Biomonitoring for Ecosystem Health

Estuaries are dynamic coastal ecosystems that are uniquely intertwined with human life and subject to a diversity of anthropogenic pressures. Due to their complexity, monitoring the health of estuaries and pinpointing stressors for mitigation can be challenging. Plankton communities are key components of estuarine ecosystem functioning and are often used for bioindication because they respond rapidly to environmental change. Data on plankton community composition is traditionally obtained through visual identification by trained experts but processing samples is timeconsuming and limited in taxonomic resolution. A solution is DNA metabarcoding, a molecular technique that utilizes universal primers and high-throughput sequencing to identify multiple species within a single sample that contains DNA from mixed sources. Here, I propose to optimize DNA metabarcoding approaches to 1) design a novel “toolkit” for the analysis of plankton communities in estuarine water samples and 2) use these tools to investigate the relationship between environmental parameters, anthropogenic influences, and plankton community composition in the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve in northeast Florida. The major outcome of this research will be a set of optimized tools for use in coastal systems across the U.S. and the important baseline data needed for conservation efforts in the GTM NERR.