Water Scholar Awardee Spring 2023: Allyson Ropp

Allyson Ropp is a North Carolina native and grew up in Chapel Hill. Before coming to East Carolina University, she studied at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and obtained her bachelor’s degree in history and classics. She then earned her master’s degree from the Program in Maritime Studies at East Carolina University.

As a trained archeologist, she returned to ECU to continue her passion for studying the past and present without having to leave her home state, North Carolina. Her Water Scholar project: “Characterizing Wooden Shipwreck Stability through Microbial and Water Quality Integration,” focuses on the data collection of a shipwreck off the coast in Maryland.

“I was working as an underwater archaeologist and worked on different sites in coastal and submerged environments that were being impacted by changing conditions,” Ropp said. “Everybody thinks that shipwrecks are totally fine with all the changing conditions that are happening, for example through climate change. There is a lot more about shipwrecks we don’t know about, how these sites underwater work, and how they are impacted. It made me start digging into research approaches until I came up with this project.”

Ph.D. Candidate and Water Scholar Allyson Ropp at her dissertation project shipwreck site, Aowa, in the Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary (Photo Credit: Jason Raupp/Program in Maritime Studies 2022).

Many researchers, Ropp said, are looking into the components of metal, such as iron and steel, shipwrecks, and how they are deteriorating in changing conditions.

After talking to her advisor, Ropp decided to focus on wood instead, she said. Inspired by another project, Ropp said, which deals with microbes and microbial corrosion, she decided to adopt the same methodology for her project in a different environment.

“It all started with researching how wooden shipwrecks will degrade through studying how microbial communities degrade wood,” Ropp said. “I don’t know of anybody that’s done it that way. So, the Program in Maritime Studies had set up a partnership with the NOAA Maritime Heritage Program and the NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries and they were really excited to have research like this occur in the Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary.”

The sanctuary, she said, is a “great” space to do studies like hers because the space lies in between fresh and saltwater.

The project itself, Ropp said, is using one of about 200 wooden wrecks dating back to World War One.

“When the United States entered the war, they didn’t have a standing Navy,” Ropp said. “They implemented this huge building program and built iron, concrete, and wood vessels. Long story short, the wooden vessels were terrible because the builders didn’t have enough supplies. There were all sorts of problems with the ships, which is why they are now on the bottom of the river.”

After the war, Ropp said, the U.S. was left with all these incomplete, unusable vessels. She said to get some of the resources back, a salvage company started taking apart and scrapping the metals, but the rest of the vessels had to be disposed of elsewhere.

Once underwater, aquatic organisms quickly made the shipwrecks their home, Ropp said. Today, she said, the vessels are a part of the ecosystem and different species inhabit the space.

“What I’m trying to do is understand how the microbial community and potential changes in water conditions like temperature, salinity, pH, are jointly affecting the stability of the wood,” Ropp said. “Water infiltrates into the woods and degrades the cellulose. If you pull up the wood and don’t do anything to it, it’ll just crumble because there is nothing supporting these cell structures anymore.”

Ropp retrieves a tube of sediment samples from Maritime Studies student Maddie Elsner (Photo credit: Nathan Richards/Program in Maritime Studies 2022).

If the destruction happens to the wood, she said, the microbes and other organisms living on it will leave, disrupting the entire ecosystem. Through her research, Ropp said, she wants to figure out when the wreck will cease to look like a wreck, or when the wood will degrade enough to fall apart.

In partnership with the Program in Maritime Studies at ECU, a team of researchers and students helped her to collect the initial set of data by mapping the shipwreck site using traditional archaeological methods, Ropp said.

“We also are using a novel device in an underwater archaeology, a resistograph, which measures the density of the timbers,” Ropp said. “It’s drilling into the hull of the ship. It measures the force that’s needed to push that drill bit in, which equates to the density of the wood. With that, we can quantify the density of a particular piece of wood. This helps me with the data collection, as I can calculate the rate of change in the wood degradation using periodic measurements.”

With the Water Scholars Award, she said, one part of the money will go towards the continuance of the microbial research. Ropp said she will be going to the shipwreck site quarterly for the next two years to see how the microbes are changing with seasonal water conditions.

The other half of the award will go towards the travel costs to Maryland, she said. On top of that, Ropp said she purchased a DNA extraction kit, which she will use to extract DNA from the biofilm and sediment samples.

“This summer, I’m going to extract the DNA from the microbial samples, and we will ship the information off to get a sequence to see what organisms live in and around the wreck site,” Ropp said.

The fieldwork, she said, will be completed by December 2024 and no other sampling will be conducted afterward. By the Spring of 2026, Ropp said, she wants to have her research written and finalized.

Her motivation for the project, she said, comes from her interest in understanding how submerged archaeological sites interact with their environment.

“As environmental conditions are changing in the underwater world, these submerged sites that have been relatively stable will be experiencing shifts in their conditions that will have unknown effects on their stability,” Ropp said.

Her research aims to fill a gap in the current resource management of natural and cultural resources by bringing together cultural, microbial, and hydrological data, she said, to research the stability of the shipwreck and ecosystem in Mallows Bay.

About Me

Name: Allyson Ropp

Age: 31

College: Thomas Harriot College of Arts & Sciences

Classification/Focus: P.h.D Candidate in the Integrated Coastal Sciences Program

Hometown: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Bachelor of Arts: History and Classics

Master of Science: Maritime Studies

Dream job: Resource Management

Extracurricular Activities: President of The Coastal Society at ECU