Project Grant 2223204

The National Science Foundation Division of Ocean Sciences awarded a $296,671 Project Grant to the University of Virginia to develop a novel approach for measuring greenhouse gas emissions from coastal marine ecosystems. The two-year award, made under the Geosciences program (CFDA 47.050), will support the Principal Investigator's research combining upside-down aquatic eddy covariance measurements of oxygen fluxes at the air-water interface with new sensor technologies to extract greenhouse gas-specific exchange coefficients and directly calculate air-water fluxes of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. If successful, this new measurement approach would significantly improve estimates of greenhouse gas exchange in shallow coastal waters and enable new lines of process-based research to enhance understanding of controls on these exchanges. The project aims to fill important knowledge gaps regarding aquatic environments' role in mitigating human-generated greenhouse gas emissions through more accurate predictions of climate change impacts.