Moore Foundation grantee Heidi Sosik and colleagues at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have been selected by the National Science Foundation to lead a new Long Term Ecological Research site in the Atlantic Ocean off the Northeast U.S. coast.
Known for its productive fisheries and abundant harvests, the Northeast U.S. shelf focal site spans the coast with an intensive study area connecting Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory on the inner shelf to the Pioneer Array on the outer shelf. As in other coastal oceans, human activities, short-term environmental variability, and long-term trends all affect the region’s complex food web and may threaten the viability of commercial fish populations.
"These sites will bring new locations, new technologies, and new scientists to the challenge of understanding our coastal oceans," said Rick Murray, director of NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences. "Research at the new sites will matter to everyone who eats U.S. seafood, is involved in coastal industries, and depends on the coastal oceans in any way. That includes all of us, through the oceans’ importance in weather and climate, and a long list of other ‘ecosystem services’ the sea provides."
Scientists have documented changes in the Atlantic off the Northeast U.S. But they have lacked the sustained, comprehensive observations needed to understand what links the physical ocean environment to plankton food webs and, ultimately, to fish stocks — limiting their ability to predict how the ecosystem will respond to environmental change.
"This is an exciting opportunity to develop a much more detailed understanding of the ocean," said Sosik, who will lead the project. "We want to know how different pathways in the food web may shift seasonally or through climate change. Ultimately, we hope this knowledge can help promote science-based stewardship of marine ecosystems and be applied to parts of the ocean beyond the waters of the Northeast."
The team will conduct four research cruises a year to observe the intensive cross-shelf study area using advanced automated equipment including imaging systems to assess phytoplankton and zooplankton populations and mass spectrometers to measure gases that trace production within the food web. They will also collect plankton for high-throughput DNA sequencing.
The research program will yield large amounts of fine-scale and regional data that scientists, modelers, and theoretical ecologists will then use to better understand interactions between physical and biological systems and the flow of energy through the ecosystem from phytoplankton to fish, illuminating how the food web is structured and shifts in response to environmental changes.
Read the full press release here and read more about Sosik's work here.
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