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Official newspaper of The University of Texas at Austin

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Official newspaper of The University of Texas at Austin

The Daily Texan

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October 4, 2022
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Grant will allow UT researchers to be left out in the cold

0327_MelWestfall_Arctic
Melanie Westfall

A $5.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation will help UT researchers study the Arctic’s coastal ecosystems. 

The grant will allow researchers to track how natural climate cycles influence coastal systems in the Arctic. 

“The focus of this grant is to advance our fundamental understanding of how variations in terrestrial inputs and oceanographic properties interact to influence the organization, stability and resilience of coastal food webs,” Kenneth Dunton, Marine Science Institute professor, said.


With the grant, the institute will establish a Long-Term Ecological Research program and a site along the Beaufort Sea on Alaska’s northern coast. 

“A LTER program concentrates on studies of ecological processes that play out at time scales spanning decades to centuries,” Dunton said. “Long-term data sets from the LTER program provide a context to evaluate the nature and pace of ecological change, to interpret its effects and to forecast the range of future biological responses to change.”

The site will be the first arctic marine LTER, according to Dunton. Researchers chose the location because it is representative of other arctic coastlines and experiences dramatic seasonal changes driven by climate change, Dunton said.

According to William Ambrose, director of the National Science Foundation’s Arctic Observing Network program, this LTER will help answer questions about changes in the Arctic.

“The Arctic is changing rapidly, (including) shoreline erosion, watershed runoff and sea-ice dynamics,” Ambrose said. “The questions that are being addressed with this research can only be answered with long-term research, which is the reason the LTER program is supported by the (foundation).”

According to Ambrose, researchers in the program will work closely with the local native Iñupiat people, who rely on the resources of the lagoons to survive. 

James McClelland, associate professor at the Institute, said the new site will incorporate local high school students from the nearby towns of Kaktovik and Utqiagvik into the research.

“Young people in Kaktovik and Utqiagvik are very in tune with their local environment,” McClelland said. “This is in part due to the fact that hunting and fishing are central to their life and culture on the north slope of Alaska. (High school students) will be able to help communicate our finding back to their broader communities and share their local knowledge and understanding of the lagoon systems with us.”

The research team includes 12 primary investigators from UT Austin, UT El Paso, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Oregon State University and University of Toronto Mississauga, McClelland said.

“We all have extensive experience working in the Arctic and bring different skills and backgrounds to the table,” he said. “In some ways, this LTER builds on work that each of us have been doing.”

McClelland said that the novelty of the LTER is that it brings together researchers to work on shared objectives and to tackle questions that cannot be answered over the short time frames of regular research grants.

“The long-term perspective provided by this LTER will improve our understanding of how variations in land-ocean interactions over time influence coastal food webs,” he said. “Long-term datasets are particularly rare in the Arctic and are essential for separating natural patterns from human-induced changes.”

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Grant will allow UT researchers to be left out in the cold