we're sitting at the intertidal at northeastern university as marine science center in the hot just north of boston you see the city of boston behind me and right next to us is a natural new england intertidal ecosystem that's really unusual about this facility is a proximity to a major urban  center the environment is changing so rapidly that almost no place on earth is untouched by humans so a lot of what we study here is the interaction between the natural and the human environments really a couple human natural ecosystem so this is really an ideal place for us to look at how things like climate change impact ecosystems on which humans the pets behind you right now it's early morning things are pretty cool with the low tide the animals and plants are all doing pretty well but if we came out here on a sunny day things would be completely different and that's a lot of what we study in my lab we want to understand how climate change interacts with other stressors to affect organisms ecosystems things that humans really care about scientifically environments like coastal zones are incredibly interesting to also culturally very important this is where babies of fish we care about live this is where we have coastal erosion happening this is our first line of defense against hurricanes this is really the interface between the human and natural worlds in terms of the ocean so we intensively study the near shore environment we especially look at the intertidal zone that's the region between the low and the high tide line so these animals and plants are really exposed to both the trust role and the aquatic environments on a daily basis so if you can  imagine being on a sunny beach sitting there with an ice drink in your hand in a bathing suit and then all of a sudden you are submerged in an arctic water we're going to have to hold your breath for the next eight hours and to do all those other things you care about you're going to have to feed you're going to have to reproduce you're going to have to to eat other organisms that's really what these organisms have to do on a daily basis they have to survive the terrestrial vironment in the air then they have to go back in the cold water environment and undergo these rapid changes so you might think that because they're exposed to these these incredibly dynamic conditions they might be a sort of buffer against environmental change or finding out it's not the case that they really are living very close to their edge so what we're looking at is the interti zone as sort of bellwether here in the coal mine for a lot of what we're seeing with climate change in fact we are seeing some incredible changes out here get a title animals and see weeds really get a raw deal out here during the summer time during a low tide in the middle of the day when the sun is out they can really heat up they can get to over forty degrees celsius so if you can imagine putting your hand on a parking lot of hot sunny day and feeling just how warm that is how much warmer that is an air temperature that's really what a lot of these plants and algae are experiencing out here in contrast if you come out here in the winter time and you have a low tide in the middle of the night they're absolutely freezing and in some cases literally freezing because they're exposed to that really cold air in the middle of the night and so they're losing all their body heat so seasonally receives incredible temperature changes in these incredible changes and things like salinity and now with ocean acidification these incredible changes in ph in this coastal environment which gives us access to a really rich ecosystem to study in terms of our science questions so there's a rich diversity of organisms out here you see behind me birds there cormorant sitting over the rock over there bay depend on what happens in the intertidal zone we have invertebrates like mussels and barnacles that are covering the rocks but have changed in recent years and i did my masters degree out here about twenty years ago when i was here there was these are also being affected by climate change but we don't yet know how and especially we don't understand exactly how climatic factors interact with things like you can stress things like changes in he age things like sediment runoff how do these well part of what we're interested in are the cute little bit facts of all the stressors that result from climate change and non combative factors what she's studying today is what happens with these heat waves what happens when we have extreme temperatures but we're also interested in what happens to things like reproduction growth my name is jessica rosie and i am a second year grad student and brian how much lab and i'm trying to understand how the seasonal variation in different stressors impacts muscle reproduction muslim populations in massachusetts and the rest of the gulf of maine have been declining recently but we don't know what's causing if it's reduced reproduction from a single population or if it's just sort of lots of populations have been decreasing in size and there's lower recruitment of new individuals into a population so hopefully this will help shed some light on what's going on so when the muscles opened up this is actually where they release their vessels threats from which is what attaches them to rocks this piece right here because they kill so they will filter water through and their food gets stuck on the field and then inside here is what we call the mantle tissue and that's actually where most of the reproductive tissue is so this here is either stronger and depending on whether or not it's male or female and muscles how many babies there because these organisms are exposed to sunlight and wind speed and they don't actually regulate their own body temperature like we do the temperatures at their bodies experience are very very different and it can depend on their size their color and their shape so you could have two organisms of the same species that are right next to each other on the rock but if one's maybe a little bit smaller and a little darker in color it can be experienced a very very different temperature than the one that's next to the because these guys are black they absorb the sun and it's really really important that we actually know what they're experiencing as opposed to what the log or color and shape would experience on modify instead of just putting out a regular sun ometer at all of our sites what we actually do is we modify the temperature loggers that we put out so we use  ggers so that we don't have to go out there every day or selves it actually is like a little computer in records temperature these are the temperature sensors that we use this is called an eye button and it fits nicely inside a middle  musselshell and this is called a tidbit logger and this is imbedded in resin and we use these for looking at muscle temperatures on the west coast most of my sites are in very urban or active harbors so it's really interesting to see how these muscles are actually thriving in areas where there is a lot of human traffic i'm looking at how body temperature as well as food availability so chlorophyll levels and within these chambers really change the interval of how quickly air temperature will rise or air temperature will fall within a long period of time to understand what the heartbeat is like for animals during the time of strikes here anthony is doing heartbeat sensing experiments inside the chambers in the northeast we've lost about ninety nine percent of our oysters and in many many of these soft sediment bottoms there's not a whole lot of structure so i'm putting  out these oyster we call the oyster pizzas they're basically oysters that have been set in cement and we're hoping that this will provide a settlement structure for those larvae and also habitat for a number of fish and crab species that might utilize them and we're also going to have some ones that are within cages to prevent  number or number of species but most importantly the number of invasive crabs we have so green crabs and asian shore crabs hopefully to get an idea of what effect these invasive crabs have on early life history oysters so the hope is basically to be able to find out what is influencing the the success and reef evolution of oysters in the northeast for the hope that will help with future restoration efforts which we really need up here so climate change by definition is something that's happening on a global scale and so we do use these very large data sets like satellite data from the nasa right now simply use satellite products to look at how things like temperature of salinity change of these very large scales but one of the important things about climate change is that how it impacts organisms place up on a very local level so we used to suse of sensors of very small scales and then connect from the ocean our lab also interested in loco data like weather data and what's going on in the local environment so here at the embassy we've deployed weather station out here by the cliffs and this will get really  going on in the environment how how air temperature are affecting muscles and shellfish another economic important animals in the ns title and that the weather station also serves as a good communications then compare those against physiological data an important point again is that air temperature really isn't a very good predictor of what we see in the field so in red what we're seeing is air temperature the high suggests is about thirty degrees but we see body temperatures are getting up to the mazing fifty fifty five degrees celsius so these animals are really really baking in the sun and that's not something we can pick up with their temperature the only way we can get that is reduced by physical models and these by the minute is on a truly international scale and that is common in the group we call ensure insure has brought together scientists from around the world if you look at the map of participants you can see where we've reached the people we're working with in a couple of cases these are countries that are still developing the scientific program like iraq it brings together scientists with a common cause and so we're developing common protocols common techniques for looking at the effects of climate change on and finding common solutions so there are diversity of ideas opinions and problems facing the world how do we bring those to bear you had a very local scale part of that is that we have team together to try to educate the public and around the world so we have a series of virtual tours from every place we work again you can see that the map of the sites where we have tours we have everything from underwater video tours to virtual tours from places that are really difficult to get to so just as one example of this is a virtual tour of the site in israel looking north towards a blimp lebannon the amazing thing about this is that we can really  scale so if you can imagine a student who wants to get a sense of what the inner tunnels like in another part of the world she can go to one of these virtual tours and get down to the level of the particle try to really experience that and get a sense of what it's like to be in that region but we have  but it is still some of these backyard so we can get the point across that every place in the world or some of these backyard that we start to make these connections of a global scale the kind of work we do especially on an international basis is often really difficult to fund funding is really hard to get right now as a scientist especially for anything that's long term most funding from the federal government is almost like a presidential cycles on a three or four year basis but the problems we're studying often take decades and especially the training aspect you can't train  student in two or three years which makes it very difficult to start connecting the dots so essentially we end up cobbling together funding from different sources so far we've been very fortunate we've gotten nasa from the national science foundation from noah but it's getting harder and harder to do this kind of work and that's really one of the major limitations we have right now for how we can explore the impacts of climate change is the funding we can get to stud