Enhancing the capabilities and integration of a long-term marine biological monitoring program

University Of Maryland Center For Environmental Sciences, Cambridge MD

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports the expansion a long-term biological, physical, and chemical monitoring program in the Chesapeake Bay region by the addition of new sensor capabilities. This expanded measurement program will allow for comprehensive documentation of ecosystem responses to environmental change in the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem resulting from global climatic change, nutrient loading, and watershed restoration. The project supports the NSF missions of expanded scientific understanding of long-term change in ecosystems and the application of scientific data to support the health and welfare of populations in the coastal zone. New measurements will fill in key gaps in our understanding of linkages among biological, chemical, and physical processes in the coastal zone and how these linkages control the response of marine systems to local, regional, and global change. The monitoring system will provide data streams that will support graduate education as well as training of visiting grade school students and the general public about coastal marine ecology and how it responds to pollution and climatic changes. An emerging component of the CBL research effort is the establishment of an integrated molecules to metazoans long-term monitoring program from its recently reconstructed research pier. This award supports the substantial enhancement of a well-established monitoring program at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Chesapeake Biological Laboratory (CBL; http://www.umces.edu/cbl) by the addition of new environmental sensors and the deployment of a state-of-the-art data integration and management system. The proposed expansion of the sampling program will allow the CBL site to become a sentinel to document diurnal, seasonal, and inter-annual-scale change in the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem, a representative coastal system, under the influence of global climatic change, nutrient loading, and watershed restoration. Specifically, this award will result in the addition of new sensors to measure chemical (pH, fDOM), physical (current velocity and waves), and atmospheric (PAR) parameters that will complement existing monitoring of temperature and salinity, tides, nutrient and organic matter concentrations, plankton and fish abundance, light availability, and community respiration. These new sensors will complete the comprehensive monitoring program we envision on the CBL pier. To ensure that these varied and extensive data streams are integrated and managed in a robust and open environment such that researchers, both at CBL and in society generally, can gain maximum benefit from the resources, this award will also support the deployment of a new data integration and management system (DIMS) that will house and disseminate the archival and new data streams.