On August 6, 2025, DENIN staff and UD student researchers represented the Coastal Critical Zone Network project at the Critical Zone Network (CZN) annual meeting at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, NY. The meeting brought together nine teams of Critical Zone researchers to connect and share research updates concerning complex environmental functions.
Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the CZN investigates environmental interactions at the portions of Earth where life-sustaining resources such as soil, air, rock, water, and organisms, meet. The Network was built off the Critical Zone Observatories program, which established this multidisciplinary approach to monitoring environmental processes.
Dr. Holly Michael, DENIN Director and Principal Investigator of the CZN’s Coastal project, presented research outcomes alongside other team PIs. Throughout five years of research, the Coastal project has worked to quantify the processes affected by increased sea level rise and salinization throughout the Mid-Atlantic coastline.
University of Delaware research was featured at the conference’s poster session. Postdoc Dannielle Pratt showcased findings from her long-term monitoring of marsh migration, the movement of saltwater marshes into freshwater systems. Master’s student Abigail McGraw’s research evaluates the drivers of moving marsh-forest boundaries in the Chesapeake Bay. PhD candidate Tahmidur Rahman Junayed demonstrated how increased salinity has played a key factor in the reduction of trees’ water intake in coastal forests. Dr. Yu-Ping Chin, Professor of Environmental and Water Resources, exhibited the potential of stemflow, the movement of precipitation from trees onto forest floors, to influence the carbon cycle in nutrient-deprived coastal forests.
Due to restructures within the NSF, funding for the CZN will end next year. While this was the network’s final meeting, the monitoring of the Critical Zone continues. Researchers are consolidating five years of data that will inform funding proposals and science education programs for institutions and stakeholders. Armed with more knowledge than ever before, upcoming projects and outreach will help achieve the wider understanding of the Critical Zone concept that’s crucial to the adaptations towns, states, and companies will have to make amidst a changing environment.