New Online Tool Can Help Identify Carbon Storage Potential in Oregon’s Coastal Habitats

Coastal ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest provide essential benefits to nature and people, including serving as an important nature-based solution in the fight against climate change by sequestering significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and surrounding waters. As states seek to advance climate goals, coastal land managers increasingly need tools to help them understand the carbon storage potential within the coastal zone. Oregon has been a leader in these efforts, developing a restoration opportunity inventory map to help inform land management and climate policy and funding decisions.

To learn from Oregon’s experiences, The Pew Charitable Trusts hosted a webinar on Nov. 7, 2023, featuring experts from Silvestrum Climate Associates, Sea & Shore Solutions, and the Institute for Applied Ecology. The speakers showcased efforts to incorporate carbon data into existing spatial data for the Coos Bay estuary and discussed how this tool can support climate policy efforts states already have underway.

Speakers

Lisa (Schile) Beers, Ph.D., a senior associate at Silvestrum Consulting, is a wetlands ecologist with more than 20 years’ experience studying wetland plants, carbon cycling, and soil biogeochemistry. Using field, geographic information systems (GIS), and spatial modeling, Beers examines tidal wetland and mangrove resilience to sea-level rise and other climate change impacts and uses this knowledge to advance carbon project development internationally. She has studied tidal wetland and seagrass bed carbon dynamics around the world and led efforts to incorporate coastal wetlands into national and state-level greenhouse gas inventories.

Laura Brophy directs the Estuary Technical Group at the Institute for Applied Ecology, a nonprofit in Corvallis, Oregon, and serves on the faculty of Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. Over the past 20 years, Brophy has led field studies in nearly all of Oregon’s major estuaries. She and her colleagues have made discoveries leading to better mapping of estuary habitats and improved quantification of tidal wetland functions. Brophy now collaborates with state, Tribal, regional, and national entities to apply these new methods and insights to improve estuarine resource management.

Craig Cornu helped found the Pacific Northwest Blue Carbon Working Group in 2015 and for the past six years, he has managed grant-supported research to help fill key data gaps and assess the feasibility of blue carbon projects for the region. Cornu has almost 20 years’ experience leading estuarine wetland restoration project design, management, and effectiveness monitoring in Oregon’s South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve and has served as an adviser to state and federal agencies, private landowners, watershed associations, and other nonprofit organizations on estuarine wetland restoration and effectiveness monitoring projects.

Adrian Laufer is an Oregon-based coastal and marine policy and management practitioner working to address complex problems affecting coastal and marine environments and to advance policies, community engagement and outreach, social science research, GIS, and group facilitation. She approaches each project with a systems-based lens and an interest in the intersections among the natural environment, society, and governance. 

Meet The Moderator

Jazmin Dagostino is an associate with The Pew Charitable Trusts, working to advance state and federal natural climate solutions. She focuses primarily on state efforts to incorporate coastal blue carbon and peatland management strategies into climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. Before joining Pew, Dagostino coordinated Our Project in Hawaii’s Intertidal, a citizen science program dedicated to promoting stewardship through the intersection of science, community, and cultural knowledge. Earlier in her career, she worked on marine algal research and studied host-bacterial interactions in Hawaiian bobtail squid. Dagostino earned a bachelor’s degree in marine science from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. She is based in Portland, Oregon.