Every chip fabricated in a semiconductor plant needs ultrapure water. Most nuclear reactors need water as a coolant and neutron moderator. Every artificial intelligence (AI) data center drinks between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day, with thirst often peaking during drought.

Water runs through every technology priority the United States has named, yet the word does not appear once in “Launching the Genesis Mission,” an executive order (EO) released in November 2025. As described in the EO, the Genesis Mission is a “dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century.”

Led by the Department of Energy (DOE), the initiative aims to build an integrated AI framework that would harness federal scientific datasets to accelerate breakthroughs in advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion energy, quantum information science, and semiconductor development. The scope of the mission is comparable to that of the Manhattan Project.

Since the announcement, the DOE has listed “Predicting U.S. Water for Energy” among its 26 Genesis Mission Science and Technology Challenges. The project is also soliciting proposals in three water-related focus areas.

This framework provides a foothold for hydrology in the Genesis Mission, but it is scoped narrowly around water as a supply variable for energy production.

In reality, water is a crosscutting constraint that will help determine whether the mission’s priorities translate into deployable outcomes. The hydrology community now has a seat at the table, and if it moves first and positions water security as one of the “most challenging problems of this century,” the Genesis Mission can become the sandbox in which AI reshapes how the country measures, models, and manages water.

Making this happen will require that the DOE and the Office of Science and Technology Policy charter a hydrology workstream inside the Genesis Mission, with interagency delivery involving the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NOAA, the Bureau of Reclamation, the EPA, and partners at state, regional, and community levels. Here is what we think that workstream should look like:

While the existing challenges reflect some of these components, others will require coordinated effort from the hydrology community to bring into the Genesis Mission’s scope.

Build the Water Corpus Genesis Will Need

The Genesis Mission EO instructs the DOE to create an American Science and Security Platform to provide the public, scientists, agencies, and policymakers access to crucial scientific datasets.

The good news is that accessible water data systems already exist across several federal agencies and academic research centers. The USGS National Water Information System tracks real-time and historical water quality and use across the country. NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program provides open access to Earth science observations. NOAA’s National Water Center, the first federal facility dedicated to national water resource forecasting, operates the National Water Model, which continuously forecasts flows on 2.7 million stream reaches across the continental United States. The Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large-Sample Studies (CAMELS) dataset, currently hosted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, provides data tailored for hydrological research on hundreds of river basins, and the Caravan framework pulls together multiple large-sample meteorological and hydrological datasets at a global scale.

What is missing is a unified, AI-ready repository that brings federal, state, and community data together. Building one is hard. Water data are fragmented, inconsistent, and often entirely absent. Consistent, reliable data for groundwater, withdrawals, reservoir operations, and water quality are especially difficult to obtain.

Local resistance to sharing data is real. In Texas, for example, landowners hold private property rights over groundwater and have opposed metering and reporting requirements imposed by groundwater conservation districts. In California, agricultural well owners fought metering mandates for years before the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act compelled local agencies to begin tracking withdrawals. Tribal nations face a different concern: Water data collected on Indigenous lands has been misrepresented in federal datasets that were modeled without accounting for Indian country, leading many nations to restrict access to their data as an exercise of sovereignty.

Practical steps toward building a unified AI-ready repository include tiered access and licensing for different stakeholders, clear provenance tracking for all data reported, financial and educational incentives for stakeholders for reporting, and targeted gap filling. Where measurements are missing, AI can fuse remote sensing with gauged records and operational logs—but only if the results carry honest uncertainty estimates tied to real decisions.

Get the corpus right, and it will outlive any single program name. It becomes infrastructure the country can lean on.

Develop Shared Hydrologic Foundation Models

The Genesis Mission EO directs the DOE to provide “domain-specific foundation models across the range of scientific domains covered.”

Hydrology has a head start. Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks are a key type of neural network designed to last thousands of time steps. Hydrology LSTMs trained on CAMELS data have already matched traditional conceptual models for daily streamflow discharge prediction. Open-source Neural Hydrology tools serve as baselines for regional runoff prediction. These predictions may serve as precursors to the foundation models the Genesis Mission envisions and building blocks from which they could be developed.

The process of scaling up these tools is not straightforward, however. A hydrologic investigation of snowmelt-driven streams in Colorado will not require the same spatiotemporal data as tile-drained fields in Iowa, for example. A hydrology-specific foundation model must take nuanced requirements into consideration and provide a clear path for managing and exploiting a variety of datasets.

Google’s Flood Hub shows what is possible: Its AI-enabled flood forecasts now cover more than 80 countries. However, Flood Hub’s core model code and trained weights remain proprietary, meaning researchers can use the forecasts but cannot rebuild or adapt the underlying models. Genesis, if well positioned, can fill that accessibility gap by producing foundation models for water that are reusable, reliable, and openly governed.

Build a National Water Digital Twin

The EO prescribes an integrated AI platform combining foundation models with simulation tools to stimulate AI-enabled innovations.

That architecture is exactly what a digital twin requires. Europe’s Destination Earth initiative is already building digital twins for weather extremes and nonstationary conditions on the Large Unified Modern Infrastructure (LUMI) supercomputer. The United Nations–led AI for Good initiative has prioritized water applications, warning that fragmented national efforts risk duplicating work.

If the United States aims for global strategic leadership in AI-accelerated science, water infrastructure cannot be an afterthought.

Rather than starting from scratch, a water-centric Genesis Mission would unite existing federal models—the National Water Model, reservoir simulators, and groundwater codes—in a single digital twin. AI can become the thread that stitches them together, correcting biases and providing numerical solvers to enforce mass and energy balance.

What should this twin actually do? Help a dam operator decide whether to release water ahead of a storm. Tell planners where a new data center can draw cooling water without drying up a stream. Flag which coastal defenses will fail first under rising seas.

A water digital twin earns its keep when it makes the consequences of choices visible, in terms of flows, levels, temperatures, and risks to people and ecosystems.

Turn Basins into AI Test Beds

The Genesis Mission promotes AI-directed experimentation and directs the DOE to keep a record of robotic laboratories and production facilities in which such experimentation could be conducted. Hydrological field sites belong in that inventory. The National Ecological Observatory Network already operates 81 sites with standardized measurements of meteorology, surface water, groundwater, and biodiversity. The Critical Zone Collaborative Network instruments catchments to track water-soil-vegetation interactions over decades.

Formalizing these networks as AI test beds would link field observations back into the water digital twin so that experiments and models continually sharpen each other. Imagine mobile sensors steered by AI agents during a storm or aquifer recharge experiments designed by algorithms and verified in real time. That feedback loop is what separates a useful model from a decorative one.

Expand Water Challenges on the Genesis Mission List

Earlier this year, the DOE released 26 Genesis Mission Science and Technology Challenges, and “Predicting U.S. Water for Energy” was among them. The accompanying funding call (DE-FOA-0003612) solicits proposals on cloud microphysics, coupled surface water–groundwater modeling, and seasonal to multiyear prediction, all framed around energy needs and flood resilience.

These inclusions are a significant win for a hydrology component to Genesis, but several urgent challenges sit outside their scope. Can AI close the gap between a flood forecast issued 12 hours out and the 48 hours emergency managers actually need? Can it map compound extremes, in which drought, heat, and infrastructure failure collide in the same week? Can it redesign monitoring networks so that coverage follows risk rather than where gauges happened to be installed a century ago? Integrating energy and water systems is equally urgent: Floods have caused 80% of major U.S. grid outages since 2000, while drought-driven water stress curtails cooling at thermoelectric plants and reduces hydropower output, exposing how deeply energy infrastructure depends on hydrologic extremes.

The water footprint of new AI infrastructure deserves a place on that list. A separate executive order (14318, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure”) is already fast-tracking expansion of data center construction, and a single hyperscale facility can consume 1 million to 5 million gallons of water daily. Emerging research shows how withdrawals at that scale can push streams below ecological thresholds during low flows.

Make Hydrology the Conscience of AI Governance

The EO directs the DOE to set data access rules and clarify policies for ownership, licensing, trade secret protections, and commercialization of products and tools associated with it.

Three principles should anchor such policies for AI use in water security.

First, Indigenous and community data rights must be embedded in every major AI water security effort, in line with the collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics (CARE) principles for Indigenous data governance.

Second, AI’s own water footprint, through electricity generation and cooling, must be treated as a design constraint. Transparent reporting, stress-based siting, and efficiency targets will prevent hydrology in Genesis from being self-defeating.

Third, the DOE should define what failure looks like. Missing a flood crest portends loss of lives and livelihoods and breaches of treaties. Accountability standards must be measurable, and they must ask not just how accurate the forecast was on average, but who bore the cost when it was wrong.

A single executive order will not solve the country’s water security problems, and a single challenge topic will not either.

But the Genesis Mission has provided a seat at a table that did not exist 6 months ago. Whether the hydrology community treats it as a ceiling or a foundation depends on what happens next. Europe’s Destination Earth and the United Nations’ AI for Good water initiatives are already moving.

American hydrology now has a seat at the table. We should take it.

Author Information

Amobichukwu C. Amanambu (acamanambu@ua.edu), Department of Geography and the Environment, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; and Jonathan Frame (jmframe@ua.edu), Department of Geological Sciences, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Citation: Amanambu, A. C., and J. Frame (2026), The Genesis Mission needs hydrology: Here’s how to incorporate it, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260131. Published on 28 April 2026.

This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s).

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

More than half the world’s population—4.4 billion people—live in cities today. That number is expected to rise to 80% by 2050. Our guest, Nadina Galle, is a trailblazing ecological engineer and author of The Nature of Our Cities. She is an ecological engineer who studies the intersection of nature and technology in urban environments. Nadina developed the concept of an Internet of Nature (IoN) that uses tools like artificial intelligence, automation, and sensors to support and enhance ecosystems within cities. Nadina’s book offers a transformative perspective on how urban spaces can be reimagined in the face of climate change and sprawling development. She shares the inspiring story of the Groene Loper project in Maastricht, Netherlands, where soil sensors were deployed to monitor tree health. The results were remarkable, with trees supported by this technology growing up to three times larger than those without it. This is a powerful example of how technology can not only protect trees but also transform urban spaces into healthier, greener environments.

From fire and the wheel to the reinforced concrete frames that define modern buildings, we are surrounded by technology. We tend to forget that technology emerged in response to nature — too often, we treated nature as the enemy, the chaos to be contained instead of recognizing that nature’s cycles and changes are the harmony we need to join to sustain society. The loss of any semblance of natural patterns, which ultimately leads to the depletion of the resources necessary for life, has inevitably led to the collapse of previous major civilizations. Modern society has more runway than previous societies because we have created a global economy, but that risks an even greater fall for our species when the ecological underpinnings of our prosperity collapse. The Nature of Our Cities, is a powerful, straightforward, and emotionally resonant book to help you think through your role and choices in the restoration of nature. You can find it on Amazon or Powell’s Books.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired in December 2024.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Author Nadina Galle on The Nature of Our Cities appeared first on Earth911.

When I set out for Waterton National Park in Alberta, Canada, I imagined fall forests resplendent in golds, accented by oranges and reds. The smell of leaves composting into the earth and the peace of the earth quieting into winter. What I found was a blackened landscape, still deeply scarred by the 2017 Kenow Fire eight years ago.

When the foliage is gone, the structure lies bare. Undulations ripple along the mountainsides; seeps and drainages stand out. 

The rhythms of the forest are speaking in structure, not color. This gift in this landscape of open vistas is long sightlines – a dream for wildlife spotting.

The Kenow Fire ignited with a lightning strike and burned slowly until September 11, 2017, when it blew up in critically dry conditions, surging from 30,000 to 104,000 acres overnight, overtaking Waterton National Park. The Kenow Wildfire was a fire of exceptional severity exceeding every fire since the Park’s records began in 1700. In the end, half of the vegetated land and 80% of the hiking trails in the Park were burnt. 

In almost all of this burn area, most or all of the organic matter was seared away by the fire. The topsoil burned away to a depth of three feet.

Dense conifer forests are being replaced by young aspens and shrubs such as Saskatoon berry, thimbleberry, and huckleberry. It’s a bear’s delight! The conifers will come back, too. They grow relatively slowly.

Fire is necessary, natural, “normal” for these forests. Our human misunderstanding and resulting meddling have given rise to an increase in these large, catastrophic (by human standards) fires. This was a dramatic fire. The recovery is being documented and studied, providing insights into the land’s history and the resilience of nature.It’s often not what I expected, but it’s always an adventure.

If you’re interested in purchasing or licensing any images you see here, please email me at SNewenham at exploringnaturephotos.com, and I’ll make it happen.

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The post Waterton Park and the 2017 Kenow Fire appeared first on Exploring Nature by Sheila Newenham.

Renske Jongen, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, calls seagrass ecosystems the “tropical rainforests” of the ocean. These underwater flowering plants offer habitats to marine life, protect coastlines from damage, and, like rainforests, store enormous amounts of carbon.

They’re also under threat from pollution, development, and warming ocean waters, which stress plants and slow growth rates. Seagrass populations have been declining globally for nearly a century, and recent estimates suggest 7% of seagrasses are lost worldwide each year.

A new study published in New Phytologist shows that warming waters may affect a microscopic aspect of the seagrass ecosystem, too: the microbes that live in their sediments. The new insight can inform efforts to restore seagrasses, the authors write.

Seagrasses are “getting attacked from both sides,” said Jongen, the lead author of the new study. Warming water stresses the plants themselves, while “something changes in the sediment that makes them grow worse.”

Sediments and Seagrass

To test how microbial communities affect seagrass growth under warming temperatures, Jongen and the research team transplanted seagrasses and their sediment from both warm and cool areas of Lake Macquarie, a coastal saltwater lake in New South Wales, Australia, into an artificially warmed part of the lake. The artificially warmed part of the lake has received intermittent plumes of heated water from a nearby power plant since 1984, leading to a consistent temperature increase of 1°C–3°C (1.8°F–5.7°F) compared with the rest of the lake.

For half of the seagrasses, the team also used an autoclave, an instrument that uses steam to sterilize materials, to kill most of the microbes in their associated sediment before transplanting them to the experimental garden. “By looking at how plants respond with and without their microbes, you can get an idea for whether [those microbes] help or harm the plant under certain environments,” Jongen said.

The plants were then left to grow for 28 days before the team measured how they’d fared.

The warm-origin seagrasses in their original, warm-origin sediments with microbes intact grew the slowest once they were in the artificially heated waters, producing 35% less aboveground biomass than their counterparts whose sediment microbial communities had been killed. That result suggests that the microbial community in warmed sediment contributes to seagrass stress, the authors wrote.

“These plants, in general, do not like sediments that have been exposed to warmer temperatures,” Jongen said. She was surprised that the plants that came from the warm areas had the worst outcomes but hypothesizes that perhaps these plants were already too stressed from warm waters to deal with the changes to sediment bacterial communities that occurred after they were transplanted into the even warmer part of the lake.

“It’s just like us, for example: When we don’t sleep or we’ve had a stressful week, then we get sick more easily,” she said.

Jongen said more research is needed to say for sure why warmed sediment seems to change microbial communities in a way that harms seagrasses. But research has shown that some microbes in ocean sediment produce sulfide, which can be toxic to seagrasses if it accumulates, especially if those seagrasses are already stressed. Warmer conditions may allow these sulfide-producing microbes to grow more quickly, harming the plants.

The new research highlights the “context dependency of host-microbe interactions,” said Karolina Zabinski, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the new study. Previous research by Zabinski and others also showed that seagrass growth depends on their associated sediment microbiome.

Restoration Lessons

The new study “serves as a great springboard” for both academics seeking to understand seagrass-microbe interactions and practitioners working on seagrass restoration in the field, Zabinski said.

For academic researchers, the paper raises exciting questions about how the microbial communities present in the sediment actually function, she said. Though the study identified the types of microbes in the seagrasses’ sediments, it didn’t evaluate the abilities of those microbes, which genes they possess or express, or how those microbes interacted with each other. “What are their actual genes, and what are they doing?” Zabinski asked.

For seagrass restoration practitioners, the study could offer new methods to try to improve restoration success. Some projects, for example, aim to take plants from warmer environments and transplant them to seagrass ecosystems that will face warming stress in the future as the climate changes. “It seems pretty intuitive that maybe those plants will have the traits or the genetics to respond to that warming,” said Randall Hughes, a marine ecologist at Northeastern University in Boston who was not involved in the new study. But the study’s results highlight “that intuition is not always reliable.”

“Certainly, having experimental studies like this helps us think about those restoration efforts in a more informed way,” she said. “When plants don’t do well, we can’t just assume it’s inherent to the plants—we have to remember it could be driven by the microbes that they’re interacting with.”

Jongen hopes to continue studying related questions about how seagrasses respond to warming waters. In particular, she’d like to investigate how long changes to the sediment microbial community last and whether those changes reverse once a marine heat wave subsides.

Ultimately, the answers to these questions will help scientists better predict where seagrasses are in danger and how they might be helped. “If we lose the seagrasses, we don’t only lose the seagrasses, we lose all the other benefits that they provide,” Jongen said. “I think they deserve a little bit more attention.”

—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), Warm waters disrupt seagrasses’ microbial environment, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260166. Published on 22 May 2026.

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

After centuries of overharvesting and environmental degradation reduced the world’s oyster reefs by 85%, restoration is bringing the conglomerations of thick-shelled mollusks back to coastal waters. And their return may have more benefits than scientists realized, new research suggests.

Oysters were initially restored to boost depleted fisheries, according to Rachel Smith, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As oysters cement their shells together into reefs, they create habitats for myriad species, including fish. “Oysters build the foundation of an entire ecosystem,” Smith said.

These days, oyster reefs are restored for reasons extending beyond ecology, including to rid coastal water of excess nutrients such as nitrogen. This pollutant enters coastal waters when wastewater, sewage, and fertilizer wash into the sea.

Past studies of nitrogen removed by oyster reefs largely looked at denitrification, a process in which microbes transform organic nitrogen in dead oysters and their excrement into inert gas. If organic nitrogen evades these microbes, it can be buried in reefs, but measurements of this mechanism are few.

“[Burial] is definitely much less explored,” said Smith.

A study published in PLoS One looked beyond denitrification and found significant amounts of nitrogen become sequestered within oyster reefs as they grow, offering evidence that restored oyster reefs actually remove far more nitrogen than we thought.

Before she started this research, Anne Margaret Smiley, lead author of the new paper and a biogeochemist at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, suspected that the amount of nitrogen buried in oyster reefs would be small because organisms at the surface transform so much of it, leaving little left to bury. She was pleasantly surprised by the results.

“We’ve been looking at denitrification all this time, and now we found out that [oysters themselves] are really good at doing this too,” she said. “What an amazing thing to know.”

In Search of Buried Nitrogen

To explore how nitrogen is buried over time, scientists turned to 20 oyster reefs in the Rachel Carson National Estuarine Research Reserve near Beaufort, N.C., that were restored nearly 3 decades ago by UNC scientists.

Using a jackhammer and metal pipe, they extracted cores from the oyster reefs in 2011. About 10 centimeters in diameter, the cores sampled the full thickness of each reef, which ranged from 10 to 55 centimeters. Shortly after they were collected, the cores were sectioned off into 5-centimeter increments, sealed, and stored in a walk-in freezer. In the years since, the samples have proved useful for studying oyster reef growth during sea level rise and how much carbon the reefs sequester and in other areas of research. Recently, Smiley measured the nitrogen levels in each of these 5-centimeter sections.

Below the top 10 centimeters or so, where microbes break down organic matter, nitrogen levels increased. Looking at all samples, Smiley found that on average, a square meter of reef buried more than 6 grams of nitrogen each year, which is similar to the rate of nitrogen transformed by denitrification at oyster reefs.

However, there was a large range in the amount of nitrogen buried, between 1 and 15 grams of nitrogen per square meter. The variability, the researchers found, was related to where the different oyster reefs grew.

For oyster reefs in sand flats, those in intertidal areas (between high and low tide on a shore) buried more than twice as much nitrogen as subtidal reefs, on average. Intertidal reefs grow faster and so bury more nitrogen. “The more they can build up and out, the more [nitrogen] they can bury underneath,” said Smiley.

But intertidal reefs that fringed the edge of salt marshes buried less nitrogen than other intertidal reefs. “They’re not able to grow as quickly,” she said, speculating that sediment from the neighboring marshes may slow reef growth.

Put Your Money Where Your Mollusk Is

North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality places the economic value of each kilogram of nitrogen removed from the environment at $26.39 (in 2024 dollars, which is about $28.50 in 2026). Using this figure, Smiley and her colleagues calculated that nitrogen removed from coastal waters and buried each year by a hectare of oyster reef has a value of $1,700 on average. This finding increases previous estimates of the value of oysters’ nitrogen removal services by 25% to 42%.

“A really valuable part of the study is not just taking those measurements, but then also translating that into valuation,” said Smith, who was not involved with the new study. The value of nitrogen burial can be added to oyster reef ecosystem services—the monetary value of benefits that humans gain from oyster reefs, such as clean water, food, and flood control. “[Buried nitrogen] is definitely an ecosystem service that I think is underappreciated,” she said.

Looking more broadly at the county that is home to the Rachel Carson Reserve, Smiley and her colleagues found that all the oyster reefs countywide bury about 120,000 kilograms of nitrogen each year—more than $3 million of value in the county’s shallow sounds and bays.

—Lisa S. Gardiner (@lisasgardiner.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Gardiner, L. S. (2026), Oysters clean up more nitrogen pollution than we thought, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260182. Published on 4 June 2026.

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

On 31 March 2026, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the closure of 57 of its 77 U.S. Forest Service research facilities. The scientific community’s response was warranted: Save the science, restore the funding, protect the researchers.

All of that is correct. But it misses a structural problem inherent in agency governance, one that will recur at every reorganization until the Earth science community builds an instrument to prevent it.

In massive reorganizations like the ones federal agencies are currently experiencing, the threat to long-term research facilities is not primarily a lack of funding. The true threat is an oversight of administrative architecture. There appears to be no general federal requirement to have a successor stewardship plan in place before reducing the output or outreach of a long-term research facility—or closing it entirely.

The Physical Archive Is Not a Digital File

Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire was among the sites under review during the Forest Service restructuring but has since received a public reprieve. The future of Bartlett Experimental Forest, also in New Hampshire, remains unresolved. The governance problem, however, extends beyond either site.

Hubbard Brook’s physical archive holds more than 60,000 barcoded and cataloged samples: water, soils, plant material, and physical cores spanning 7 decades of continuous collection and stored under active environmental controls in a dedicated building on site.

These samples cannot be digitized. They cannot be migrated to a remote server, backed up to cloud storage, or emailed to a university partner. The samples require a functioning building, active temperature management, and a named human steward responsible for their integrity.

The archive at Hubbard Brook is impressive, but a governed record is defined by continuity, provenance, and stewardship, not by the number of observations it contains: Data volume is not data value. A 70-year unbroken record of watershed chemistry, maintained by named stewards who documented what they were measuring and why, is a governed product. Without that stewardship and physical anchor, volume can become noise.

The failure to maintain archives like this is likely not malicious; it is an example of administrative indifference or perhaps a lack of awareness or understanding. Environmental controls, for example, get zeroed out of a budget line item, and nobody notices until the temperature in the facility drifts. By then, the sample record has degraded in ways that cannot be reversed.

This Is Not a Hubbard Brook Problem

Hubbard Brook is the most visible instance of a pattern—the lack of a successor stewardship plan—that runs across the entire 84-site federal Experimental Forests, Ranges, and Watersheds network. The March order that identified Bartlett Experimental Forest and 56 other research facilities across 31 states for closure was executed without a mandatory requirement to identify successor stewards for what gets left behind.

Nor is the pattern unique to experimental forests. The Long Term Ecological Research network spans 28 core sites. AmeriFlux includes more than 500 monitoring locations across North America.

Throughout all these systems, many physical archives, calibration sites, and long-duration sampling programs operate without a formal requirement for stewardship continuity under agency reorganization.

What We Stand to Lose

Long-term physical archives provide scientists and other stakeholders the ability to ask future questions of past reality. Nobody collecting water samples at Hubbard Brook in 1963 was thinking about PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), for instance, but the baseline its site samples provide is why we can track the chemicals today. The same continuous record was central to the regulatory science behind the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990.

Archival value compounds silently for decades and becomes visible only when someone needs it.

When these archives fail, the loss is not historical. It is operational. Regulatory agencies rely on long-baseline records to determine whether interventions are working. Without a continuous physical reference, observed changes cannot be distinguished from measurement drift, instrumentation bias, or natural variability. The results are policy decisions made without a defensible scientific baseline.

Federal investment in continuous collection at a site like Hubbard Brook runs to tens of millions of dollars over decades. That investment is not recoverable once continuity is broken.

Unlike a paused research grant, a degraded physical archive cannot be restarted. You can photograph a sample, but you cannot rerun its chemistry 40 years from now if the physical sample has degraded.

In 2017, a double mechanical failure at the University of Alberta destroyed 12.8% of the Canadian Ice Core Archive over a single weekend, permanently erasing records dating back 12,000 years. That incident was accidental. A mechanical malfunction is a failure of equipment. Administrative disposal without a named successor steward is a failure of governance. One arrives without warning. The other can be prevented.

The Community Already Knows How to Do This

The Earth observation community has already built the governance model we need. We are not yet applying it to long-term ecological research infrastructure.

GRUAN, the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Reference Upper-Air Network, operates under the World Meteorological Organization and GCOS, with explicit named stewardship obligations. Upper-air observations—measurements of temperature, humidity, and wind through the atmosphere—are foundational inputs to weather forecasting and climate monitoring. Each GRUAN station has a designated principal investigator with a documented succession obligation.

ICOS, the Integrated Carbon Observation System operating across Europe, applies the same logic to terrestrial ecosystem observations through formal site-level stewardship agreements and named succession requirements.

In the United States, the National Ecological Observatory Network is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by Battelle, a science and technology nonprofit, under a contract that includes explicit data continuity obligations.

These systems did not emerge by accident. They were explicitly designed to solve a known failure mode: Distributed observational networks cannot maintain their own calibration integrity without a separately governed reference layer. That design decision is documented, enforced, and funded. The absence of an equivalent requirement in long-term ecological research infrastructure is not a technical limitation. It is a governance omission.

The pattern is consistent across every network that has solved this problem: Named continuity obligations must be written into the governance structure before the need becomes acute.

The Governance Instrument

The best outcome is the continued, uninterrupted operation of facilities like Hubbard Brook.

If reductions move forward, however, the proposed fix is specific and not novel: Any federal agency action that would reduce or eliminate operational support for a long-term research facility should require a formal continuity plan before the action takes effect. That plan must name a successor steward for each active long-term dataset and for each physical archive under active environmental control.

In practice this means specificity: the name and institutional affiliation of the successor, a funded maintenance budget sufficient to sustain environmental controls and sample integrity, documented protocols for custody transfer, and a timeline for uninterrupted handoff. The plan must demonstrate that the successor steward has the operational capacity and funded mandate to preserve the archive’s physical integrity and continuity.

The default should be continued stewardship by the responsible federal entity. If a change in custody is legally permitted and genuinely unavoidable, any successor steward, whether another federal unit, a university partner, a consortium, or another entity, must have a funded mandate, demonstrated technical capacity, enforceable continuity obligations, and the ability to maintain the archive without interruption.

Protocol demands that if the agency cannot name a viable successor steward, the agency cannot execute the closure. This requirement does not prohibit closure; it prohibits closure without continuity of custody.

The instrument requiring a research facility to have a formal continuity plan should be applied not on a site-by-site basis, but uniformly across networks. A limitation narrowly written to protect a named facility invites the agency to execute the same administrative disposal at adjacent sites while technically complying with the specific requirement. The governance is structurally sound only if it applies across the network.

How This Actually Happens

The pathways that would make such an instrument possible already exist.

Agencies can impose continuity requirements through policy directives, appropriations language, or funding conditions. The federal Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget have coordinated interagency data management guidance before, and a directive requiring named successor stewardship before any facility reduction does not require legislation. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) has already secured fiscal year 2026 language directing the Forest Service to prioritize staffing at long-standing experimental forests; attaching successor stewardship language is the logical next step. NSF, the Department of Energy, and NOAA could require stewardship continuity guarantees from partner agencies as a condition of incorporating facility data into federally funded continental-scale products.

What is missing is the requirement itself—and the strategic initiative to establish it. The Earth science community has the standing, the documented models, and the mechanisms to close those gaps.

This is not an argument against reorganization. Agencies reorganize. Budgets shift. Research priorities evolve.

The argument is that reorganization cannot be permitted to destroy multigenerational scientific infrastructure through administrative indifference when a specific, enforceable governance requirement can prevent it. The Earth observation community built GRUAN because it recognized that no federation of climate datasets can be a substitute for a governed anchor point. Long-term ecological research infrastructure needs the same recognition applied to the administrative layer that governs its continuity.

The scientific enterprise already knows how to do this. The governance has not caught up yet.

Author Information

Anthony Veltri (anthony@anthonyveltri.com) is an independent practitioner and former physical scientist and senior policy analyst with the USDA Forest Service Washington Office, where he worked on enterprise architecture and governance in federal programs, including those supporting scientific research.

Citation: Veltri, A. (2026), The governance gap threatening long-term ecological archives, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260172. Published on 27 May 2026.

This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s).

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Source: Earth’s Future

Greenhouse gas emissions are heating our atmosphere and oceans, and turning seawater more acidic. One of the myriad expected impacts of these conditions is a reduction in farming yields of shellfish, such as oysters and mussels. Coastal communities worldwide rely on these organisms for their economies and as a major food supply. However, exactly how climate change will affect oyster and mussel farming is not yet clear.

Using a novel experimental setup, Pernet et al. report new projected yields of oyster and mussel farming in the Mediterranean Sea for the years 2050, 2075, and 2100. Their results suggest that by 2050, yields of both shellfish will drop dramatically, with mussel production perhaps collapsing altogether.

Most prior studies have assessed shellfish in tank experiments under fairly idealized conditions that do not adequately reflect real-world aquaculture settings. This research team took a different approach. They developed a novel system for exposing oysters and mussels in tanks to realistic conditions using water pumped in from the sea, meaning the animals would experience fluctuations in acidity, temperature, and nutrients similar to those experienced by shellfish on nearby farms.

The researchers set up 12 experimental tanks on the French Mediterranean coast in the Thau lagoon, where shellfish farming is key for the local economy. In three tanks, oysters and mussels were exposed directly to pumped-in seawater under present, ambient conditions. The rest of the tanks received seawater that was first warmed and acidified in accordance with widely accepted climate projections for 2050, 2075, and 2100, with three tanks for each year.

The survival rate of oysters in the tanks with predicted 2100 conditions dropped by 7% compared to present rates, and their growth rate dropped by 40%. These results suggest that yields of farmed oysters in the Mediterranean could drop severely over the next several decades.

The mussels fared even worse. In fact, compared to oysters, mussels have a lower range of water temperatures in which they can survive, and the upper limit is already being exceeded in some summertime Mediterranean waters, leading to mass-mortality events. In the experimental tanks under present conditions, mussel mortality was about 40%, and nearly all mussels died under predicted 2050 conditions.

On the basis of these findings, the researchers call for the urgent development of strategies to protect Mediterranean shellfish farming, such as relocating mussel-farming operations to the cooler waters of open seas or developing cofarming with algae to increase resilience to climate change. (Earth’s Future, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EF005992, 2025)

—Sarah Stanley, Science Writer

Citation: Stanley, S. (2026), Mediterranean mussel farming could collapse by 2050, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260121. Published on 17 April 2026.

Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.