| NSF Org: |
OCE Division Of Ocean Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | February 11, 2014 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 17, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1430048 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Michael Sieracki
OCE Division Of Ocean Sciences GEO Directorate for Geosciences |
| Start Date: | February 15, 2014 |
| End Date: | February 28, 2017 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $153,898.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $153,898.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
110 INNER CAMPUS DR AUSTIN TX US 78712-1139 (512)471-6424 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
750 Channel View Dr. Port Aransas TX US 78373-5015 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
BIOLOGICAL OCEANOGRAPHY, OCEAN TECH & INTERDISC COORDIN |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.050 |
ABSTRACT
Remote areas of the ocean are difficult to sample for short-lived or episodic features. This project will use a new sampling platform, the Wave Glider, and provide a continuous presence in the central North Pacific gyre. The six month duration of the mission will allow repeated sampling as well as spatial coverage previously unavailable. This mission will incorporate phytoplankton specific sensors as well as a set of optical sensors that will provide information on distribution, physiology and aggregation of a unique diatom-nitrogen fixing cyanobacterium symbiosis. When completed, this program will have generated the first data sets that follow these diatom blooms over extended periods in the region. Access to this instrumentation was facilitated by the PacX challenge, an international competition to produce high quality research from long-duration autonomous vehicles in the North and South Pacific Ocean. As a result of winning that competition, the principal investigator has been awarded the use of 6 months of the Honey Badger Wave Glider time in 2014. The Wave Glider is a wave-powered surface vessel capable of extended duration missions. In order to maximize this the principal investigator will outfit the glider with advanced sensors to quantify zones of intense diatom activity and aggregation along mesoscale features in the Pacific (Project MAGI: Mesoscale feature-AGregate Interactions).
This program will recruit a Hispanic graduate student and thus address the NSF's interest in increasing STEM diversity. This research effort will develop a novel sampling platform that demonstrates the ability to sample the physical environment simultaneously with relevant physiological data on important components of the phytoplankton. The project will engage the public by creating a web-based presentation of the data that will be available both on the web as well as in a public large screen display in the University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Center visitor center (40,000+ visitors per year). The availability of the data will also allow for the creation of specific educational exercises for classroom use and workshops for teachers and create programs that teach marine concepts aligned with state educational benchmarks.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This project explored the use of long range, long endurance unmanned vehicles to explore the biology of the N. Pacific Ocean. The great size of this ocean and remoteness from ports has made documenting and exploring short lived or unpredictable aspects of its biology very difficult. In this project, we were examining the composition and characteristics of a specific type of diatom bloom. These diatoms host a nitrogen fixing symbiont that converts nitrogen gas into biological useable forms. Diatoms are unicellular algae with a glass cell wall whereas the symbiont is a filamentous cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). Together, they are termed a diatom-diazotroph association (DDA). By providing a source of biologically available nitrogen, they eliminate one of the primary limitations on growth and biomass accumulation. However, these blooms are episodic, unpredictable and fall well outside the timeline used to fund research vessels. Our approach was to test the suitability of cheaper, more nimble systems to explore these blooms.
Using seed money from the Liquid Robotics PacX award prize to Dr. Tracy Villareal (Univ. of Texas at Austin) and Cara Wilson (NOAA), this NSF award allowed acquisition of holographic imaging equipment and personnel support on a Liquid Robotics SV2 Wave Glider (the Honey Badger). Glider piloting time and technical support in Hawaii was provided by Liquid Robotics, Inc. In May, 2015, we launched the Honey Badger from Hawaii for testing and then initiated the mission on 1 June 2015. Over the next 159 days, the glider successfully navigated over 8,000 km of ocean, acquired over 9,000 images of phytoplankton, and returned a high resolution dataset of temperature, salinity, biomass, variable fluorescence (a measure of phytoplankton health) along with a variety of meteorology and wave data. It was recovered in Nov. 2015. A website (http://oceanview.pfeg.noaa.gov/MAGI/#) was created to allow users and the public to examine the data in near-real time and well as download and manipulate it from a NOAA ERDDAP server.
The imagery confirmed that these diatom symbioses are dominant components of these episodic blooms at levels thousands of time the background abundance, that multiple species bloom independently of each other, and that they assembly into aggregates that are a likely source of rapidly sinking material. All indications are that these blooms are physiologically vigorous. We were able to confirm that these vehicles are capable of such extended missions in the open sea, can carry sophisticated equipment specific to the mission, and could be navigated to targets of interest in near real time.
The broader impacts of this project were two-fold: developing and illustrating a new integration of technologies for oceanographic work and developing human resources. The total mission costs were less than just the transit costs for a research vessel to and from the study site and illustrated the cost savings possible. The project interfaced several instruments in novel combination for remote sensing and tested specific hypothesis in an active, user-directed mode. One female graduate student was supported and developed skills in large data set manipulation as well as in the use of R and Matlab, advanced analysis and presentation software. Three presentations at national meetings have distributed the results to the scientific community. The data has been uploaded to the NSF data archive BCO-DMO (http://www.bco-dmo.org/project/505589).
Last Modified: 06/23/2017
Modified by: Tracy A Villareal
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