Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

We request a continuous flow auto-analyzer for the analysis of nutrient concentrations in water samples to support a substantial increase in the co-PIs' research on the topic of Great Lakes Health. Nutrient imbalances, especially of phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N), represent the single greatest threat to aquatic ecosystem services in the Great Lakes. Low P levels in Lake Huron limit the commercial fish catch, while high P levels in Lake Erie have contributed to nuisance and toxic algal blooms. Lake Ontario experiences recurring nuisance and toxic algal blooms in a number of embayments. There are many uncertainties that make it difficult to link management actions on the landscape (the ultimate source of excess nutrients) to improvements in the health of the Great Lakes. These uncertainties include: i) the respective roles of watershed and lakebed sources of N and P in driving water quality problems; ii) the forms of N and P input to aquatic ecosystems and the transformations they undergo from landscapes to aquatic ecosystems. The emerging consensus is that accurately quantifying N and P inputs to lakes requires hundreds of samples per station per year, while multiple stations are needed to understand downstream N and P transformation. Information from many locations is needed at the mouths of rivers to track the N and P form and transformation in nearshore areas, and bed sediments must be sampled at many locations to understand the overall sediment N and P flux to lakes. The co-PIs are involved in research that examines nutrient dynamics in urban, agricultural, nearshore, open lake, and freshwater benthic sediments, and that links nutrients to primary production, fish consumption advisories, and the release of contaminants stored in sediments. Dedicated infrastructure is needed that can estimate the N and P content of many water and sediment samples while minimizing the effects of operator error. The requested continuous flow analyzer will be based in the University of Windsor's recently established Nutrient Lab (NL), a shared facility that all faculty and students in the University can access. We anticipate a total of 14 MSc, 12 PhD, and 2 PDFs to benefit from the use of the requested infrastructure in the first 5 years of use. The requested equipment will foster faster, more informative research, larger sample sizes, and more robust study designs, into the most important pollutants in the Great Lakes.