The Northern Gulf Institute at LSU

Public Health, Stressors and Water Quality

(NGI-LSU Project LSU-02)

Objectives

The overall hypothesis of the proposed work is: changing hydrologic regimes and nutrient loadings will impact ecosystem restoration and public health in coastal waters.

Figure 1: Conceptual diagram of structural and functional elements
of water-column planktonic communities in the Delta environment, as related to public health

The specific objectives and related approaches of this project are:

To quantify temporal and spatial dynamics of community biomass in the two e Louisiana estuaries, using POM samples collected from open waters during routine monthly transects;
To determine plankton community metrics, using fingerprint of microbial metabolites, nutrient bioassays (algae), respiratory demand (whole plankton community) and sediment records;
To routinely sample estuarine waters to quantify occurrence and abundance of harmful algal species, and also begin to quantify HAB toxicity using ELISA and HPLC;
To develop qPCR protocols to detect and quantify potentially pathogenic Vibrio species of interest in coastal waters and study the temporal and spatial dynamics of Vibrio vulnificus and Vibrio parahaemolyticus using both culturing and molecular methods;
To determine the impacts of physiochemical parameters (temperature, salinity, and nutrients in particular) on the development of microbial populations.