“Find something you are interested in and stay with it, if nothing else you can become the expert!”
Fred Short
Behind New Hampshire’s modest 19 miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline lies the Great Bay Estuary and its tidal rivers.
Stretching for 235 miles and lined with seagrass, it’s an ideal home base for world-renowned seagrass ecologist Dr. Fred Short. The GSO alum (M.S. 1976) landed at the University of New Hampshire after receiving his doctorate in 1981, and he has studied seagrasses at its Jackson Estuarine Lab along the shore of the Great Bay Estuary ever since.
Seagrasses, which live at the interface of land and water, are unique because they are flowering plants that grow fully submerged in shallow water. Seagrass meadows are hidden to the eye but are crucial nursery areas and a food source for fish, crustaceans, and other estuarine and coastal organisms. The seagrasses also serve as important filters, protecting the water from contaminants, high nutrient levels and sediments.
Short’s first work on seagrasses, specifically eelgrass, Zoster marina, started here in Rhode Island, while he was a master’s student at GSO. The New Hampshire native had been an undergraduate math major at Plymouth State College with an interest in modeling. His advisor said, “Go work with the best, and Scott Nixon is one of the best modelers in the world.” Short followed that advice and arrived at GSO in 1973, knowing nothing about ecology or eelgrass but excited to learn.
About the same time, Narragansett Electric was making plans to build a nuclear-powered electric generating plant on the former U.S. Naval Air Station property in Charlestown, R.I., on the northern border of the shallow coastal lagoon then called Charlestown Pond, now known as Ninigret Pond. Nixon thought a hydrodynamic model would be the ideal way to understand the ecology of the brackish pond and the potential impact of the proposed power plant. Short had found his thesis project and began to examine Ninigret Pond, which he discovered was full of eelgrass.
“At the time, not much was known about eelgrass, so I studied it, took measurements, grew eelgrass in the first mesocosms at GSO and developed a model of eelgrass growth based on the environmental factors of light, temperature and currents,” Short said.
Two years later, in 1975, his M.S. thesis was completed: Eelgrass production in Charlestown Pond: an ecological analysis and numerical simulation model.
Short’s time at GSO was crucial to his nascent career. “Scott Nixon got me going on eelgrass and set me on my whole career of looking at what factors control eelgrass growth by emphasizing how important it was to understand the whole ecosystem,” he said.
Short also found the lunchtime discussions in the Nixon Lab fascinating. Jim Kremer (Ph.D. ‘76) was working on a model of Narragansett Bay and would bring up modeling questions. Steve Hale (M.S. ’74) was studying the benthos of the bay and talked about his findings, while Candace Oviatt (Ph.D. ’67) was GSO faculty working with Nixon on marshes and discussed coastal issues.
(GSO professor) Scott Nixon got me going on eelgrass and set me on my whole career of looking at what factors control eelgrass growth by emphasizing how important it was to understand the whole ecosystem.
Working with Peter McRoy at the University of Alaska, Short continued his eelgrass work for his Ph.D. by looking at nitrogen limitation in an estuary, a very unusual ecosystem. After completing his degree, he returned to New England to continue a prolific career of publishing eelgrass studies about Great Bay, Waquoit Bay, Boston Harbor and other sites in the region. “Our research has shown that the biggest threat to eelgrass is the excess nitrogen coming from human sources—mainly wastewater treatment plants,” said Short. Over time, Short’s work expanded to include seagrass genetics, managing seagrasses for climate change, seagrass mapping, and seagrasses as blue carbon sinks.
Because of his expertise, Short was invited by non-governmental organizations and other states and countries to sites around the world to examine seagrasses and speak at conferences. However, he soon realized that it was hard to compare these systems to each other because, in his view, researchers were not making consistent measurement of seagrasses.
To fill this gap, Short and his Australian colleague Dr. Robert Coles of James Cook University wrote a standard methods manual for seagrass research published in 2001: “Global Seagrass Research Methods.” Later that year, Short founded SeagrassNet (seagrassnet.org), the Global Seagrass Monitoring Network. This ecological monitoring program, which employs easy-to-monitor metrics and permanent plots for measurements, is now used at 139 sites on every continent except Antarctica (where seagrass has yet to be found) and covers the 72 different species of seagrasses found worldwide. Short has been to nearly all of the sites himself.
In 2003, with the research methods and network established, Short followed up with “The World Atlas of Seagrasses” to present a global synthesis of the distribution and status of seagrasses.
“When I started working on eelgrass in Great Bay, there was 80% more than there is now,” said Short. “Now is a low point world-wide. The decrease is due to human sources of nitrogen, and it’s going to get worse unless we do something.”
However, Short pointed to signs of improvement. “For example, Tampa Bay in Florida is recovering, and locally Mumford Cove in Connecticut has eelgrass returning once they removed the source of nitrogen.”
With glimmers of hope for the future of eelgrass, and SeagrassNet well-established with plans to include it in the Marine Global Earth Observatory Program at the Smithsonian Institution, Short plans to retire this fall with his wife Cathy, a science writer who has been his editor for all his papers. “She’s the reason I’ve been able to publish so much over the years,” said Short. “She’s been a huge asset to my career.”
Short’s vast circle of students and colleagues weren’t about to let him retire quietly. This past April at the meeting of the New England Estuarine Research Society (of which Short is a past president), colleagues held a “Festschrift,” a German word for honoring someone in academia during their lifetime. The event was not just retrospective, but also a continued call to work and source of inspiration to others. Thirteen of his students and colleagues gave presentations about their current work and spoke about how Short inspired their research. Dante Torio, a colleague, remarked that when the Cree Native Canadians in Hudson Bay needed someone to help them restore their eelgrass, “They Googled ‘eelgrass’ and Fred’s name came up, so they called him!”
As he looked back on his career, Short was asked for words of advice for today’s graduate students. “First, read Scott Nixon’s papers, he had a way of writing that was very logical and concise and he emphasized knowing the whole picture,” he replied. “And find something you are interested in and stay with it, if nothing else you can become the expert!”
Sage words from a researcher who has spent his career with a singular focus on understanding, protecting, and restoring seagrasses worldwide.
This article was written by Veronica M. Berounsky, who also writes Bay Campus Blog.