A Seawater System for Enhancing Nature Coast Biological Station's Research and Education Programs

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This project will build state of the art mesocosm facilities to study coastal systems along the nature coast of Florida. The Nature Coast spans the Big Bend of Florida on the Gulf of Mexico (984,000 acres) and contains one of North America's least developed coastlines, with extensive seagrass meadows, valuable recreational and commercial fisheries and healthy populations of marine mammals, waterbirds, and sea turtles. The Nature Coast Biological Station (NCBS) is a new modern laboratory and education center created by the University of Florida in 2017. This new laboratory is the only one of its kind for 416 kilometers of the U.S. Gulf Coast. This project will install a modular seawater delivery and filtration system at NCBS that will serve the wet lab and public education/aquarium area. This system will allow faculty and students to conduct climate change research and education, in a region where small changes in temperature are causing large, obvious shift from temperate to tropical species composition (salt marsh to mangroves, increases in tropical fish grazers (parrotfish) and predators (snook) and with a human population that is highly dependent on healthy coastal habitats. The flexible design of this seawater system will allow researchers to conduct experiments and tailor the seawater flow, salinity and temperature to improve science and conduct work of national significance. This system will also enhance the NCBS' aims of advancing education and public outreach by serving one central, large aquaria display, a touch tank, and a sea level rise simulator to educate the public about ecology and climate change. Given its location on the waterfront and within the Historic District of Cedar Key, Florida, the wet lab and aquarium/public education area will provide a valuable new venue for educating the public, undergraduate/graduate students, and visiting K-12 students about the research being conducted at the station and about the effects of climate change on coastal ecosystems and communities.The Nature Coast Biological Station (NCBS, https://ncbs.ifas.ufl.edu) is a new modern laboratory and education facility created by the University of Florida in the Historic District of Cedar Key, Florida. This project will install a modular seawater delivery and filtration system that will serve the wet lab and public education/aquarium area. This system will augment the NCBS' ability to facilitate interdisciplinary ecological research, including studies on the response of plants and animals to warming temperatures, changing seasonality, freshwater discharge, and ocean acidification. This system will allow faculty and students to evaluate impacts of stressors such as ocean acidification and invasion of the region by expanding plants and fishes due to climate change (red mangrove, common snook), and will allow researchers to culture fish and shellfish for basic biological and ecological assessments. The addition of the seawater system to the NCBS will facilitate several on-going projects funded through NSF and other agencies as well as provide infrastructure critical to supporting research and outreach on the effects of climate change in the region. The seawater system will substantially augment these interdisciplinary and multi-institutional activities by creating an adaptable wet lab that can be tailored to meet the needs of fisheries biologists, ecologists, epidemiologists and physiologists, among others. This system will also provide a venue for undergraduates and graduate students to make new discoveries about the effect of climate change on socio-economic and ecological features of the Nature Coast. Furthermore, the wet lab and aquaria array supported by this new seawater delivery and filtration system are poised to provide a valuable new venue for educating the public and visiting K-12 students about the research being conducted at the station and about the effects of climate change on coastal ecosystems and communities.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.