive.

“It’s not quite terrifying, but I definitely feel the weight of managing the longest running global climate change experiment in the world. Lots of money has gone into this and a lot of research has come out, and I just don’t want to mess it all up!” she told us.

If the day arrives when Genevieve leads this grand experiment, she might be the first director of GCReW that disliked biology in high school. “They always focused on one organism at a time, and I don’t really care what an individual plant or microbe is doing,” she said. “Rather, I care about what our manipulations mean to the whole ecosystem.” Despite her disdain for biology, Genevieve earned her spot at GCReW by getting degrees and more degrees. With a bachelor’s degree in ecology, two master’s degrees (one in math), and a Ph.D. in microbiology, Genevieve has hit all the marks of the interdisciplinary field she’s found herself in.

Given that Genevieve is studying the future of our climate, and she has seven-year-old twins at home, we had to ask the question—the one she said she gets all the time—how do you feel about raising kids in this changing world? “I try to understand how the effects we’re having on the world are going to change things in the future,” she responded. “For the warming experiment, for example, a little bit of warming won't destroy the marsh; in fact, it actually helps. If we keep things from getting a lot worse, it won't be too bad [for today’s kids],” Genevieve said. She argues it's better to think this way than the alternative.

“Some people say, ‘What is the point of all this research? What is the point if we can't do anything about it?’ But we can't just give up and say the world is going to fall apart and that we're all doomed. We can't solve the problems we don’t understand,” she said.

In conversation with people, Genevieve explains “if you can get someone to ‘wetlands are good,’ then we can start discussing what they can do to keep these wetlands healthy. People might start to think, ‘if what I’m doing is causing damage, maybe I shouldn’t be doing that.’” Then, Genevieve explained that her data can help us predict what will happen, which will help us inform policy that can prevent further damage and keep these critical ecosystems in good shape for centuries to come.