1000 individually-controlled microcosms to assess ecological impacts in Canadian ecosystems, aquaculture, and agriculture

加拿大水产养殖和农业将受到全球变化与当地压力因素的复杂影响。凭借我们结合的工程生态专业知识，我们将开发和应用一个平台，用于测量生物和社区对多种环境参数的反应。这项工作是通过基于气凝胶的气体梯度发生器的新概念实现的，该气体梯度发生器实现了对微孔上局部CO2和O2浓度的前所未有的控制。这种气体控制技术将与投影光学器件和基于微孔板的液体处理相结合，以实现1000多个平行处理的实验，用于具有广泛的特征性不同参数的全因子数据集。3年交付成果是一个商业化筛选平台，能够量化模型微生物、植物群和动物群对关键环境变量的响应。 该项目提供与加拿大水产养殖（Nova Harvest）和农业（POS Biosciences）直接相关的数据，并利用加拿大的产品开发优势（Quorum Technologies）。通过该项目产生的方法和数据直接针对“环境与农业”目标领域。 具体而言，我们将限定全球和当地人为压力对水生环境的影响。此外，该技术将使加拿大众多公司能够适应气候变化的农业和水产养殖业。该项目与加拿大水产养殖（Nova Harvest）、农业（POS Biosciences）和设备开发（Quorum Technologies）的领导者密切合作，将提供行业就绪的筛选技术，并开发具有新工具的杰出HQP，以评估加拿大和全球气候变化的影响。

Canadian aquaculture and agriculture will be subject to a complex mix of global change in combination with local stressors. With our combined engineering-ecological expertise we will develop and apply a platform for measuring organism and community responses to multiple environmental parameters. This work is enabled by the novel concept of an aerogel-based gas gradient generator that achieves unprecedented control of local CO2 and O2 concentration over microwells. This gas control technology will be combined with projection optics and microwell plate-based liquid handling to enable experiments with 1000+ parallel treatments for full-factorial data sets with a wide spectrum of characteristically different parameters. The 3-year deliverable is a commercialization-ready screening platform capable of quantifying the response of model microorganisms, flora, and fauna to key environmental variables. The project provides data directly relevant to Canadian aquaculture (Nova Harvest) and agriculture (POS Biosciences) and leverages Canadian product development excellence (Quorum Technologies). Both the method and the data produced through this project directly address the "Environment and Agriculture" target area. Specifically, we will qualify the impact of global and local anthropogenic stressors on the aquatic environment. Moreover, the technology will equip a broad range of Canadian companies to adapt agriculture and aquaculture for a changing climate. In close partnership with Canadian leaders aquaculture (Nova Harvest), agriculture (POS Biosciences), and device development (Quorum Technologies), this project will provide both industry-ready screening technology, and develop outstanding HQP with new tools to assess climate change impacts in Canada and worldwide.