A series of new research grants will support UGA Skidaway Institute research projects for the coming years.

Julia Diaz is the lead scientist on a $852,906 three-year grant from the National Science Foundation titled “Collaborative Research: Assessing the role of compound specific phosphorus hydrolase transformations in the marine phosphorus cycle.” Diaz and her colleague, Solange Duhamel from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, will study how phytoplankton cope with shortages of phosphorus in the ocean, and if phytoplankton in phosphorus-rich environments also exhibit some of the same strategies. Skidaway Institute’s share of the grant is $296,831. The grant began on Sept. 1, 2017.

Cliff Buck has been approved for two new grants.

The first is a four-year, $350,412 award, beginning on January 1, 2018, from the NSF Arctic System Science Program. Buck will work as part of an international team on the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) program in the central Arctic Ocean. The team plans to lock an icebreaker into the Arctic ice cap for a year and use it as a base of operations to study a wide range of Arctic processes. Buck’s specialty will be studying the atmospheric deposition of trace elements.

The second is a three-year grant, for $466,135 from the NSF Ocean Section – Chemical Oceanography. It is titled “US GEOTRACES PMT: Quantification of Atmospheric Deposition and Trace Element Fractional Solubility” and will focus on atmospheric deposition to the Pacific Ocean. The grant will fund participation in the planned U.S. GEOTRACES Pacific Meridional Transect (PMT) from Alaska to Tahiti scheduled for September to November 2018 which is the dusty period in the Gulf of Alaska.

Sasha Wagner, Aron Stubbins and Jay Brandes have received an NSF grant totaling $577,082 to study oceanic dissolved black carbon. The project is titled “Constraining the source of oceanic dissolved black carbon using compound-specific stable carbon isotopes.” The grant will begin on February 1, 2018 and run for three years.