Collaborative Research: The Holocene and Anthropocene as windows into the future of marine systems

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Paleoceanographic records provide a unique opportunity to understand how ecosystems have responded to rapid environmental change in the past, a topic of significant societal and scientific interest. This project will document ecological changes in nearshore environments over the past several thousand years in Southern California, including investigation of impacts of both past and modern climate change. This work is of particular importance because these coastal ecosystems play critical roles in carbon sequestration, marine fisheries, coastal economies, and cycling of nutrients. As part of an integrated effort, the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) will catalog, digitize and identify fossil samples collected along the California margin. These materials will be combined with samples from available sediment cores to develop a public online digital database through which the research community may access project data and results. Two graduate students per year from the University of California Davis (UCD) will work closely with CAS staff to receive training in core curation and database development. In addition, this project supports the training of two Ph.D. students, and undergraduate research interns at UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara. The project also supports intensive field and laboratory based coursework and mentored research at Bodega Marine Laboratory for two undergraduates per year who are pursuing careers in K-12 STEM teaching. A research blog will be generated to develop scientific communication and writing skills in undergraduate, graduate students and technicians involved in this project. To complete this research, the research team will use sediment records from along the California margin to address two key questions: 1) How did the development of the modern oxygen minimum zone during the Holocene influence marine ecosystems, including multiple stages of perturbation and recovery? 2) Can we identify the marine ecological impacts of the Anthropocene, against a background of decadal-centennial scale variability? The team will utilize recent marine sediments to reconstruct marine microfossil response to both natural and anthropogenic environmental perturbation. This research will utilize a suite of available sedimentary archives (over 20 piston, box and multi cores), with moderately high sedimentation rates and available geochemical records, to identify and interpret metazoan and protistan assemblages. Microfossil assemblages will provide a framework to understand past, modern and future climate and oceanographic processes along the California margin. These results can be directly compared to modern instrumental records, and utilized to better predict future impacts of environmental change in this region.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.