Murat Van Ardelan

Life below water, as well as at waters, is threatened due to human activity that has caused global warming. As UNESCO stresses, “the time to learn and act for our planet is now”. This article reports on a literature review of existing action research on water education, ocean literacy and arts integration carried out by an emerging interdisciplinary research group stretching across the fields of marine science, arts and science education. Joined by a concern for water education and ocean literacy, the interdisciplinary teams screened 368 research articles with the assistance of the program Covidence which helps with streamlining the literature review processes in a team. Ending up with 14 relevant articles that were analysed in-depth, the authors argue that arts-integrated water education projects take place locally across higher education, formal education and informal education in collaborative teams. The action research projects screened promote and develop open-ended, inquiry-based and creative pedagogies, seeking to foster the capacity to act for sustainable living in a more-than-human world. However, all research projects screened in the review seemed to develop water education more generally. There is a lack of literature researching how the connection to ocean literacy including life below water specifically, can be nurtured.

Cyanobacteria have high iron requirements due to iron-rich photosynthetic machineries. Despite the high concentrations of iron in the Earth’s crust, iron is limiting in many marine environments due to iron’s low solubility. Oxic conditions leave a large portion of the ocean’s iron pool unavailable for biotic uptake, and so the physiochemical properties of iron are hugely important for iron’s bioavailability. Our study is the first to investigate the effect of iron source on iron internalization and extracellular reduction by Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002. The results indicated that the amorphous iron hydrolysis species produced by FeCl₃ better support growth in Synechococcus through more efficient iron internalization and a larger degree of extracellular reduction of iron than the crystalline FeO(OH). An analysis of dissolved iron (II) indicated that biogenic reduction took place in cultures of Synechococcus grown on both FeCl₃ and FeO(OH).

Iron is an essential, yet scarce, nutrient in marine environments. Phytoplankton, and especially cyanobacteria, have developed a wide range of mechanisms to acquire iron and maintain their iron-rich photosynthetic machinery. Iron limitation studies often utilize either oceanographic methods to understand large scale processes, or laboratory-based, molecular experiments to identify underlying molecular mechanisms on a cellular level. Here, we aim to highlight the benefits of both approaches to encourage interdisciplinary understanding of the effects of iron limitation on cyanobacteria with a focus on avoiding pitfalls in the initial phases of collaboration. In particular, we discuss the use of trace metal clean methods in combination with sterile techniques, and the challenges faced when a new collaboration is set up to combine interdisciplinary techniques. Methods necessary for producing reliable data, such as High Resolution Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (HR-ICP-MS), Flow Injection Analysis Chemiluminescence (FIA-CL), and 77K fluorescence emission spectroscopy are discussed and evaluated and a technical manual, including the preparation of the artificial seawater medium Aquil, cleaning procedures, and a sampling scheme for an iron limitation experiment is included. This paper provides a reference point for researchers to implement different techniques into interdisciplinary iron studies that span cyanobacteria physiology, molecular biology, and biogeochemistry.

Research projects combining different disciplines are increasingly common and sought after by funding agencies looking for ways to achieve environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Creating and running a truly integrated research project that combines very different disciplines is, however, no easy task. Large-scale efforts to create interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research efforts have reported on their experiences in trying to achieve this goal. This article shares the methods, challenges and achievements experienced by a smaller group of researchers who have developed an interdisciplinary approach based on former results of Norwegian and Chilean experiments. The project “A Cross-disciplinary Integrated Eco-system Eutrophication Research and Management Approach” (CINTERA), funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN, project 216607), brings together the fields of political science, economics, marine biology/oceanography and marine bio-geo-chemistry to improve the understanding of marine eutrophication and its possible socio-economic impacts. CINTERA is a multidisciplinary project that evolved into an interdisciplinary project and in so doing, transformed the attitudes of participants. The transformative process was generated particularly by the need to work closely together in making the CINTERA project useful for policy-makers.

The distribution and concentration of iron in seawater and plankton were studied under different ammonium concentrations along a 22 day mesocosm experiment in order to assess possible effects of aquaculture over the phytoplankton and the biogeochemistry in fjords of Chile. Brackish and marine water were used in two different setups, each one with 1 control and 4 different NH4+ concentrations. Total Chelex labile (TFeCh), dissolved Chelex labile (DFeCh) and DGT labile (FeDGT) iron measurements were performed in seawater, wheile the particulate iron content was determined as total (PFe) and fractionated (PFeSF) for the plankton community. Average concentration per treatment showed higher concentrations for both TFeCh and DFeCh in the marine system compared to the brackish. TFeCh showed general increasing trend in time and with increasing ammonium concentration, exhibiting positive correlation to the chlorophyll and particulate organic carbon content, whereas DFeCh presented an inverse pattern as expected. FeDGT showed an average lower concentration compare to DFeCh with final concentrations significantly lower in treatments with artificial ammonium addition. PFe showed an increasing trend in time and with increasing ammonium in both systems. Yet, when normalized to Chlorophyll a or particulate organic carbon the trend inverted, showing that at higher ammonium loading the iron per Chlorophyll a or particulate organic carbon decreases. PFeSF major changes occurred in the marine system in the ratio between the 20–140 μm and the 2–20 μm fractions, suggesting possible community structure shift. Overall, ammonium input indicated an effect over iron in the seawater and the particulate matter, depending on the iron form and the microbial assemblage. The further changes over the microbial composition due to ammonium addition may affect the cycling of iron, having possible negative or positive feedbacks over major biogeochemical cycles.

Anthropogenic (aquaculture) changes in environment nutrient concentrations may affect phytoplankton (biomass and taxa composition) in marine coastal waters off the Chilean Patagonia. The effects of adding nitrate (NO₃ ⁻) to natural phytoplankton assemblages were evaluated considering biomass, cell abundance, and taxonomic composition. Microcosm experiments were performed in the spring, summer, and winter in the Comau Fjord located in Subantarctic Patagonia. At the end of the experiments, NO₃ ⁻ decreased rapidly and was undetectable in treatments, indicating a strong NO₃ ⁻ deficiency associated with an exponential increase in Chl-a concentrations, particulate organic nitrogen, and carbon in these treatments. Moreover, given the depleted nitrate concentrations of the spring and summer experiments, the micro-phytoplankton taxa structure shifted from mixed diatom and dinoflagellate assemblages (Ceratium spp., Dinophysis spp., Coscinodiscus sp., Rhizosolenia pungens) to assemblages dominated by blooms of the classic chain-forming diatoms found in temperate and cold waters such as Chaetoceros spp., Skeletonema spp., and Thalassiosira spp. Thus, nitrogen sources (i.e., nitrate, ammonia) may influence phytoplankton abundance and biomass accumulation dynamics in the northern section of Patagonia. It also emphasizes the importance of diatom taxa in regards to the short-term response of phytoplankton to changing environmental nutrient conditions due to natural (decreasing freshwater stream flow) and anthropogenic (aquaculture) events. This situation may be one of the future scenarios in the Patagonian fjords, thus stressing the needs for active environmental monitoring and impact assessment.