Acquisition of a Research and Teaching Salt Water Flume at Priest Landing, GA

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The Georgia Tech Research Corporation - Georgia Institute of Technology is awarded a grant to to build a flume at the Priest Landing Marine Laboratory, located adjacent to Wassaw Sound (Skidaway Island). The proposed flume at Priest Landing replaces an outdated flume located on the SkIO campus and fills a critical gap in facilities infrastructure in the region. The flume is designed to create flow conditions that mimic the tidal channels in the surrounding coastal environment near the lab. The size will be sufficient to generate realistic flow and boundary layer conditions and provide a large working section for animal experiments and will incorporate features such as Plexiglas channel walls, false bottom for a sediment section , and rails for an instrument carriage. The capabilities of the facility will support a variety of fluid physical, sediment transport, and behavioral or ecological studies including ecological interactions mediated by chemosensation tracking, the ecology of defensive chemical signaling, river/riverbed porewater contaminant exchange, transport of consolidated, cohesive sediments abraded by non-cohesive sediments, coherent structures in pulsatile flows, sediment erosion and bridge scour, and turbulence modeling in tidal flows. Potential users of the versatile flume facility include faculty and students from Georgia Tech, Georgia Tech Savannah, Savannah State University, Armstrong Atlantic State University, Columbus State University, Georgia Southern University (affiliated with Tech through the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program, GTREP), the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography (SkIO), and other institutions. The flume also will be used for graduate and undergraduate student training through laboratory and capstone courses, individual research projects, and NSF REU-Site programs on Aquatic Chemical Ecology and field ecology. Finally, use the facility will be used for K-12 science education via affiliation with the Savannah Science Seminar Series. Additional information about Priest Landing Marine Laboratory may be found at http://www.biology.gatech.edu/Priest_Landing_Marine.html.