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

该奖项由2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助。记录和理解海洋气候和生态的长期趋势，包括人类活动对生物圈的作用，取决于对自然年代际波动的充分了解。拟议的研究将记录过去四十年来麦克默多湾底栖生态系统的变化，即，自从对该地区人口和社区组织进行定量研究以来，调查人员将检索、分析和存档硬底质和软底质中底栖生物组合的历史数据，并继续进行20世纪60年代中期和70年代初开始的几个时间序列项目的工作。调查人员将重点关注海洋无脊椎动物群落的演替，这些群落在20世纪60年代末至1989年期间在海底放置的各种人工基质上定居并存活。这些基质包含了几十年来关于定居、生长、生存、寿命、过度生长和其他生物相互作用和过程的信息。 最初的研究人员将重新定位并永久标记（使用GPS）历史采样点;尽可能多地从历史工作中恢复数据;提供元数据，以确保过去的数据得到理解，并且可以正确地对站点进行重新采样;并在SCAR-MarBIN的永久数据库中向一般科学界提供所有数据。 拟议的工作将与罗斯海的国际宏观生态计划密切协调，由合作者Simon Thrush（垂直梯度项目）代表。除了在同行评议的出版物中报告结果，并为至少两名研究生提供研究支持和机会外，研究人员还将让本科生和高中实习生参与该项目，并参与教师教育计划。 研究人员将继续与K-12外展和专注于海洋科学的大学项目进行合作，并与斯克里普斯海洋研究所的桦树水族馆开展新的，更广泛的公共外展工作。

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.