NSF Award
2418066
The Great Lakes Center for Fresh Waters and Human Health is a consortium of over 10 universities and agencies working in the Great Lakes region and directed by the University of Michigan and University of Toledo. The Center is a five year effort to further our understanding of the critical risk that climate change, and resulting cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (cHABs), pose to freshwater ecosystems and human health. Increased precipitation, more powerful storm events, and warming waters all encourage the proliferation of cHABs, which now occur in all five Great Lakes. The Center is organized around several overarching themes. The first is to resolve how climate change influences the occurrence of cHABs and the transport of the toxins they produce. The second is to understand toxin production and how toxins impact health, through both airborne and waterborne exposure. The third is to develop new technologies for enhanced monitoring and forecasting. In collaboration with agency and community partners the team will integrate findings into state-of-the-art forecasts and other data products that reach a wide stakeholder audience. A Community Engagement Core (CEC) will connect Center science to relevant communities, promoting co-design of research and communication of research outcomes to stakeholders. The team will leverage the Center’s research enterprise to recruit and train a diverse next generation of scientists in the field of oceans and human health, including support for graduate students and postdocs. The Center will advance inclusivity in all facets of research and engagement. Together, these research, engagement, and training activities will advance progress toward the stated goals of understanding and translating climate change effects on cHAB events and their threats to human health in the Great Lakes region. The Center is jointly supported by NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences and by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).<br/><br/>The Center’s research is organized around four distinct but highly integrated projects. Project 1 seeks to determine how a changing climate influences the proliferation and toxin production of cHAB taxa. This project will use a multipronged field-lab experimental approach to test the hypothesis that climate-driven episodic events (e.g., storms) affect several classes of cyanotoxins (microcystins, anatoxins, saxitoxins, and anabaenopeptins), taste and odor compounds, and phycosphere interactions. Project 2 seeks to reveal the diversity, spatial and temporal distribution, and bioactivity of known and undiscovered toxins and other secondary metabolites. This project will use a combination of approaches (including metagenomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics) to characterize the diversity of emerging toxins and bioactive compounds currently invisible to methods used in routine water quality analysis. Project 3 will study toxin release from cHAB cells, aerosolization, and transport to test the hypothesis that climate change will increase human exposure to cHAB toxins through ingestion and inhalation. A combined measurement and modeling approach will be used to evaluate the impact of climate-change driven stressors on the distribution of dissolved and particulate toxins in both water bodies and aerosols generated from cHABs, enabling predictions of toxin exposure under a changing climate. Project 4 will assess the effects of aerosolized toxins on human health with a special focus on populations that are vulnerable due to pre-existing conditions, such as asthma. Project 4 will test the overall hypothesis that exposure to aerosolized cyanotoxins induces significant inflammation in the airway epithelium and that individuals with asthma are particularly susceptible to cHAB aerosols. Combined with the results of the other three projects, this work will enable assessment of human health risks of cHAB toxins under current conditions and future climate scenarios. In summary, the Great Lakes Center for Fresh Waters and Human Health aims to understand and communicate the risks of cHABs in the face of climate change through collaborative research, engagement efforts, and training initiatives.<br/><br/>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.
