I remember hearing once that the most powerful emotion that you can experience is wonder.

if you have a really wondrous experience in a film and a photograph in nature, it's going to stick with you.

Soren Goldsmith is scouting locations for his upcoming photography project in the coastal marshes of Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

If you were to ask somebody what they think about a saltmarsh, they probably wouldn't be able to tell you.

they're often seen as sort of wasteland-y areas.

Yeah.

So this marsh is one of my favorite marshes to go to because it's been preserved really, really well.

I mean, look at this.

People don't see this every day unless they know about it.

The 20 year old has been setting wildlife camera traps in his suburban Boston home town since high school, but the nature of this particular environment required him to think outside the box.

Salt marshes are intertidal environments, which means that half the day they're going to be dry, but the other half of the day, the water is going to come up and cover this landscape.

I had this idea of, "what if I could build an amphibious camera trap?"

It was around that same time that I ended up heading to the University of Wisconsin for engineering.

And suddenly I had all these resources at my disposal.

I had mechanical engineers, environmental engineers, civil engineers, computer engineers, that were able to combine their expertises onto one project.

Because a camera trap is a complex contraption.

Yeah so this is the underwater amphibious camera trap.

I call it IMPACT, which stands for Intertidal Motion Picture Activated Camera Trap.

And if it works right, it will go for a week in the marsh.

But it always works.

My, my my inventions are always perfect.

[laughs offscreen] The salt marshes are very low elevation, practically at sea level.

So the sea level rising only a little bit like an inch, there's a huge impact on that land.

And as a result of this, salt marshes are being flooded more frequently and eroding more quickly than they can replenish.

And you mix in this problem with human development, and a lot of projections are saying that marshes are going to disappear very quickly by the end of the century.

But hope is not lost in this regard, because we actually are lucky to have tools to deploy.

Soren hopes his portraits of vulnerable animals will make people want to protect salt marshes.

They're known to have some of the most biodiverse ecosystems.

They also support coastal communities from eroding into the ocean.

And they store a ton of carbon So they're really important.

Despite the dire projections about the fate of coastal habitats, He remains optimistic.

Some of the stuff that I've been able to build -- 15 years ago would not have been possible.

I'm lucky to be young right now, when I have all of these cool technology and opportunities that I can leverage to tell my stories that older people might not have had.

What would be even better than that is get my technology to people all over the world.

Just the whole human understanding of ecosystems and wildlife would be greater.

I found that in terms of these wondrous moments, being able to go out there and experience it and share it, it's wonderful.

And I remember it.

It kind of slows my life down and keeps me in the moment.

For PBS News Student Reporting Labs, I'm Grace Go in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.