Guest speaker, Dr. Bianca Charbonneau, Founder of Eco Branch LLC, will be discussing “Weathering the Storms: Coastal Ecology in the Face of Climate Change.”

ABSTRACT:
Shaped by wind, waves, and interacting biological and geomorphological processes, barrier island habitats sit at the dynamic interface of land and sea. The habitats within these mosaics —including dunes and marshes — are ever changing, reshaped daily and episodically by disturbance. The effects of climate change stand to add to uncertainty regarding their stochasticity, development, recovery, and persistence. Plants act as ecosystem engineers in these habitats. They shape them and facilitate recovery post-disturbance through ecogeomorphic feedbacks between organisms and physical processes operating across varying spatial and temporal scales. Together, ecological and geomorphic processes drive topographic development and impact localized erosion, ultimately affecting how these coastal habitats respond to storms and other episodic or chronic stressors. From the aboveground morphology of individual plants to the interconnected root, rhizome, and mycorrhizal system hidden beneath the sand, seemingly small biological differences can have landscape-scale consequences for dune formation and storm erosion. Understanding these relationships brings together multiple academic disciplines, linking fundamental questions about ecosystem and landscape change with applied implications for habitat conservation, management, and recreation. Using coastal dunes as the primary lens, this seminar will explore how biological processes shape topography, influence storm response and erosion, and inform coastal conservation and restoration efforts.

BIO:
Dr. Bianca Charbonneau is a field ecologist specializing in coastal dune plant ecology. Known informally as “Dr. Dune Goon” or “the Dune Goon,” she has studied coastal dunes and their responses to storms since Hurricane Sandy in 2012. She is an affiliated scientist in the School of Marine Science and Policy within the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment and runs her own ecological consulting firm, Eco Branch LLC. She earned her PhD in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, where she was a National Defense Science and Engineering Fellow. She earned a Master of Science in Biology from Villanova University and completed undergraduate studies in ecology, evolutionary biology, and environmental studies at Princeton University. She has led and contributed to interdisciplinary research endeavors bringing together local coastal practitioners and researchers across disciplines, universities, and sectors, including as a postdoctoral ORISE Fellow in multiple laboratories within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. She believes that innovative science is inherently creative and brings that spirit to her research and outreach endeavors.

https://www.ecobranchllc.com/

Join us in welcoming guest speaker John W. Jengo, PG, a licensed Professional Geologist, who will discuss "Restoring Migratory Fish Passage on the Raritan River, New Jersey - A 30 Year Endeavor."

Abstract:
Over a 30-year period, beginning in 1992 with the characterization and remediation of heavily contaminated petroleum, chemical, and manufacturing industrial sites in New Jersey adjoining the Raritan River, the Delaware River, and other waterways, an innovative Natural Resource Damages (NRD) Settlement Agreement was brokered by the presenter John W. Jengo, PG, between New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) — and in one case with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and United States Fish and Wildlife Service— and several of Mr. Jengo's industrial company clients. The concept of this facet of NRD is that the past decades of pollution of rivers from industry discharges and spills of hazardous substances and petroleum products damaged the riparian ecosystem and prevented the full use of that natural resource by both the public and ecologic biota. Even though the rivers are clean once again, under State and Federal law, compensation was owed for the past “lost ecological services” of those formerly impaired surface water resources. Upon the determination that there was a direct nexus between the past surface water injury and the ecological benefits associated with reestablishing historically significant migratory fish passage, ideally via dam removals, a program was implemented that resulted in the removal or planned removal of five low-head dams on the main stem of the Raritan River in central New Jersey and its principal tributary the Millstone River. A brief review discussing the complicated process of calculating and negotiating NRD with regulatory agencies will be presented, followed by photos and videos of a dam removal case study that was particularly challenging. The goal of the dam removals is to reopen spawning habitat that has been blocked (in some cases for hundreds of years) for several anadromous fish species (primarily shad and river herring) whose populations are in a steep decline along the Atlantic Coast.

Bio:
John W. Jengo, PG, has a B.S. and M.S. in Geology and is currently a licensed Professional Geologist in several states. He spent most of his 44-year career conducting investigations and clean-ups of large, complex, and severely contaminated industrial sites throughout New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, including several refineries in the Delaware Valley in addition to dozens of other petroleum, chemical, manufacturing, and coal ash disposal sites through the Northeast and Southeast. Since 2008, he has planned, managed, and supervised five dam removals in New Jersey to restore ecologically significant migratory fish spawning runs for American shad, river herring, and other species. He also has spent the last six years developing and designing one of New Jersey’s largest floodplain reforestation projects involving the planting of 53,500 native plants over 112 acres of former agricultural fields.

A long-standing member of the Lewis and Clark Trail Alliance, John has traveled extensively along the 8,000-mile-long Lewis and Clark Trail over the past three decades. He has authored over a dozen articles about the geological observations, mineralogical collection, and scientific context and influence of the Lewis and Clark expedition in the quarterly historical magazine We Proceeded On. In 2004, in commemoration of the expedition’s bicentennial, John contributed a key essay on the underlying mineralogical scientific objectives and accomplishments of Lewis and Clark in a book about the expedition published by the American Philosophical Society, and he is the author of the recently published book Scenes of Visionary Enchantment: The Geology of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (2026).

The Kaczmarczik Lecture is a significant event at Drexel University. For nearly 30 years, guest lecturers have included renowned scientists from around the world who present on topics that range from mapping the universe to revolutions in fundamental physics.