LTREB: Collaborative Research: Decadal Variation in Antarctic Marine Benthic Ecosystems

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The ability to document and understand long-term trends in ocean climate and ecology, including the role of human activities on the biosphere, depends on an adequate knowledge of natural interdecadal fluctuations. The proposed research will document changes in benthic ecosystems in McMurdo Sound over the last four decades, i.e., since the beginning of quantitative studies of population and community organization in this region. The investigators will retrieve, analyze, and archive historical data of benthic assemblages in both hard and soft substrata, and continue work on several time series projects begun in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. The investigators will focus on the succession of marine invertebrate communities that have settled and survived on a variety of artificial substrates placed on the sea floor from the late 1960s to 1989. The substrates harbor several decades of information on patterns of settlement, growth, survival, longevity, overgrowth and other biological interactions and processes. The original researchers will relocate and permanently mark (with GPS) historical sampling sites; recover data from as much of the historical work as possible; provide meta-data to insure that past data are understood and sites can be properly resampled; and make all data available to the general science community in a permanent database housed at SCAR-MarBIN. The proposed work will be closely coordinated with an international macroecology program in the Ross Sea, represented by collaborator Simon Thrush (Latitudinal Gradient Project). In addition to reporting results in peer-reviewed publications and providing research support and opportunities for at least two graduate students, the investigators also will involve undergraduate and high school interns in the project, and participate in teacher education programs. The investigators will continue ongoing collaborations with K-12 outreach and college programs that focus on ocean science, and develop a new, broader public outreach effort with the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.