This proposal seeks to evaluate carbon cycling in Apalachicola Bay, a shallow bar-built sub-tropical estuary located in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. A collaborative and interdisciplinary team made up of biogeochemists, ecologists, molecular biologists, and modelers will integrate their skills and areas of expertise to characterize in detail the sources, transformations and fate of carbon within the Apalachicola Bay estuary. An important emphasis of this proposal is the training of graduate students and postdoctoral associates in multidisplinary research on carbon cycling, and in communicating the knowledge gained from this and other research to students in the classroom making them better teachers and mentors. A collaborative interdisciplinary team will integrate their skills and expertise to characterize carbon cycling and its relationship to hydrologic processes, the bulk dissolved organic carbon pool in the estuary, the microbial loop, bacterial community structure, and overall trophic dynamics. Data generated from this work will promote a dramatically improved understanding of the carbon flux from Apalachicola Bay to Gulf of Mexico coastal waters, and ultimately provide insight as to how carbon cycling in Apalachicola Bay fits with established estimates of coastal carbon flux. In addition to the training of both graduate and undergraduate students through direct participation in field and laboratory based activities the results and the scope of this project will also be developed into ateaching module. The development of the module will be a collaborative effort by the PI's, senior scientists and graduate students three PI's to illustrate how carbon flow through estuarine systems can potentially impact models of global carbon flux.
