A grant has been awarded to the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) under the direction of Paul A. Steudler for partial support to acquire a continuous flow isotope ratio mass spectrometer (CF-IRMS) system that will support the MBL's expanding research and undergraduate and graduate education program in the application of stable isotopic techniques to terrestrial and aquatic ecological research. The expanded capabilities of the new instrumentation will be focused on four research activities; (1) Determination of aquatic system metabolism, (2) Measurement of the composition and sources of nutrition of microbial systems, (3) Determination of the sources and processes regulating carbon cycling and production of atmospheric greenhouse gases and (4) Resolving the sources and flow paths of water and nitrogen in watersheds.
The new CF-IRMS system will benefit the Laboratory's research program, including three NSF Long Term Ecological Research sites at Plum Island and Harvard Forest, MA and at Toolik Lake, Alaska, two NASA and one NSF supported program in Brazil and as well as 17 other federally funded projects. The grant will benefit several MBL educational and training programs: one is the Semester in Environmental Sciences (SES) program; second is the NSF program on Research Experience for Undergraduates; third is training of graduate students in residence and visiting the MBL through our joint projects with PI's at US and foreign universities. New educational activities include the Brown-MBL graduate program in Biological and Environmental Sciences that begins in the fall of 2004. We will teach three new workshops in the use of stable isotopes and the capabilities of the new CF-IRMS instrumentation: one is a two-day workshop to SES students; second is a 10 day workshop in January to Brown-MBL advanced undergraduate and graduate students and the third is a weekend workshop for the MBL summer Microbial Diversity course on the capabilities of the new system in elucidating the diversity and function of microbial communities.
The new CF-IRMS system will have significant impacts on research, training and teaching activities. This system will allow us to make progress on important questions in ecosystem productivity, regional and global water balance and global climate change issues. The new system will allow us to move from flask-level experiments to regional estimates of productivity, to understand the processes that control the transfer of materials such as nutrients from land to water, and to gain information on the role of soil and aquatic microbes on the evolution of carbon and nitrogen greenhouse gases. Knowledge on exactly what microbes are involved in various C and N transformations in these systems is clearly tied to developments in the methods and instrumentation that we use to study these systems. Our understanding of the links between biogeochemical processes and microbial species composition and function will be greatly improved by the new CF-IRMS system.
