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Our Mission:
Our field and experimental work focuses on coastal marine communities. Being an ecosystem lab, we follow a community-integrated approach, i.e., we study the main communities of coastal ecosystems in concert. These include phytoplanktonic communities, sediment flats (mostly inhabited by benthic microalgae), macroalgal beds, seagrass meadows, and marshes. Most of our research aims at understanding the regulation and trophic fate of primary production in these communities.
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Elucidating what controls the amount of food produced in these communities, as well as the routes followed by that food (consumption by herbivores, decomposition, export out of the community, and storage as living or detrital mass) is essential in understanding a number of important ecological roles. These roles include the system's capacity to support secondary biomass within (consumption in the system) or off (through export) the system, carbon and nutrient accumulation or release (sink vs. source), and nutrient links with neighboring systems (i.e. the system's dependence on imported nutrients). |
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We are also very interested in elucidating how current anthropogenic perturbations, such as coastal eutrophication and increasing UV irradiance, may alter carbon and nutrient budgets in coastal ecosystems. Increasing evidence suggests that these anthropogenic impacts can deeply influence the flux of carbon and nutrients in ecosystems, but little is known on how and why these changes actually happen. In turn, this information is important in an understanding of how increasing human domination of coastal ecosystems can alter local and global elemental budgets, and in elaborating effective policies towards environmental sustainability.
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Our research is not restricted to marine communities. We also like to compare our and other marine communities with freshwater and terrestrial communities in an attempt to examine whether there are across-community patterns in the trophic fate of primary production. We do this through extensive literature compilations. We thus work at different scales of integration: across marine communities, where our field and experimental work is focused; and across aquatic and terrestrial communities, where, using published data, we intend to identify trends in how carbon and nutrients cycle. |
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Prospective Students
***Ph.D. Assistantship Available***
***Internships Oppotunities***
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