The NGA LTER REU program has selected our 2023 cohort. We are excited to host six undergraduate students this summer at UAF. They will be in Fairbanks from June to August and will have the opportunity to participate in our summer research expedition onboard the R/V Kilo Moana working on individual projects related to various forcings affecting the ecology of the Northern Gulf of Alaska.
Katie Gavenus, our Education and Outreach Coordinator, has been successful in securing funding for a new project titled PhytoCLAS (Culture, Language, Art, and Science). This is a North Pacific Research Board funded project learning about phytoplankton in the Gulf of Alaska through culture, language, art, and science. There are two complementary components to this project: (1) working with local language speakers to highlight or develop local Native words for plankton and (2) creating opportunities for youth in coastal communities around the Northern Gulf of Alaska to learn about phytoplankton through outdoor sampling, microscope labs, art, presentations, and language.
Students and scientists in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Photo courtesy of Hana Busse.
The Northern Gulf of Alaska Long Term Ecological Research (NGA LTER) project invites Alaska Native undergraduate students to participate in our interdisciplinary project during 2021.
Timing options for student involvement:
Spring and Summer 2021
Summer 2021 only
Summer and Fall 2021
Spring and Fall 2021
Any of the first three options include an opportunity to participate in a research expedition (dates to be determined as sea activities may be subject to quarantines, personnel reductions, and other restrictions due to COVID-19).
NGA LTER is one site within the national LTER network. Our research team investigates the features, mechanisms, and processes that drive NGA ecosystem production and foster its resilience. Scientists conduct ship-based observations and experiments, do research in land-based laboratories, run computer models of the ocean, and communicate findings to students and the public through education and outreach partners.
We seek a Alaska Native undergraduate student with interest in the Northern Gulf of Alaska to work with our University of Alaska Fairbanks team. Student research will integrate with work currently being done on the NGA LTER ecosystem. The time period of this REU position could includes our summer expedition aboard R/V Sikuliaq, so participation in ship-board research activities is possible, as is work that fosters partnerships with other disciplines. Research themes include biogeochemical cycling, microplankton ecology, physical oceanography, chemical oceanography, zooplankton ecology and molecular studies.
This REU opportunity is not limited strictly to oceanographic research, but can be a project that promotes partnership between marine science and other disciplines. Projects can be related to fields including but not limited to visual arts, music, education, engineering, communication. Participation could include joining a research expedition to the Northern Gulf of Alaska onboard R/V Sikuliaq, or it could be carried out fully at the UAF campus. The student will present their work to the UAF LTER community when the project is completed.
Details
Salary
Stipend of $5760 for a position that requires 480 total working hours.
Additional funds may be available to offset housing and transportation costs.
Qualifications
Required:
Alaska Native heritage
Preference will be given to applicants whose resume indicate:
Desire to work in a team setting.
Communication skills.
Organizational skills.
An interest in science.
Self-motivation.
Enrolled in the UA system.
Upper division status in a bachelor’s program.
How to Apply
Filtering nutrient samples aboard the R/V Sikuliaq.
Applicants must be citizens or permanent residents of the U.S. and its possessions and must be enrolled in a 2- or 4-year institution of higher education. Students who have received a bachelor’s degree before the start date of the program are ineligible.
To apply, email each of the following:
Cover letter
Resume
Make sure your resume includes:
Contact information: email address and telephone number
Students setting up deckboard incubators aboard the R/V Sikuliaq during our 2019 REU program.
The Northern Gulf of Alaska Long Term Ecological Research (NGA LTER) project invites undergraduate students to participate in our interdisciplinary oceanographic research this summer. This cohort of REU students will join our team from June 15 to August 20, 2021. The application period closes February 15, 2021; applicants will be notified in mid-March.
The NGA LTER is one site within the national LTER network. Our research team investigates the features, mechanisms, and processes that support NGA ecosystem production and foster its resilience. Scientists conduct field work, including ship-based experiments, run computer models of the ocean, and communicate findings to students and the public through education and outreach partners.
We seek highly motivated undergraduates with interest in marine science, biology, chemistry, and/or physics to work with scientists through the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Student research will integrate with work currently being done on the NGA LTER ecosystem. The time period of this REU position may include our summer cruise aboard R/V Sikuliaq, so participation in ship-board research activities is possible, as is historical time series or retroactive data analysis. Oceanographic research themes include biogeochemical cycling, microplankton ecology, physical oceanography, chemical oceanography, zooplankton ecology and molecular studies.
Details
Salary
Stipend of $5760 for a full-time position (40 hours per week) over 10 weeks.
Additional funds may be available to offset housing and transportation costs.
Qualifications
Required:
College level background in biology, chemistry, physics, or marine science.
The ability to carefully follow instructions.
Desire to work in a team setting.
Communication skills.
Desired:
Upper division status in a Bachelor of Science program.
An interest in continuing scientific research upon graduation.
How to Apply
Applicants must be citizens or permanent residents of the U.S. and its possessions and must be enrolled in a 2- or 4-year institution of higher education. Students who have received a bachelor’s degree before the start date of the program are ineligible. Members of groups under-represented in earth and environmental science are strongly encouraged to apply.
To apply, submit each of the following:
Cover letter
Resume
Make sure your resume includes:
Contact information: email address and telephone numbers
Satellite observed Chlorophyll in the Gulf of Alaska with NGA station locations. [credit: Rachel Potter]
The Summer 2019 cruise aboard R/V Sikuliaq has begun. 2019 is the 50th consecutive year of samples taken at oceanographic station GAK1 (begun December 1970) and the 23nd consecutive year of Seward Line physical-chemical-phytoplankton-zooplankton-seabird sampling. However, many new things are happening too.
Special Studies
Deployment of a Gulf Ecosystem Observatory (GEO) mooring aboard R/V Sikuliaq [credit: Seth Danielson]
One of our special studies involves several days of high-resolution sampling of the Copper River discharge plume. We suspect this plume is a source of iron (and other nutrients), therefore driving some of the high productivity in the Gulf of Alaska. To investigate this, we’ll be deploying drifters, making maps of data along the plume edge, and performing incubation growth experiment using both shelf and offshore water.
In addition, the Gulf of Alaska Ecosystem Observatory (GEO) is being deployed this week. During the next year, it will report oceanographic conditions in real-time. The GEO moorings will provide the NGA LTER program with year-long data about conditions in the Gulf, so we can know what is happening even when we can’t be there. Two of the three moorings in the array report real-time data on ocean surface conditions. You can view data from these moorings in the Ocean Data Explorer system provided by AOOS and Axiom Data Science:
Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) students Ayanda, Kelsie, Adrianna, Kate, and Delphina on the deck of R/V Sikuliaq on the 4th of July following safety training for bear guards, compressed air grapnel hook cannon demonstrations, and deployment of satellite-tracked drifters. [credit: Seth Danielson]
Five Research Experience for Undergraduate students are also aboard. Most of their time is spent in the labs at UAF and WWU, but for a few weeks, they are experiencing life at sea. They are:
Adrianna, working with Russ Hopcroft (UAF),
Kate, working with Russ Hopcroft (UAF),
Ayanda, working with Seth Danielson (UAF),
Delphina, working with Suzanne Strom (WWU), and
Kelsie, working with Ana Aguilar-Islas (UAF).
Participants are also updating several blogs about their work.
The Strom Lab describes their work with plankton (especially heterotrophs) in The Planktonic Life
Catherine (Cat) Fuller describes her experiences in her Teacher at Sea Blog.
Internet communication with ships in the Gulf of Alaska is spotty, but these blogs will be updated as often as possible. Katie Gavenus’s completed blog from the Spring cruise gives even more insight into our work.
The ideas for REU projects give an overview of currently interesting research topics at the NGA LTER. They range from physics to chemistry to biology. They involve retrospective analysis of decades worth of data or cutting-edge sampling aboard R/V Sikuliaq. The following are project ideas submitted by UAF investigators. REU students might work one of them, or use them as inspiration to design their own summer project. At the end of the summer, students will present their findings.
REU project with Seth Danielson:
The physics of the Prince William Sound
Prince William Sound (PWS) is a fjord adjacent to the Gulf of Alaska. A shallow sill separates the deep waters within the fjord from the Gulf, which provides sheltered habitat for zooplankton that over-winter there during diapause. Since the Exxon Valdez oil spill, physical oceanographic measurements, such as temperature and salinity, have been taken in PWS. The REU student will assemble these measurements (and the density calculated from them) from multiple sources, and will compute monthly means and time-series of anomalies. Consequently, we can investigate:
Do the deep waters in PWS get replaced every year?
Are there trends in the temperature and salinity properties?
How much do the deep properties vary from one year to the next?
The student will gain experience analyzing physical oceanographic data, and will code algorithms in either MATLAB or Python.
CTD sampling in Prince William Sound.
REU project with Ana Aguilar-Islas:
Investigating nutrient cycling in the Northern Gulf of Alaska (NGA)
Along with light, nutrients are essential resources for phytoplankton (unicellular primary producers). In the NGA, the relative availability of macronutrients (i.e., nitrate, phosphate, silicic acid) and the micronutrient iron exert a key control on the phytoplankton community structure, which in turn influences higher trophic level communities.
The REU student will participate in the summer 2019 LTER cruise onboard R/V Sikuliaq in late June/early July. Onboard, they will:
Participate in water sampling while collecting macronutrients, and
Help perform iron dissolution experiments.
Back in the lab, the student will work with archived nutrient data to investigate inter-annual (2017 and 2018) and seasonal (spring and fall) variability in macronutrient distributions along the Seward Line in the NGA. The student will gain seagoing experience, will learn best-practices in the collection of seawater for nutrient analysis, will gain experience plotting and interpreting oceanographic chemical data.
Performing an incubation experiment aboard R/V Sikuliaq, Spring 2018
REU project with Russ Hopcroft:
Computers help count zooplankton
NGA-LTER scientists collect millions of zooplankton during our net tows in the Gulf of Alaska. These must be identified into species and counted to order to understand the Gulf’s community structure. But that is tedious work. Therefore, we are teaching computers to do it for us. First, a watertight, flat-bed scanner (ZooScan) creates a digital image of a plankton sample from a net tow. Then software isolates individual images and sorts them into taxonomic groups (or particles and detritus). To teach the software how to do the sorting, scientists create a training set and then double-check the output. The REU student will gain lab experience as they scan and sort samples, and then will have the opportunity to look for differences in communities across stations and cruises.
REU project with Russ Hopcroft:
Telling sisters apart
The Gulf of Alaska zooplankton contains many examples of closely related “sibling species”. These species occupy similar niches in the environment, but are slightly different in ways that may create advantages under changing conditions. It is likely that climate change acts by tipping the scales on which sister species are more successful. Unfortunately, zooplankton sampling in previous years did not always differentiate between these sisters. To gain knowledge about how things have changed in the NGA over the years, we hope a detail-oriented REU student will look back through our archived samples. They will help establish the shifting ratio of two keystone copepod species during the first decade of our time series, while they gain experience in microscope work and taxonomic classification. Moreover, we are also open to other small projects that might utilize our historical samples.
Contents of plankton net samples vary dramatically by station.
Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Summer 2019
Overview
The Northern Gulf of Alaska Long Term Ecological Research (NGA LTER) project invites undergraduate students to participate in our interdisciplinary oceanographic research. Two or three REU students will join our team from June 3 to August 23, 2019. The application period closes May 7, 2019March 15, 2019; applicants will be notified soon thereafter.
We seek highly motivated undergraduates with interest in marine science, biology, chemistry, physics, and/or computer science to work with scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The students’ research will integrate with work currently being done on the NGA LTER ecosystem. Oceanographic research projects include water column characterization measurements, zooplankton studies, particle dynamics studies, data analysis, and numerical oceanographic modeling.
The time period of this REU position includes our summer cruise aboard R/V Sikuliaq. So participation in ship-board research activities is also possible.
Details
Salary
$12/hr for a summer full-time position (40 hours per week) over 12 weeks.
Discretionary funds may be available to offset housing and transportation costs.
Qualifications
Required:
College level background in biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, or marine science
The ability to carefully follow instructions
The ability to successfully work in a team setting
Good communication skills.
Desired:
Upper division status in a B.S. program
An interest in continuing scientific research upon graduation
Eligibility
Must be a registered student in an undergraduate program.
Citizenship or permanent residency in the United States or its possessions is required.
To Apply
To apply, email your resume and a cover letter to Elizabeth Dobbins (eldobbins@alaska.edu). The cover letter should include a brief description of your interest in participating in LTER research. Make sure your resume includes:
Contact information: email address and telephone numbers,
Applicable completed coursework,
Previous laboratory/field experience, and
Anticipated graduation date
Preliminary contact with potential mentors is highly suggested. You can find potential mentors and their fields of study on our Personnel Page.
Members of groups under-represented in earth and environmental science are particularly encouraged to apply.
