Award: OCE-1205233

The surface ocean is characterized by steep gradients in density, which limits the mixing of water from different sources such as those from the coast and the open ocean. This means that different communities of organisms and different chemistries distinguish these waters, creating distinct ecosystems. On land, the boundaries between ecosystems are commonly highly productive zones characterized by high biodiversity. In the ocean, ecosystem function is driven primarily by microbial activity. Previous studies suggested that boundaries between different marine ecosystems created areas of high biodiversity of microscopic algae (phytoplankton). Our goals were to understand if these regions of high phytoplankton diversity influenced the biodiversity of other microbes and to identify how chemical attributes across these boundaries differed from the surface to the seafloor. We conducted a 6-day oceanographic research cruise in the Northeast Pacific Ocean that crossed a density gradient between open-ocean and coastal waters off the US Pacific Northwest coast. The science party for the cruise consisted of students, postdoctoral researchers, technical staff and laboratory heads representing 30 different laboratories from 17 institutions. Samples for over fifty different types of chemical, molecular, and organism analyses were collected at 8 sites. This is the first time that such a broad suite of measurements for trace metals and organic molecules as well as genomic analyses have been made at the same set of oceanographic sites. New streamlined sampling protocols were developed, new ways to integrate the resulting data sets were created, and a new community of interdisciplinary researchers was fostered. A lasting legacy of this project is the integration of expertise from these very different research domains – organic chemists, molecular biologists, inorganic chemists, modelers, and data scientists. It is now possible to see how trace metals influence the physiology of the organisms at the base of the food web and in turn how these organisms influence the organic molecules detected in the water. Last Modified: 04/19/2014 Submitted by: E. Virginia Armbrust