EDI Staging Environment
This project examined the impact of mud-dumping into the Goleta Pier following the Santa Barbara debris flow in January of 2018. Specifically, our experiment focused on how the nutrients leached from mud from recent debris flow altered concentrations of organic and inorganic nutrients in the coastal seawater. We also examined how these altered levels of nutrients affected local phytoplankton communities. The outdoor incubation experiments were conducted in both fall and winter over the span of one week with seasonal phytoplankton communities collected from Goleta Pier. Samples were taken four times throughout the seven days to determine how nutrient concentrations and phytoplankton community compositions changed in response to the mud leachate addition. Future work includes both spring and summer experiments. This study will for the first time allow us to develop an understanding for the consequences that the mud dumping, which followed to Thomas Fire and subsequent debris flow, had on the effected coastal ecosystem.
EDI is a collaboration between the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Center for Limnology:
