Very humbled to announce that the Fish and Movement Ecology Lab at UNH and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) have been awarded a grant exceeding a half a million dollars from the National Science Foundation.
The Gulf of Maine is warming rapidly, and fish species along our coast are on the move, with many species' distributions pushing northward as temperatures increase. However, the response of each species is unique; some are shifting northward rapidly, while others move little or not at all. As a result, the interactions among species is going to change, affecting the prey available to predators and overall ecosystem structure. This project is going to investigate how diets of predators have shifted over the past several decades. This information, along with climate change models, will be integrated to understand how predator-prey relationships may continue to change in the future (2055). We will also investigate why some species may be better equipped to maintain a high-energy diet in the future, while others may be at risk of energy deficits due to reduction in prey quality.
This project is also exciting in that we will be reaching the next generation of scientists, developing new materials for GMRI's "LabVenture" program that brings ~10,000 elementary school students through its doors each year, and further partnering with New Hampshire's Seacoast Science Center. Lastly, this project will support a PhD student at UNH and a postdoctoral scholar at GMRI.
For more information, check out the link below:
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