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R/P-24
Phytoplankton biomass and nutrient loading relations for the Chesapeake Bay from aircraft remote sensing
Principal Investigator:
Lawrence W. Harding, Jr.Start/End Year:
1990 - 1994Institution:
Horn Point Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental ScienceCo-Principal Investigator:
Eric C. Itsweire, Johns Hopkins UniversityTopic(s):
- Ecosystems and Restoration
Description:
The objective of this study is to deploy NASA's Ocean Data Acquisition System (ODAS) in the Chesapeake Bay during successive winter-spring transitions in 1990 and 1991 to produce fine-scale maps of phytoplankton biomass. ODAS is an aircraft borne ocean color instrument that is used to detect chlorophyll concentrations. We propose to track event-scale changes in phytoplankton distributions during the diatom blooms that develop annually in the mesohaline to polyhaline part of the Bay.
Funding Start Year
1990
Funding End Year
1994
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Featured Fellow
Nina Santos
Nina Santos is a Ph.D. student at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. For her dissertation, she is focused on small shrimp-like crustaceans called mysids – an understudied yet important part of many estuarine and coastal food webs.
Featured Research Project
Developing a habitat model for mysids, an important link in Chesapeake Bay food webs
Mysids are important mesozooplankton prey for many species of fish in Chesapeake Bay and are an important link in transferring energy from lower to upper trophic levels. Mysids also serve as biological vectors for benthic-pelagic coupling due to their diel vertical migration and omnivorous prey-switching behavior, which makes mysids important regulators of food web architecture. Despite their central role in coastal food webs, surprisingly little is known about mysid ecology and dynamics in Chesapeake Bay.
