Anson "Tuck" Hines, SERC director

Spring 2024

“We have to fix the ‘who’ of conservation. And when we bring more people in the room, it’s going to change the ‘how.’”

This January, I heard those words while at the Smithsonian and NOAA’s Summit on Ocean Biodiversity. A man named Angelo Villagomez had the floor, addressing a crowd of roughly a hundred scientists, policymakers, community leaders and entrepreneurs. A senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Villagomez is also a member of the Chamorro people from the Mariana Islands.

Villagomez joined several speakers from communities working on the front lines of climate change. The lieutenant governor of Guam, an urban wildlife biologist in Baltimore and an Alaskan Iñupiat shaping Arctic policy with the White House also shared their stories.

Angelo Villagomez at the Ocean Summit on Biodiversity Jan. 23 (Credit: Norwood Photography)

The summit was a call to action, a summons to find new solutions to protect our oceans and coastlines. 

You may have heard of “30 by 30”—an ambitious goal to conserve 30% of the world’s land and ocean by 2030. The U.S. already has 26% of its territorial waters under some kind of protection. But that figure fails to tell the full story. Our nation’s marine protected areas are almost exclusively (over 95%) in one giant area of the tropical Pacific. Only 1% of the remaining U.S. coastal water is protected. Thousands of species and many vital ecosystems are left out, as our scientists discovered this winter. 

However, by identifying the gaps, the scientists also discovered keys to moving forward: We need to prioritize critical habitats, especially for marine mammals and birds. It’s also time to rethink what protection can mean, by allowing more room for community and indigenous-led efforts.

Two team members from the Centro de Estudios Marinos in Honduras, which helped the Estero Prieto community with mangrove planting. (Credit: Hannah Morrissette/SERC)

This February I was inspired by another story from Honduras, of a community in Estero Prieto. When their fish were suffocating in habitats crowded by invasive water lettuce, they rallied to restore their wetland. To date, they have cleared out half the invasive plants and replanted nearly 18,000 mangroves. Two SERC scientists, Steve Canty and Hannah Morrissette, joined their efforts. But the drive, direction and critical on-the-ground knowledge came from the community. Their story was one of 21 from around the world featured in a new guide: “Including Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) in Mangrove Conservation & Restoration.”

Actions like these are the future of conservation, and they are key to life on a sustainable planet. At SERC, we have a long history of working alongside local communities in the Chesapeake and globally. Many leaders on the ground are very attuned to their local environments. They know what the needs are. The Smithsonian’s role is to provide tools, data and, if necessary, training to help scale up their efforts.

That’s why I’m so proud of this issue’s feature story. After the historic Paris Agreement, nearly 200 nations are required to report how they will cut or offset their greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change. SERC’s new Coastal Carbon Library and Atlas are helping them tap into the power of local wetlands, by offering data on how much “blue carbon” their coastal wetlands can store. 

It’s an open-access library, with raw, original carbon data from nearly 15,000 sites around the world—the largest, most comprehensive database of its kind. And it’s freely available to everyone. Our wetland ecologists are helping scientists at home and abroad share their data, so the library can grow and help the communities that need it most. The discoveries people can make with this data, especially by pairing the data with satellites, are infinite—and entirely in their hands. 

What happens at the Smithsonian does not stay at the Smithsonian. If you join our mission, your impact will go beyond our walls and beyond our national borders. You can be part of a more open world—opening data, minds and possibilities.

-Anson “Tuck” Hines, director