Dania Beach, Florida, a small coastal city about 10 miles south of Fort Lauderdale, is best known as a jai-alai haven and home of the International Game Fishing Association Hall of Fame. It’s also where, for more than a decade, researchers at Nova Southeastern University’s (NSU) Oceanographic Center have quietly studied coral ecosystems in association [...]
An extensive Karenia brevis algae bloom off of the Florida coast prompted NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science to provide the state funding to pay for offshore monitoring of the bloom’s development, movement, and toxicity. This can help the state more accurately predict its magnitude and movement of the bloom as well as its impacts. The bloom started in [...]
This post was co-authored with Bob Diaz, a WRI partner and professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. This year’s extreme weather events—a warm winter, even warmer summer, and a drought that covered nearly two-thirds of the continental United States—has certainly caused its fair share of damages. But despite the crop failures, water shortages, [...]
The largest red tide bloom to affect Southwest Florida in years stretches nearly 100 miles from Lee County to Pinellas, with reports of fish kills and irritating red-tide air concentrated in Sarasota County. The widespread nature and intensity of the bloom, strongest off Charlotte Harbor, exceeds a smaller outbreak at this time last year and [...]
Nancy Rabalais is a marine ecologist who is dedicated to documenting and mitigating the effects of hypoxic zones—aquatic areas with low dissolved oxygen levels commonly known as “dead zones”—that have expanded dramatically in the Gulf of Mexico and many other coastal systems around the globe. Since the mid-1980s, she has led a long-term monitoring program [...]
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the recipients of their ‘Genius Grants’ yesterday, and one of them is a scientist dedicated to studying the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Nancy Rabalais is a marine ecologist and the executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. A ‘dead zone’ is an [...]
On September 27, Nova Southeastern University officially opens a new research facility, the 86,000-square-foot Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Ecosystems Science Research, which will host local, national, and international coral specialists. Located at the University’s Oceanographic Center at John U. Lloyd Beach State Park in Dania Beach, Florida, it will be the largest research facility in the [...]
In a $50 million five-story brick and glass building in John U. Lloyd Beach State Park, researchers are taking the biomass of crustaceans to help study the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, cultivating asexual staghorn coral and sequencing the genomes of sponges. The answers they discover will help preserve an ecological resource — coral [...]