The Bacterial Environment of Mississippi Coastal Systems
Principal Investigators: Colin Jackson (UM)
Team Members: Jordan Heiman (Ph.D. student), Elizabeth Basha (undergraduate Honor’s student), Jackie Pavlovsky (Masters student), Dr. Stephanie Vaughn (Postdoctoral Research Associate)
Award Amount: $615,000
Project Description
Goal:
To provide a comprehensive assessment of the composition and function of bacterial communities in water and sediment along Mississippi Gulf Coast beaches, and what influences these bacterial communities.
Why it is Important:
We have virtually no knowledge of coastal bacterial communities in Mississippi, beyond ongoing monitoring of bacteria of human concern. Understanding natural bacterial communities can be informative of water quality and efforts to clean-up coastal areas.
Objectives:
To provide a thorough and comprehensive spatial assessment of the bacterial communities in Mississippi near-shore coastal systems.
To determine how bacterial communities in Mississippi near-shore coastal systems are influenced by water quality and other environmental parameters.
To determine how bacterial communities in Mississippi near-shore coastal systems change over time scales ranging from days to seasons, and in response to natural and/or anthropogenic disturbance.
Expected Outcomes and Management Impacts:
A comprehensive description of bacterial communities in sandy sediment and water along the Mississippi Coast and how these communities vary geographically and over time
Information on the environmental factors that influence the composition of these bacterial communities
Understanding of how coastal bacterial communities respond to changes in physical and chemical conditions and short-term disturbances
Information on the potential function of these coastal bacteria communities, in terms of their capability to process organic carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, or overall metabolic activity
Recommendations for how ongoing monitoring strategies may be able to predict changes in coastal bacterial populations
OUTREACH:
Undergraduate and graduate students will work on different aspects of the project, as part of thesis and dissertation research.