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NOAA AWARDS FIRST INSTALLMENT OF $548,273 GRANT TO UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE TO STUDY HYPOXIA IMPACT ON ESTUARINE ECOSYSTEMS

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration awarded the University of Delaware a $206,758 grant to study the impact of hypoxia on fish habitat quality in the coastal bays of Delaware. This award is the first installment of a three-year, $548,273 grant from NOAA.

The grant supports research to study how diel-cycling hypoxia, or short term hypoxia that lasts for hours, affects fish populations such as juvenile summer flounder and weakfish which use the coastal bays for vital estuarine nursery habitat. Researchers plan to collect data, calibrate and integrate models in order to assess the impact of continued water quality decline on habitat quality and fish behavior, feeding and distribution. The project will provide vital information to living resources management by providing a direct link between nutrient and other constituents discharged to a water body and impacts to fish production and health. This research will be conducted in collaboration with scientists from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Hypoxia in aquatic systems refers to waters where the dissolved oxygen concentration is below two milligrams per liter. Most organisms avoid, or become physiologically stressed in, waters with oxygen below this concentration. While hypoxia can occur naturally, it is often a symptom of environments stressed by human impacts (e.g. nutrient enrichment). Over half of U.S. estuaries experience natural or human-induced hypoxic conditions at some time each year and evidence suggests that the frequency and duration of hypoxic events have increased. These hypoxic events can have large impacts on the affected ecosystems and have associated economic impacts.

“We need to increase our understanding of hypoxia in shallow systems like Delaware's coastal bays,” said retired Navy Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr., Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. “NOAA's partnership with the University of Delaware will enable research to enhance our understanding of the effect of water quality on juvenile fish behavior, distribution, and production in shallow coastal estuaries, which account for 13 percent of the global coastline habitat.”

This project is part of the Coastal Hypoxia Research Program (CHRP), managed by the NOAA Ocean Service's Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research. CHRP will provide resource managers new tools, techniques and information for making informed decisions and assessing alternative management strategies regarding hypoxia in U.S. coastal ocean waters, estuaries and Great Lakes. Determining the causes of hypoxia, developing the capability to predict its occurrence in response to varying levels of anthropogenic stress, and evaluating the subsequent ecological and economic impacts are necessary to assess potential management alternatives.

Each year, NOAA awards approximately $900 million in grants to members of the academic, scientific, and business communities to assist the agency in fulfilling its mission to study the Earth's natural systems in order to predict environmental change, manage ocean resources, protect life and property, and provide decision makers with reliable scientific information. The NOAA Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research awards approximately $25 million in grants annually to institutions of higher education, state, local, and tribal governments, and other non-profit research institutions to assist NOAA in fulfilling its mission to study our coastal oceans. NOAA-sponsored competitive research programs such as CHRP demonstrate NOAA's commitment to these basic responsibilities of science and service to the nation for the past 35 years.

NOAA, an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department, is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and providing environmental stewardship of our nation's coastal and marine resources. Through the emerging Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), NOAA is working with its federal partners and nearly 60 countries to develop a global monitoring network that is as integrated as the planet it observes.

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