Hello, I'm Natalie Monacci, and I lead the Ocean Acidification Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I partner with the EcoFOCI program, and gave the seminar on November 13th of this year, 2021. Unfortunately the seminar organizers told me that they had a problem with the audio recording from my realtime seminar, so this is a re-recording on December 13th. This means that there will be no group discussion at the end of this recording, but if you'd like to know more about the research I'm gonna present, or the Ocean Acidification Research Center, please send me an email. For those of you that might be new to ocean acidification, here are the basics. Humans are increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the ocean is absorbing it. When carbon dioxide enters the ocean, a series of chemical reactions take place, and ultimately the pH of the sea water goes down. This decrease in pH or acidification can create conditions corrosive enough to dissolve calcium carbonate minerals. This graphic is from my colleague Liqing Jiang, and shows the historic and predicted surface seawater pH. The takeaway here is that more than a quarter of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean. From the year 1770 to 2000, the global average surface ocean pH decreased from about 8.2 to 8.1. Under business as usual emission scenarios, the surface ocean pH could potentially decrease to as low as 7.7 by the year 2100. Ocean certification can have a variety of complex impacts on the marine ecosystem. Shellfish provide food for both marine life and for people. The decreases in seawater carbonate ion concentration expected with ocean acidification can make building and maintaining calcium carbonate structures difficult. If this impacts shellfish survival growth physiology, then the food webs and economies that depend on that shellfish will also be affected. Increased levels of marine carbon dioxide can also impact fin fish, including altering behavior, otolith formation, and young fish's growth. There is an excellent resource summarizing the impacts of ocean acidification on Alaska fish and shellfish. This was produced by Dr. Amanda Kelley, and other Alaska Ocean Acidification Network members. One thing to note, there are a lot of culturally and commercially important species that have yet to be studied. So if you have a specific species you're interested in check out this resource online. The ocean acidification is related to the intrusion of anthropogenic CO2, but this is not the only process that can reduce the water pH and alter the marine carbonate system. Enhanced sea ice melt, respiration of organic matter, and upwelling, have been shown to exacerbate CO2 driven, ocean acidification and high latitude regions. Alaskan waters are naturally high in CO2. The addition of the anthropogenic carbon, along with other stressors, such as warming, bring the marine ecosystem closer to biological thresholds for some species. So I'm from the Ocean Acidification Research Center and we have a dual mission. First we aim to determine the intensity, duration and extent of ocean acidification events around the state. We accomplished this with a few different tools. First, we use repeat hydrographic surveys. We began making ship based observations in 2008 and continue this type of data collection to this day. This map displays most of the stations where we have collected samples around the state and includes sites in the Gulf of Alaska, Bering Sea, Chukchi Sea, and Beaufort Sea. This approach can give us a good spatial understanding of carbonate chemistry around Alaska, but generally we're limited by the ship's capabilities. As you know, shortcomings to this approach are not many samples are collected nearshore and not many ships are going out in the Winter. I joined the OARC in 2010, and was hired to lead the new Alaska Ocean Acidification Mooring Network. In 2011, we deployed autonomous sensors to measure surface carbon dioxide parameters at the GAKOA Mooring site and Resurrection Bay, in the Gulf of Alaska. And also your EcoFOCI, M2 mooring site in the Eastern Bering sea. Our first deployment was in 2011, and we hit a lot of obstacles. At the time these sensors had not been tested in high latitudes in freezing conditions. We had design problems, engineering problems and battery problems. So if you look at our data records, we have a gap in 2012. This is when I was working on a major overhaul for both sites. Luckily by 2013, we began collecting data again. In 2013, we received infrastructure funding from the State of Alaska to expand the monitoring network. We deployed two additional sites, one in Port Conclusion in Southeast Alaska, another in Chiniak Bay off Kodiak. We also began receiving funds for maintenance from NOAA and AOOS, the Alaska Ocean Observing System. Some of the maintenance funding was discontinued in 2016. So both the Southeast and Kodiak buoys came out of the water. We still have the gear, so if anyone is looking for a partner for a surface platform for their research projects, please get in touch. We also invested in shoreside monitoring with the state infrastructure funds. Our first project was to begin monitoring marine carbon dioxide at the then Alutiiq Pride shellfish hatchery in Seward, Alaska. This project was led by Wiley Evans, a UAF postdoc at the time. And Jeff Hetrick, the director of the Alutiiq Pride shellfish hatchery. This was a wildly successful project, and Alutiiq Pride later secured funds for their own monitoring equipment. They were recently renamed to the Alutiiq Pride Marine Institute, and I encourage you all to visit their webpage to check out what they're up to now. So what are we gonna do with all that gear? Well, we moved it to Ketchikan. This project is a collaboration with OceansAlaska Marine Science Center, there are a few gaps in the record as OceansAlaska moves their hatchery location. We're hopeful that the data will be coming back online in the next few months. Our most recent shoreside monitoring started in 2019 at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center's Kodiak laboratory. OARC owns the bercalator. NOAA owns the facility and provides maintenance and personnel to run the equipment, and Wiley Evans at Hakai is the carbon expert. Okay, so we have ships moving around collecting data with good spatial coverage, and we have moorings and shoreside stations with good temporal coverage. Another monitoring approach we take is using uncrewed surface vehicles. I have a small role in this project, I process all the data collected by the saildrone and provide validation data from our nearby hydrographic surveys and mooring stations. In 2017, the first saildrones outfitted with a carbon package sailed around Alaska. This project was repeated in 2018 and 2019. The mission was unfortunately canceled in 2020, but we had a successful season this year in 2021 and four vehicles sailed in Alaska. So that's a lot of background as to what OARC does and what resources we have to monitor dynamics. Now I wanna share a few carbon stories with you from the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska that give examples on how researchers are using the data that OARC is helping produce. A quick reminder on ocean acidification parameters. If we measure two of the four parameters, we can calculate the other two. For example, when we collect seawater samples, we measure dissolved inorganic carbon or DIC and total alkalinity TA. And we calculate pH and the partial pressure of carbon dioxide pCO2. When we're discussing data collected by sensors, such as what we have on the moorings and saildrones, we're measuring pCO2 and pH, and we calibrate those sensors with seawater sample DIC and TA. In all cases, you need to collect the physical oceanography as well. We need temperature, salinity, and depth for our calculations. And finally, we often express our data in terms of saturation states or Ω. This parameter is always calculated from whichever measured input pairs you choose. Okay so here's some data from hydrographic surveys in the Bering Sea. On the left three panels, I'm showing the bottom water saturation states, that's Ω, for the mineral aragonite ΩA during Spring, Summer and Fall 2009 in the Bering Sea. The furthest right panel is ΩC, this is the saturation state for the more durable mineral form of calcium carbonate. This data was collected through the BEST-BSIERP project and led by Dr. Jessica Cross. When the saturation state is less than 1, we say that the water is undersaturated. The cool colors on the color bars show Ω < 1. This project, as well as data we've continued to collect in the Bering Sea from ships show that we have bottom water undersaturated for aragonite mineral during all seasons. And we even observed undersaturations for the more durable form of calcium carbonate mineral in the Fall. These seasonal maps show that the duration of aragonite undersaturation is long, they exist over several seasons. And the intensity of these events increases seasonally with lower Ω values, widely observed in the Fall. When Ω is low, the conditions are less favorable for shell building organisms like pteropods and shellfish. This doesn't mean that life will end, but it will be an additional stress. And the organism will need to expend more energy to maintain its calcified shell. What is important is that a variety of natural processes cause CO2 accumulation and saturation state suppression, including biological respiration, local circulation patterns, and temperature variations. These processes are in addition to the accumulated anthropogenic carbon absorbed by the ocean. So these repeat hydrographic cruises allow us to provide enough data to help researchers determine which mechanism is driving undersaturations. They also allow biologists to set their experiments to conditions, we are currently seeing in different region. Now I'm showing you service data from the M2 mooring site in the Southeastern Bering Sea. This buoy's namesake, Peggy Dyson, is known as the Voice of the North Pacific and broadcasted marine forecasts to mariners for over 35 years. This area gets sea ice seasonally, so it is typically only deployed from May to September. The data are the partial pressure of carbon dioxide one meter above the surface of the ocean shown by the blue line. And one meter below the surface ocean shown by the gray lines. There's a strong seasonal signal during the Spring bloom. Phytoplankton draw down the carbon dioxide in surface water. Then the seawater carbon dioxide increases throughout the deployment and is usually fairly well mixed and near air values by the time we recover the gear in September. These data can show the timing of the Spring bloom. In 2017, it was fairly early in our record. The next year, 2018, we arrived on site just after the bloom started. And in 2019, there was a relatively late bloom and we even observed surface sea water values that were greater than the air. Okay so what are we seeing this year in 2021? This is the preliminary data from the current deployment. After we recover the gear, I'll do the final processing. So these values might change a bit. We deployed our gear just as the Spring bloom started and we saw a fairly rapid and intense biologically driven draw down of surface seawater pCO2. The double blips are probably related to mixing events. Storms can bring deep water to the surface with higher carbon dioxide surface ocean pCO2 observations play a key role in understanding the global ocean carbon sink. Remember when pCO2 in the air is greater than the surface ocean, the ocean acts as a carbon sink, but we only have this gear out six months. So what happens the rest of the year? At the end of October, a large low pressure system moved through the Eastern Aleutian region. The storm track, just a little south of our site at M2. Our max winds at the buoy were around 60 miles per hour. And Unalaska had gusts over a hundred miles per hour, wind events bringing deeper water with high carbon dioxide to the surface. When this happens, surface carbon dioxide concentrations are higher than air and the ocean becomes a local CO2 source to the atmosphere. We know about these outgassing events, but we're not always around to measure them during the Winter storm season. So this was pretty exciting to capture these data. I made a note here to say that these are the data as of November 1st, 2021. I originally gave this webinar in person, I mean, in real time, it was a virtual webinar on November 13th. But I'm recording this in December, so what's happened since then? After the large storm brought water with higher carbon dioxide to the surface in November, the surface water and the atmosphere eventually came into near equilibrium in mid-December. We may continue to see outgassing events at this site. We currently have plans to recover the surface mooring at the end of January, and this is expected to be a high sea ice year. So we really wanna get that out whenever we can. If ice gets to the site, when the surface mooring is still out, the ice will win. So we're working hard to recover this mooring. So when we look at the data this year, we see that M2 is both a carbon sink and a carbon source. How much outgassing we will see at this site is still to be determined. We may continue to see large storm events, bring deep water CO2 up onto the shelf. Okay now let's take a look at this year's saildrone data. These sensors are also measuring carbon dioxide, both one meter above and one meter below the ocean service. These are screen grabs from the real time data we are getting from the saildrones this Summer, this data is brand new and also preliminary, meaning I have not processed it yet. Only seawater data are shown by these tracks. I'm not showing the atmospheric CO2. But we know from past deployments and the mooring that atmospheric CO2 in the Bering Sea is around 415. So the cool colors show seawater CO2 that's below air and warm colors are showing seawater CO2 that's above air. You can see the lower values in the Bristol Bay region. We think this is coinciding with a regional bloom or phytoplankton are using seawater CO2. North and Nunivak we're seeing seawater CO2 that's above air. These are similar to concentrations we're seeing at M2 this week. And once we got up into the Yukon river plume, we saw neutral CO2 or about the same as air. So this water is neither a sink nor source of carbon dioxide. These next two panels are the sea surface temperature and sea surface salinity. When we got into the Yukon river plume, the minimum salinity we saw, which is around 7, which is not on this scale, but it's shown by the white areas and the tracks, so that's pretty fresh. We haven't been able to get a ship close enough to the shore to see these really low salinity values from the Yukon. So the saildrone is just a really neat tool to explore areas you can't get to from a large research vessel. So now I'm showing you the final process data from this saildrones 2017, 2018 and 2019. This work is led by Hongjie Wang at the University of Washington, and CICOES. Hongjie used the surface seawater and air data to calculate the flux of CO2, negative is into the ocean and positive is from the ocean. On average, the Bering Sea shelf acts as a CO2 sink, but there are exceptions. One area I find interesting and North Nunivak Island, where we see this local CO2 source, maybe it's organic matter respiration. Rivers deposit terrestrial organic carbon, where it begins decomposition and then wind and tidal mixing bring the respiration products or carbon dioxide up to the surface to be outcast to the air. So we know the ocean acidification is driven by humans, emitting carbon dioxide to the air, and the ocean is absorbing it. But the marine carbon system is dynamic and complicated, and we need to make a lot of measurements to understand the episodic, say a storm event, the seasonal, that's Spring bloom versus Winter mixing and interannual variability. That's increasing temperatures, anthropogenic carbon, and increasing fresh water inputs. Okay, so we have these moorings, we have ships, we have saildrones out collecting the data, how is it applied? A way to apply all of our observations is through modeling. The Bering 10K model is a biophysical regional model for the Bering Sea that's been adopted by managers and stakeholders for use and understanding ecosystem trends. Darren Pilcher at the University of Washington added a carbonate chemistry package to this model. This can help refine regional scale risk and hazard exposure, especially in data poor areas. This model can't provide very good estimates at the immediate nearshore, but they do help us estimate regional and sub regional ocean acidification exposure. So before we use this model for these purposes, we need to ensure that it's actually showing some skill in simulating the observed conditions. This is to ensure trust in the model projections that we're making. The panel on the right shows the model simulated Ω shown by the shading compared to the observed stations shown by the circles. On a cross shelf transect occupied by ship in 2008. This is a qualitative way to see how the model is broadly capturing the observed vertical and horizontal spatial patterns. So next Darren calculated Ω both at the surface and at the bottom, he has Ω = 1, the threshold shown by the dotted line. And the main takeaway here is at the bottom water undersaturation occurs much faster than at the surface. Bering Sea surface water is predicted to become at undersaturated in the future and Bering Sea bottom water is undersaturated with respect to aragonite now. We can also use these model projections combined with biological sensitivity experiments in order to narrow in on a specific region and stock. Here Darren is projecting habitat suitability for red king crab in Bristol Bay, using chemical thresholds, determined by experiments at the NOAA Kodiak lab. These figures are showing when the water conditions are above the respective threshold. So this is illustrating the decline in these favorable water conditions through time. Darren notes that the green line representing a pH of 7.5 was associated with 100% of crab mortality in these experimental settings. So these are pretty extreme conditions for red king crab. These conditions emerge under the high emissions scenario, but are absent in the middle of the road mission scenario. So this work provides a tangible example of how emissions reductions can benefit marine ecosystems. Now I want to move into the Gulf of Alaska. Here we're collecting data with ships, moorings and shoreside stations, Today, I'm going to highlight the mooring work, where we partner with the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program. If you want to learn more about our other projects past and current, please send me an email. So now I'm showing you surface data from the GAKOA mooring site outside Seward and the Northern Gulf of Alaska. This equipment is out year round and we turn it around at the end of February. So we have freshly calibrated sensors and new batteries before the Spring bloom starts. Like M2 GAKOA also has a strong seasonal signal during the Spring bloom. And the site is usually mixed and near air values by the end of the calendar year. Now I'm showing you the current preliminary data in red. This is the data that is transmitted from the buoy that it's in the water now. The onset of this year's Spring bloom was about average when comparing to our tenure record. The biologically driven draw down was fast, intense, and intense rather than slow, like we had seen in years past. A record show that the surface ocean at this location is mainly a CO2 sink. Now I'm showing you data from the Kodiak mooring. Remember our data record is only from 2013 to 2016 at this site. While we had gear in the water, we determined that the site is both a CO2 sink and a source, depending on the time of year. Here's the 2013 to 2015 data from the Southeast Alaska mooring site, and the record is most similar to our observations at Kodiak. The surface ocean is both a CO2 source and sink the atmosphere. Okay, here I'm plotting the average air CO2 in blue. The average data from the GAKOA buoy in red, and the average data from Kodiak in gray. And the average data from Southeast Alaska in black. Remember the Kodiak and Southeast data are older and the GAKOA data average includes a wider time range. So this plot's a little weird because I'm comparing different years, but I'm trying to convince you that the surface ocean carbon dynamics and the Gulf of Alaska really vary based on location. At the Southeast site, we saw not only our highest surface seawater CO2 at over 600 µatm, but we also saw the shortest duration of surface water CO2 below air. The green lines here are approximately when the average seawater CO2 is less than air. The GAKOA is a sink most of the year. Kodiak is a sink about six to seven months a year. And the Southeast site is a sink less than five months a year from 2013 to 2015. So earlier I talked about CO2 flux, but what else do we learn from the carbon dioxide, concentration and water? Remember the higher carbon dioxide in the water leads to decreased carbonate ion concentration and lower pH. Okay, so now we have all of these observations. What else can we learn from them? The next step is taking the observations and using them to predict how the intensity duration and extent will change in the future. This plot was generated by Wiley Evans. He used the mooring data to calculate Ω for aragonite at all three sites through time. GAKOA is on the left, Kodiak is in the center and our Southeast site is on the right. So this plot is showing how acidification might change through the end of the century. The cool colors are higher Ω and indicate ideal habitat for important species and are more prevalent during the Summer at all three sites. We see less favorable conditions, the warmer colors and the gray colors in the Winter and the Fall. Wiley's calculations also tell us to expect the lowest Ω or more corrosive conditions shown in gray in Southeast Alaska. Wiley also calculated the decline in ideal habitat for certain species over time. Here we're using a habitat proxy based on Ω aragonite. When Ω > 2, shown in red, we are describing the ideal habitat for pteropods an important food source for pink salmon. Pteropods build their shells from very weak carbonate bio minerals, and are some of the most vulnerable species to acidification. When Ω > 1.5, shown in blue, we're describing ideal habitat for oysters, which are slightly more resilient to acidified conditions. Our final proxy is when Ω > 1, shown in black. This describes the ideal habitat for very resilient organisms, such as adult crabs. Again, we see that the Southeast region is more vulnerable to corrosive conditions and less than ideal habitat shown by the lowest percentages of the year when the calculated conditions occur. Okay, so our surface observations can be used to calculate air-sea CO2 flux, and they can be used to predict ideal habitat changes. They can also be used to determine time of emergence. This is the number of years of observations necessary to detect an anthropogenic trend. The moorings in Alaska are part of the larger global network monitoring surface CO2. In 2019, Adrienne Sutton calculated time of emergence for 40 different sites. The important thing to remember for the Alaskan sites is that they are in the coastal region. These areas have higher natural variability. So the time of emergence is longer. Open ocean sites have less natural variability, and we need fewer observations to begin to detect the impacts of anthropogenic carbon on top of our natural variability. M2 is left out of these calculations since it's only a seasonal deployment. The rest of the network has gear in the water year around. As a service laboratory, the Ocean Acidification Research Center not only provides equipment and infrastructure for monitoring, we also provide data resources. Today I mostly wanted to highlight the moorings project where we have partnered with EcoFOCI and the carbon groups for 10 years. But remember we work all over the state. Most of our data are archived with the Ocean Carbon Data System at the Information. When I became the lead of OARC, there were several projects that were not archived with OCADS. I've gotten a handful of these projects out now, but there are still several to go. Ultimately, our data are then ingested into the GLODAP and SOCAT databases. That's the Global Ocean Data Analysis Project and the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas. Both products enable the quantification of the ocean carbon sink, ocean acidification and evaluation of ocean biogeochemical models. Individual links to our public data can be found on the OARC website. I also announce newly archived data links on our Twitter page. The saildrone data will be made public with Hongjie's manuscript. Another large project where the OARC partners with NOAA is collecting carbonate chemistry and the DBO or Distributed Biological Observatory. These stations are in the Bering and Chukchi Seas and all of these data can be found on the OARC website and at NCEI. So most of you have seen the news this week related to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26. Here's the key curve again, showing CO2 levels in air. And it was about 360 during the first meeting in 1994. 26 meetings later, an atmosphere in carbon dioxide continues to rise. The Global Carbon Project released their latest budget during this meeting. And there's huge effort that synthesizes the global carbon cycle. On average, the ocean is a CO2 sink. The amount of CO2 the ocean is absorbing is quantified by using global ocean biochemistry models and observation based data products such as SOCAT. So the data that OARC is collecting makes its way here. This year many of us worked with Liqing Jiang to develop the Coastal Ocean Data Analysis Product for North America. This product will play a role in promoting regional to global research efforts to understand societal vulnerabilities, risks and areas of resilience to ocean acidification. This data product is unique because it only focuses on the coastal ocean where most of the OA susceptible commercial, recreational and subsistence fisheries, as well as the mirror culture industry are located. The OARC has provided the majority of the data points from Alaska that are included in this product. As a service laboratory, we are also a recharge center. This means we can accept seawater samples to be analyzed for marine carbonate parameters. So how does this work? First users need to collect their seawater samples, following the OA community best practices. This includes adding a preservative, we use mercury chloride and collecting auxiliary data like temperature, salinity, and depth. Next, we analyze the seawater on our lab equipment to measure TA and DIC. When we are returning these data to you, you may calculate the other parameters depending on which variable is most applicable to your research. We do not need to be project members to analyze your samples. This year, I launched the samples of opportunity program. This is open for current UAF students to apply marine carbonate data as a new monitoring tool for their projects. Proposals were requested during Spring of 2021 and two students, Jake Cohen and Courtney Hart were awarded free sample analysis. Jake collected his samples from the Sikuliaq on the Bering Sea during the cruise in the Summer. And Courtney Hart worked with the miracles reform to collect samples in Southeast Alaska throughout the Summer. I'm thinking we could do something similar through CICOES in the future, so if anyone has any outreach ideas, please get in touch. Now I'm going give a quick summary on Courtney's samples of opportunity project. Courtney Hart is a UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, PhD student and Dr. Jenny Decker's lab down in Juneau. Her work focuses on how harmful algal blooms affect shellfish species in Southeast Alaska. And more specifically how paralytic shellfish toxins affect the commercial geoduck clam fishery. Last year with the help of an EPSCoR seed grant and funding through the Alaska IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence or INBRE, Courtney started a HAB monitoring project with Meta Mesdag the owner and operator of Salty Lady Seafood, AmeriCulture operation. So this is Meta's farm, it's a small family operation, she has permits to grow oysters, kelp and geoduck clams. The farm is only about three years old, and she's currently focusing on oysters. She harvests once a week and delivers mostly in Juneau, but ships up north and just started shipping out of state as far as Louisiana. Like all commercial shellfish operations, she goes through weekly PSP testing during the Summer months when HABs are common in the local waters. A failed PSP test can mean at least two weeks of farm closure and a series of expensive follow up tests. Courtney and Meta started talking about how to avoid some of these closures through monitoring. And they developed a project to trying to determine if they could figure out the warning signs of toxic blooms at her particular farm site. So she could avoid or mitigate the cost of getting shut down. It was also an opportunity to collaborate with Meta and combine her experience on the farm with some of the tools that Courtney has for quantified environmental parameters. In Courtney's research, she learned that regardless of how the intensity of harmful algal blooms change, the certainty of ecosystems becoming warmer, lower in oxygen, and more acidified while HABs and their toxins are present, creates a scenario that is a more serious physiological threat to aquatic life than climate change stressors alone. There is an extreme scarcity of data to understand the nature of this threat. And despite the certitude that the co occurrence of harmful algal blooms and climate change stressors will become more common in the future. So Courtney's done a great job 'cause cake starting the monitoring at a local farm and has proven that this is a feasible monitoring program. And hopefully it continues in the future. So there have been some dire headlines in the news in the past few weeks. Ocean acidification is a long and slow process and many communities in Alaska are facing much bigger and more immediate threats like coastal erosion and food security. As we collectively monitor a changing marine ecosystem, know that there are already tools and resources for you to determine if a changing ocean chemistry is applicable to your research questions. This year, we are awarded a project to collect marine carbonate data during fishery surveys led by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center and the National Marines Fisheries Service. Unfortunately, the cruises were canceled for COVID this Summer, but you can expect to see these data added to the future ecosystem status reports, hopefully starting with 2022. These results will be shared with the Alaska Ocean Acidification Network. There are over a dozen different groups working on Ocean Acidification, Alaska. So check out the network to learn more about other projects. A new podcast was just released by the network. The Future Ocean podcast has six episodes and discusses carbon policy and context of our fisheries. So check that out if you're interested. The network also has a newsletter that you can sign up for to stay up to date on what other groups are doing around the state. The University of Alaska Fairbanks recently appointed Justin Sternberg as the new director of the Alaska Blue Economy Center. This center serves as a resource to the State by doing a few things. They're advancing research and education opportunities in fisheries, mariculture energy, marine, observing and technology, and also training. They help position Alaska for a broader base of investment in its blue economy. And they serve as a liaison between UAF and Alaska's ocean and inland aquatic industries. If your work overlaps with the blue economy, please get in contact with Justin to learn about new activities through the Alaska Blue Economy Center. So my first cruise sailing with the EcoFOCI group was in May 2011. which means I'm celebrating working with your program for 10 years. I even dug out a few photos from the first EcoFOCI cruise on the Dyson. It's been a really fun ride and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to continue working with you in new capacities in the future. Thank you so much.