Dr David Suggett and his team at the University of Technology, Sydney have been using a Chelsea Technologies Group FastOcean to monitor coastal health along the East coast of Australia. “Primary productivity of the coastal ocean directly influences drawdown of atmospheric CO₂ and fuels fisheries,” said Dr Suggett.

“Conditions that regulate primary productivity are highly variable along the east coast and we have been using the FastOcean to better understand the control of nutrient availability on carbon fixation in waters off the coast of Sydney; we have been adopting novel incubation approaches to better predict CO₂ uptake capacity from FastOcean determined ‘electron transport rates’ within these waters. These data will feed into predictive models of environmental regulation of CO₂ fluxes.”

Dr Suggett and his team have also been developing novel functional-trait based approaches, based on photo biological signatures produced by the FastOcean to discriminate ‘healthy functioning’ amongst closely related microbes. “Genetic tools are frequently used to assign ‘species’ level markers to marine microbes but we have developed a novel FRRf-based approach to identify functional groups,” said Dr Suggett. “We have applied this to the symbiotic algae of corals and currently evaluating how this can provide an improved means to determine the susceptibility of corals to stress.”

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