The University of California-Davis has been awarded a grant to enhance experimental facilities to study climate change at the Bodega Marine Lab. The Bodega Marine Lab is one of the worlds premier field facilities for marine research and education. For more than 45 years, the Bodega Marine Lab has served as a gateway for research and educational activities from San Francisco Bay to Point Arena. The Bodega Lab is poised to respond quickly to pressing societal problems plaguing the coastal zone. With recent national report cards on the state of ocean ecosystems calling for climate change research, a new tri-state agreement (California, Oregon and Washington) coordinating coastal conservation efforts, and new sources of national and state funding anticipated, Bodega Marine Lab proposes to construct new facilities that can easily generate and control complex multi-variable environments needed by researchers and students to study the effects of climate change.
The climate change facility at Bodega Marine Lab provides an outstanding and unparalleled opportunity as an ocean observing network that provides long-term data on a complex suite of real-world coastal environmental variables needed for the creation of realistic scenarios in controlled environments. The award will provide funds for a facility that is designed for work with marine, estuarine, and freshwater species, including non-native and larval organisms. A modular arrangement of the facility allows flexibility needed for experimental replicates, and easily accommodates static, semi-controlled, closed, and flow-through experimental systems. The climate facility will provide co-located utilities needed to easily manipulate environmental variables typical of climate change that can be controlled and monitored on-site or remotely via a computer-interface.
The highly interdisciplinary and collaborative user base and experiments enabled by the infrastructure will provide an in-depth understanding of the complex multi-level ecosystem responses to climate change and climate effects on larval biology, marine physiology, environmental toxicology, molecular genetics, marine ecology, fish and invertebrate behavior, marine botany, conservation biology, and invasive species biology. The project will attract new interdisciplinary collaborations, increase facility capacity to address climate change issues, enhance training of new scientists, and advance marine lab facility design and performance.
