RUCOOL Updates: January – April 2023

The new semester is well under way for our students and faculty, while our operations teams gear up for the summer research season ahead. That said, it seems like it’s always research season here at RUCOOL, just check out the numerous things we have been working on below.

State

• RUCOOL welcomed Associate Professor Daphne Munroe to the team! Daphne has been at Rutgers since 2010, but now joins the team with her expertise in larval ecology, sustainable shellfisheries and aquaculture, climate changes, population ecology and marine conservation.
• Rutgers has launched the Offshore Wind Collaborative to coordinate and build expertise in offshore wind research across the university community and to support workforce development pathways to employment in this industry. Leading the establishment of the collaborative is Margaret Brennan-Tonetta, director of the Office of Resource and Economic Development at Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, along with RUCOOL’s Josh Kohut,, and Wade Trappe, professor and Associate Dean for Academics, School of Engineering. This group of more than 40 faculty members from across Rutgers’s campuses brings a wide range of disciplines and expertise including marine sciences, environmental science, engineering, materials science, supply-chain, and public policy, as well as economics, psychology and other social sciences. Rutgers is well positioned to establish the collaborative environment and knowledge-sharing needed to foster the growth of a wind-based economy in New Jersey.
• RUCOOL PI Josh Kohut was one of the lead organizers of the first Rutgers Offshore Wind Symposium held at the Richard Weeks Hall of Engineering on January 12, 2023. Over 100 guests attended this meeting hosted by the Rutgers Offshore Wind Collaborative, whose goal was to provide a forum for industry, government, and academic leaders to discuss challenges, collaborate on solutions, and build community engagement. Several members of the RUCOOL team including our students presented talks and posters and led breakout sessions. A summary report will be prepared based on the information shared at the symposium that will serve as an action plan to advance the growing offshore wind industry in New Jersey.
• Grace Saba won this year’s Faculty Scholar-Teacher Award. The award honors tenured faculty members who have made outstanding synergistic contributions in research and teaching. This award recognizes those who make visible the vital link between teaching and scholarship by contributing to the scholarship of teaching and by bringing together scholarly and classroom activities. Congrats Grace!
• Masters of Operational Oceanography (MOO) students have successfully completed their Spring glider mission off NJ, allowing for a seasonal comparison of the NJ shelf waters against their Fall mission, and serving as vital experience of working with operational technologies as part of an ocean observing lab. These two deployments are the foundation of a new student-led sampling effort along this transect over subsequent cohorts of MOO students – an opportunity unique to the MOO program of Rutgers University. The Endurance Line has been sampled for decades by COOL across various grants and projects, and now the MOO students will lead the effort across cohorts, monitoring the real-time seasonal dynamics and changes to the NJ shelf waters.
• MOO Program Advisor Alexander López has been selected to be in the 2023-24 cohort of the Provost’s Teaching Fellows Program.
• As Chair of the Marine Technology Society New Jersey Student Section, PhD Candidate Joe Gradone recently hosted a research symposium at the Rutgers University Marine Field Station and Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve in Tuckerton, NJ. This symposium brought together over 25 undergraduate and graduate students as well as faculty and staff from Rutgers University, Stockton University, Princeton University, and the New Jersey Institute of technology for a day of networking and student presentations.
• New Jersey’s First Lady, Tammy Snyder Murphy, joined our RUCOOL education team in April, learning about the new NJ climate change curriculum, research with ocean gliders and the Explorers of the Deep 4H STEM Challenge. A very COOL day!
• It was a bit wet at Rutgers Day this year, but our DMCS team, led by our students, education team, RU American Fisheries Society and the Haskin Crew, was out in force for Rutgers day. Community members of all ages were engaged and eager to become “Ocean Explorers” with our touch tank, density demonstration, glider display, ocean fossils, and the “Great Plankton race.” Some even became “Fish (and Shellfish) Fanatics!”
• The Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences hosted an open house for incoming first year students and their parents. Department Chair, Oscar Schofield, gave a program overview, but then our current undergrads and grad students came in to give an awesome overview of their experiences, helped with tours and spoke 1 on 1 with our visitors. Thanks so much to our students. This is why we are here!
• The R/V Rutgers continues to be busy! Rutgers had 13 trips during the semester with a total of 120 passengers. Five undergraduate classes and one graduate class performed research in the Raritan and in Raritan bay studying physics, biology and ocean chemistry as well as a class trip performing seal observations. Of course there is also the work performed for research supporting our glider deployments, AUV training and helping BOEM on the deployment and recovery of a hydrophone array. And winter/spring is the quiet season! Looking forward to a very busy late spring and summer.
• Our faculty are teaching eight classes this semester including 1) Biological Oceanography: Ocean Boundary Ecosystems, 2) Topics in Marine Science, 3) Ocean Methods and Data Analysis, 4) The Biology of Living in the Ocean: Boundary Ecosystems and Processes, 5) The Role of the Polar Regions in the Earth System, 6) Integrated Ocean Observations 2, 7) Field Laboratory Methods 2, and 8) Polar Systems.

National

• The RUCOOL education team held 18 video conferences where we connected kids in grades 5-9 live with researchers in Antarctica as part of the Palmer Station Long-term Ecological Research Program (PAL LTER) project. State representation includes New Jersey, Alaska (including Utqiaġvik and Anchorage), Washington, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Michigan, Iowa, Arkansas, Florida, and California. We worked with a broad range of young people from diverse backgrounds including: school programs that serve Native Americans, homeless youth, and those with special needs (blind and deaf).  We engaged approximately 1,080 young people in grades 5- to 9 from January 2023-March 2023.  Each implementation ended with a Video Teleconference to Antarctica speaking with an early career polar researcher: https://pallter.marine.rutgers.edu/2022/11/2023-virtual-classroom-programs/)
• The RUCOOL education team attended the Advancing Research Impacts in Society (ARIS) Summit (March). We presented several workshops for our NSF funded ARIS Toolkit project (see https://aris.marine.rutgers.edu) with ten universities. The Implementation and Evaluation of the ARIS Broader Impacts Toolkit project is designed to advance the understanding of mechanisms and supports needed to develop effective Broader Impacts (BI) statements. In the toolkit project, we are partnering with ten universities to pilot test a suite of tools developed by the NSF-funded ARIS Center and conduct research on use cases of the ARIS Toolkit. The ARIS Toolkit is a suite of digital documents and interactive web stools designed to provide guidance and effective practices aimed at improving BI outcomes and impacts for researchers and their collaborating partners. The kit includes the a) BI Wizard, b) BI Checklist c) Guiding Principles, and d) BI Evaluation Rubric. The toolkit can be used by researchers who are proposing to NSF and those acting as panel reviewers; BI professionals who assist researchers in BI work; and partners who participate in BI work with university researchers.
• In January, Sage Lichtenwalner participated in an 8-day STEAM SEAS project cruise aboard the R/V Armstrong to present a series of talks on data literacy and the classroom materials available form the NSF’s Ocean Observatory Initiative to a group of HBCU faculty participating in the STEM SEAS workshop.

International

• Oscar Schofield and Josh Kohut host an all-hands science meeting for the NSF Palmer LTER and SWARM projects studying climate change induced changes in ecosystem processes. The meeting hosted over 30 participants here at Rutgers with another 15 participants joining us virtually.
• Grace Saba and PhD student Lauren Cook co-organized, co-hosted, and presented at a 3-day international workshop “Fish, Fisheries, and Carbon” funded by the Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry Program: https://www.us-ocb.org/fish-fisheries-and-carbon/. Grace and Lauren presented the following talks:
  • Cook, L., Saba, G.K. 2023. Closing the fish carbon export gap: Laboratory-based approaches in creating a full carbon production suite for an abundant North Atlantic forage fish. Talk presented at the 3-day international workshop on Fish, Fisheries, and Carbon. March 2023
  • Saba, G.K. 2023. New insights on the role of fishes in ocean carbon flux. Talk presented at the 3-day international workshop on Fish, Fisheries, and Carbon. March 2023
• The Antarctic Science Season is done, and it was very successful! We had three teams working in the field including:
  • Our HF-Radar team led by Josh Kohut and Ethan Handel, recovered a CODAR site buried in ice and snow on a remote island. The site was used to measure surface currents that impact penguin foraging zones along the western Antarctic peninsula.
  • Our glider team completed 3 deployments with our partners at the University of Delaware. They were studying the impacts of melting fresh water from ice pack on the entire ecosystem and formation of deep water masses.
  • Nicole Waite completed six weeks on a cruise offshore of Antarctica. Nicole was the PI on the Palmer LTER cruise studying the polar marine biome with research focused on the Antarctic pelagic marine ecosystem, including sea ice habitats, regional oceanography and terrestrial nesting sites of seabird predators. Oh, and if you think a “cruise” sounds nice, try a month on a boat with 15-40 foot seas, constant rain with little sleep. Not exactly the Pacific Princess.

Newly Funded Research

• New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection: Development of Guidance for Municipal Environmental Justice Action Planning, Jeanne Herb & Grace Saba ($82,025 for 6 months).
• New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection: Research Monitoring Initiative Observing Systems, Josh Kohut, ($282,289 for 2 years).
• New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection: Glider Deployment for Water Quality Monitoring, Josh Kohut ($95,609).
• John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab: Ship Detection Upgrades for Rutgers 5Mhz HF-Radar Sites, Hugh Roarty ($131,794 for 14 months).
• New York State Energy Research and Development Authority: GLIDE: Glider Based Ecology and Oceanographic Surveys of the New York Bight, Josh Kohut ($338,709 for 2 years).
• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region (WHOI CINAR): Ocean Acidification Synthesis, Grace Saba ($23,166).
• University of Connecticut: Quantifying Linkages Between Sea Ice, Phytoplankton Community Composition, and Air-Sea Carbon Fluxes, Oscar Schofield ($151,443).
• Office of Naval Research: Passengers, Travis Miles ($150,000).
• NASA Rapid Response SOCCUM, Oscar Schofield ($250,000).
• California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Lab: Surface Water and Ocean Topography, Oscar Schofield ($252,000)

Proposals Submitted

• Northeastern University: A Mesophotic coral reef observatory for climate change. Oscar Schofield, $1,531,768.
• Biodiversity Research Institute: BRI-Projecting the effects of OSW-mediated benthic changes on marine ecosystems. Oscar Schofield, $31,764.
• National Science Foundation: MRI Track 1: Acquisition of an underwater Bio-Sentinel Glider. Oscar Schofield, $1,147,896.
• National Science Foundation: Providing a holographic imaging capability for Slocum gliders. Oscar Schofield, $988,866.
• National Science Foundation: Fish Caron and Flux. Grace Saba, $511,682.
• Creare, Inc.: Integrated Optical Imaging of the Environment on Underwater Autonomous Vehicles. Travis Miles, $9,888.
• National Science Foundation: Supplement for Polar Literacy: A model for youth engagement and learning. Janice McDonnell ($39,950).
• National Science Foundation: Collaborative Research: Strengthening the OOI Data Labs Community of Practice (CoP) to enhance undergraduate data literacy. Janice McDonnell ($465,011).
• Rider University: Improving Undergraduate Scientific Explanations: Exploring the Role of Data Literacy Skills in Scientific Reasoning. Sage Lichtenwalner, ($19,663).

Papers Published: (**Current or Former Graduate Student or Postdoctoral Researchers)

• Cimino, M., Conroy, J., Connors, E., Bowman, J., Corso, A., Ducklow, H., Fraser, W., Friedlaender, A., Kim, H., Larsen, G. D., Moffat, C., Nichols, R., Pallin, L., Roberts, D., Roberts, M., Steinberg, D., Thibodeau, P., Trinh, R., Schofield, O., Stammerjohn, S. 2023. Long-term patterns in ecosystem phenology near Palmer Station, Antarctica, from the perspective of the Adélie penguin. Ecosphere DOI: 1002/ecs2.4417
• Nardelli, S. C., Stammerjohn, S. E., Waite, N., Schofield, O. 2 Coastal phytoplankton seasonal succession and diversity at Palmer Station, Antarctica. Limnology and Oceanography. DOI: 10.1002/lno.12314
• Saba, G.K., Schwartzman, B. 2023. Recommendations for Developing a Statewide Ocean Acidification Monitoring Network for New Jersey. Access document here.
• Rutgers University. Green Climate Fund SAP20: Climate Resilient Food Security.
• Miles, T., Munroe, D., Kohut, J., and others. 2023. NOAA Tech memo? 1.3 Interactions of Offshore Wind on Oceanographic Processes. In Hogan, F., Hooker, B., Jensen, B., Johnston, L., Lipsky, A., Methratta, E., Silva, A., Hawkins, A. (Eds.) Fisheries and Offshore Wind Interactions: Synthesis of Science. NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-NE-291, p. 50-55.
• Seidel, D., J.E. Simon, R. Govindasamy, O. Schofield, original co-authors. 2023. Rutgers University, Green Climate Fund SAP20: Climate Resilient Food Security.