Poster Session 3, 1:15 PM - 2:00 PM: Campus Center Auditorium [A42]

Presenter: Emily Marie Cruickshank

Faculty Sponsor: Jesse Farmer

School: UMass Boston

Research Area: Geology and Earth Sciences

ABSTRACT

The Belize Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System (MBRS) is a 1,200-km-long network of coral reefs in the western Caribbean Sea. In recent years, this reef system has been exposed to anthropogenic nutrient runoff from fertilizer use and fossil fuel combustion. Anthropogenic pollution is expected to promote eutrophication, degrading coral reef ecosystems in the MBRS by reducing coral growth. However, the spatial pattern of anthropogenic pollution and its relative importance compared to natural nutrient cycling within coral reef ecosystems has not been established in the MBRS. Here, we reconstruct nutrient inputs to the MBRS using measurements of the nitrogen isotopic composition (δ¹⁵N) of skeletal-bound organic nitrogen in the massive starlet coral Siderastrea siderea, a widespread reef-building coral in the Caribbean. We expect to track anthropogenic nutrient inputs through an elevated δ¹⁵N of food consumed by corals in eutrophied reefs. The δ¹⁵N of S. siderea corals will additionally be compared across nearshore, forereef, and backreef locations as well as latitudinal transects along the length of the Belize MBRS.