Land-Sea Exchange Network for Salinity (LENS)

The average American consumes approximately 14 tons of salt over the course of their lifetime, and the U.S. uses an estimated 20 million metric tons of salt to treat roads and highways each year. Approximately 1/3 of the continental U.S. is drained by streams and rivers with increasing salinity levels. Increased salt use pollutes major drinking water supplies, degrades soil quality, harms local vegetation, and can endanger wildlife. Saltwater intrusion, the landward movement of sea salts, causes damage across the globe, including millions of dollars of damage to crops on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Salinity threats converge in many rivers draining to the Chesapeake Bay, impacting drinking water, infrastructure, coastal communities, and food and energy production. Billions of dollars are lost annually in agricultural communities on the Eastern Shore due to saltwater intrusion. Transformational projects are urgently needed to identify and manage early stages of salinity risks before it causes lasting and expensive damage to soils and waterways and to enable improved adaptive responses.

This project will establish the Land-sea Exchange Network for Salinity (LENS), a novel framework of integrated research, extension, and education to detect and manage salinity problems from land to sea. The project will modernize data access and interpretation of salinity risks, expand research coordination and translations, and establish UMD as a global leader of salinity science. The team will (1) harmonize salinity data from the land to the sea to develop an early warning system for salinity threats, (2) translate state-of-the-art science to inform stakeholder land and water management at different stages of salinization, and (3) develop a “School of Salt” to educate students and the general public on salinity risks. LENS will offer a transdisciplinary approach that combines biological, physical, chemical, and social sciences to achieve direct local, regional, and global impacts on economy, health, environmental, and educational outcomes.

LENS will help manage and mitigate increasing salinity risks to reduce damage to infrastructure and protect rural livelihoods. LENS will have an immediate impact on student and stakeholder understanding of salinity risks. As the project continues to develop, the team will invite stakeholders across the Mid-Atlantic region to use the LENS early warning system to manage local resources. Findings and recommendations from LENS will be incorporated into policy, legislation and community planning, and will help fill critical gaps for understanding the spatial and temporal scales of salinization risks needed to manage water, food, and energy production.