NC State faculty and students are helping to keep coastal communities healthy through the North Carolina Center for Coastal Algae, People and Environment
NC C-CAPE (and our fearless leader Astrid Schnetzer) were featured on the NC State homepage.
NC C-CAPE was featured on the NC State homepage. Lots of information and quotes from folks in the center, including great photos of our colleagues in the field and laboratory. It is fun to contribute to such a large, meaningful research effort.
“In the past few months, we’ve officially started to sample as NC C-CAPE,” [Barrett] Rose said. “It was a shock to see the magnitude of how much we were actually studying. It went from a small pilot study to a huge center effort.”
Data collection and analysis is only the first part of the work NC C-CAPE seeks to do. While harmful algal blooms are common in fresh waters across the U.S. and the world, major data gaps around the issue exist. [Astrid] Schnetzer’s data will inform NC C-CAPE’s other two projects, which focus on predicting the health risks of toxic algal blooms on mammals and humans, as well as considering how factors like climate change will affect future toxin levels in water and seafood.
“The most exciting aspect of NC C-CAPE for me is that the research doesn’t end where my expertise ends,” said Schnetzer. “What we learn from the field about algal toxins is handed to the next team to look at the bigger picture on the ecosystem level and in connection to human health.”