Session
2024 Poster Session
Location
Salt Lake Community College Westpointe Campus, Salt Lake City, UT
Start Date
5-6-2024 9:55 AM
Description
Great Salt Lake (GSL) is home to a massive variety of microorganisms and these populations will aid in understanding the ecosystem. The Union Pacific’s railroad causeway divided GSL into two distinct sections, the green South Arm and pink North Arm, and each have nurtured two accordingly distinctive ecosystems. Breaches periodically opened in the causeway allow the waters to mix and provide opportunity for the microbial communities of the two arms to intermingle. This project focuses on procuring a picture of the North Arm’s microbial diversity and the extent that it adapts to new environments over the four seasons, as well as what happens to the microbes and their nutrient exchange at that breach mixing point. Halophilic archaea and algae comprise the majority of the GSL biodiversity and we hypothesize that those taxonomic compositions of the North Arm are stable over the different seasons, due to their extremophilic nature. Over nearly two years of sampling, we are seeing stability in community compositions in comparison to the lower salinity South Arm.
Ecological Dynamics of the Hypersaline Great Salt Lake North Arm
Salt Lake Community College Westpointe Campus, Salt Lake City, UT
Great Salt Lake (GSL) is home to a massive variety of microorganisms and these populations will aid in understanding the ecosystem. The Union Pacific’s railroad causeway divided GSL into two distinct sections, the green South Arm and pink North Arm, and each have nurtured two accordingly distinctive ecosystems. Breaches periodically opened in the causeway allow the waters to mix and provide opportunity for the microbial communities of the two arms to intermingle. This project focuses on procuring a picture of the North Arm’s microbial diversity and the extent that it adapts to new environments over the four seasons, as well as what happens to the microbes and their nutrient exchange at that breach mixing point. Halophilic archaea and algae comprise the majority of the GSL biodiversity and we hypothesize that those taxonomic compositions of the North Arm are stable over the different seasons, due to their extremophilic nature. Over nearly two years of sampling, we are seeing stability in community compositions in comparison to the lower salinity South Arm.