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"Take Five" is an occasional feature in which we pose five questions to a Marine Biological Laboratory community member about their career, dreams, and passions. Here we profile С����Ƶ Senior Scientist Anne Giblin, director of the С����Ƶ Ecosystems Center. The Center is celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year. 

Giblin’s research focuses on the cycling of elements, especially nitrogen, in the environment and understanding how ecosystems respond to human impacts and climate change. She is the lead principal investigator at the National Science Foundation’s (LTER) site at Plum Island, Mass., the largest contiguous salt marsh in the northeastern United States. She also conducted research at the Arctic LTER in Toolik Lake, Alaska, for nearly 4 decades. 

Giblin received her Ph.D. from the Boston University Marine Program with advisor Ivan Valiela (now a Distinguished Scientist in the Ecosystems Center). She joined the С����Ƶ’s research staff in 1983 after completing postdoctoral work at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. During the 1990s and 2000s, Giblin worked with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority to monitor the Massachusetts Bay outfall project. 

What first brought you to the С����Ƶ and what brought you back? 

I first came here because I was looking at options for graduate school. At that time, the Boston University Marine Program was located here in Woods Hole, and that ended up being the program I went to. After I graduated, I got a postdoc at WHOI, and about a year later I saw a job with the Ecosystems Center had opened up back at С����Ƶ. I had already worked with some of the people from the Ecosystems Center and really enjoyed it, so I applied and got the position. 

What excites you most about studying ecosystems science? 

Ecosystems science has to be interdisciplinary, because you're trying to answer really big questions with a lot of different parts, and nobody has the expertise to do it all. I had originally thought I wanted to research toxicology and environmental physiology: what happens when fish get exposed to toxins and things like that. But it was a little bit too reductionist. I like the scale of working at the ecosystem level. I like the fact you can transfer what you know from one ecosystem to another, and yet there are new things to learn. I like the fact that you spend a lot of time outside, often in beautiful places. Those are the main things that attracted me: that you could look at processes at a really big level and then work with other people to put all the pieces together and answer an important question.

Please share a few favorite memories or stories from your many years with the Ecosystems Center. 

A lot of my favorite memories are going to new places and seeing things for the first time. I have really vivid memories of working on a research vessel on Lake Victoria in Africa with George Kling. One night we were close to the equator and looking up, and we said, “Boy, there's very few places you can see the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross at the same time.” The African scientists asked, “What's the Big Dipper?” So we all started talking about the stars, and found they had a whole different story about them and very different constellations. I thought, “Wow, everything’s so different.” And then about 10 minutes later, we started complaining about administrative paperwork, and we were all exactly on the same page. That really stuck in my mind: You think people are really different, but then you find so many things you really connect on. 

Other favorite memories are being in Panama in a 20-foot boat and having a 30-foot whale shark right next to us, seeing wildlife like grizzly bears in Alaska and howler monkeys in Panama, and watching dolphins play in the bow wake while on a ship. But it isn’t just the places; it is the camaraderie of working on new and interesting questions with great colleagues and students that makes it all so fun. 

What do you view as your greatest achievements, either professionally or personally? 

I think I have made a significant contribution to the field of nitrogen cycling, in part because I’ve been at the С����Ƶ. Engaging with people here that were working with stable isotopes, and then incorporating the use of nitrogen stable isotopes as tracers into a lot of the research I was doing, enabled me to make some good progress. I learned all of that from people here, like Bruce Peterson and Brian Fry, who started some of the first whole system tracer studies. 

The other thing is that I've served on a lot of student committees and been the primary mentor for several graduate students. Often, my input is mainly to help with a specific technique — something like using stable isotopes — but for a number I think I have helped them develop a deeper understanding of biogeochemistry. When I see these students now doing great science, it makes me feel very proud, even if they may not have necessarily needed me. 

Where do you see Ecosystems Center research going in the next 50 years?

When I first started here, the only microbes we knew about were the ones we could grow in a culture. John Hobbie, now retired from the Ecosystems Center, believed we weren’t learning anything from cultured organisms, because they're such a small percentage of what's really out there, and they're often not the major players. If you take something from an oligotrophic lake and put it on a nutrient-rich agar plate, you're growing the 1 percent — you're not growing most of the microbes. I think the whole revolution of what we can do now with microbial ecology — sequencing all the organisms, knowing what genes are there, and even metabolomics and transcriptomics — has led to some important insights. Collaborating to do that kind of work and combining it with the long-term field experiments we do is really leading to new insights. 

Biogeochemists used to have this view that microbes were all competing for resources. I think we're developing a much more nuanced view of the fact that a lot of these microbial communities are interacting. Maybe one organism's waste product is another organism's food, and they have these loose associations. Biogeochemistry is a little bit different than we thought. I think we're now looking at microbial data and biogeochemistry through a slightly different lens.

I also think what the Ecosystems Center has done really well for 50 years is long-term field experiments, and I view them as more and more valuable as time goes on. We found over and over again that what we see with a three-year experiment is not the outcome we see with a 30-year experiment. As we're starting to look ahead at the impact of global change on these systems, these long-term experiments will prove really valuable. Combining them with the system-scale modeling that we do is going to be more and more important. There are new techniques out there that allow us to measure the carbon flux between land and the atmosphere using eddy flux towers and get carbon budgets in a way we never could before. We can combine that with our understanding of what happens when we do a long-term experiment, what happens in different years when we see differences in climate, and understand the system a lot better.