This award provides NSF funding over 36 months to acquire basic biogeochemistry instrumentation for carbon and nutrient cycling studies at Rice. A CHNSO solid sample analyzer and a total carbon analyzer will be purchased and installed. Several research projects would utilize the requested instrument suite: soil black carbon (BC) pool stability and pryolysis analysis; natural aluminosilicate nanoparticles impacts on carbon and nutrient cycling in soils; paleoclimate and paleo-productivity indicators in Holocene Antarctic Peninsula (AP) sediments using carbon and nutrient distributions; and ecosystem nutrient cycling studies to evalute Gulf coast restoration and mitigation efforts. The equipment, in addition to the PIs' research projects, will support an upper level environmental chemistry lab course. Funds are requested to sponsor two high school teachers for a summer program through the Rice Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology. The instrumentation will be primarily administered by the PI but will placed under the Rice Shared Equipment Authority which will ensure long-term maintenance. Use statistics will be compiled and evaluated for setting reasonable cost-recovery user fees after the first year of the award.
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This award funded the purchase of two instruments intended to form the nucleus of a shared environmental chemistry lab at Rice University: a Costech ECS 4010, which measures the percent carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, or oxygen in a solid sample, and a Shimadzu TOCvcsh, which measures the percent carbon and nitrogen in a liquid sample. These instruments are essential to the basic study of the chemistry of soils, rivers, oceans, and the atmosphere, both in pristine and polluted settings. These instruments have been purchased, installed, and are operational. Both are under the care of the Rice Shared Equipment Authority (sea.rice.edu; SEA), a central group which provides campus-wide access to instruments with multiple users. Through the SEA, each instrument's user base, operational costs, and maintenance are carefully tracked, and useage fees are set to cover operational expenses. Beyond meeting a campus need for environmental analyses in the Earth Science, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Civil and Environmental Engineering departments, these instruments have also become unexpectedly valuable to researchers at Rice in Chemistry, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. These researchers are able to access the instruments through the SEA for the same costs, and their wider useage provides a strong financial base, creating funds needed for timely maintenance and administrative support. We were fortunate to be able to leverage additional private donor funds based on this NSF award. Because of these additional donor funds, we stretched the NSF award to supplement the purchase of other shared instruments on campus, all of which provide analytical environmental chemistry measurements. Instruments partially supported by this award include two pycnometers (to measure density of solid materials), two soil water potential instruments (to measure the amount of plant-available water in soils), and a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, used to measure volatile gases released from plants and soils.
