Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Evaluation, Mitigation, and Adaptation of Impacts of Ocean Acidification to Marine Ecosystems

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities.

It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.

The project will quantitatively evaluate the impact of culturing corals and seaweed together in an effort to reduce ocean acidification and mitigate coral bleaching. This project will assess whether this practice is a feasible intervention with quantifiable benefits, and whether this approach has potential to be implemented in other coral reef locations.

The study sites include Onna-son, Okinawa, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, and Mayotte, France. The results will help in measuring the impacts of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems and will provide a summary of mitigation measures to reduce the ocean acidification impacts. The work is critical in providing information to assist scientists around the globe to understand different elements of ocean acidification which is considered to be an emerging threat in many regions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.