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Project Description- 
• Mono Lake, an alkaline, hypersaline, currently meromictic lake located east of the Sierra Nevada in California is an ideal site for a microbial observatory. It is a well-defined, ecologically simple, microbially dominated ecosystem for which long-term ecological and limnological data exist. Mono Lake is a hydrologically simple system, which makes modeling tractable, yet it contains complex gradients in chemical and physical variables as a result of meromixis. The lake is located close to a major field station (the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory). There are ongoing studies of the lake’s physics, plankton ecology, and biogeochemistry that provide a comprehensive framework for the microbial studies.
•Mono Lake represents an extreme environment that is likely to harbor unique microbes. However, relatively little is known about the types of microorganisms dwelling in Mono Lake, their phylogenetic diversity, taxonomy, ecology, or ecophysiology. The primary goals of the Mono Lake Microbial Observatory project are to examine the distributions of Mono Lake microbes, to understand the response of microbial assemblages to the gradients of physical and chemical variables in the lake, and to assess their role in some of the unusual geochemical processes (for example, arsenic cycling) in the lake. This project provides a unique opportunity to identify novel microorganisms and define interactions among microorganisms in complex gradients of physical/chemical conditions usually only encountered at sediment-water interfaces.
Principal Investigators &
Affiliated Programs-
School of Marine Programs,
University of Georgia
Ocean Sciences,
University of California, Santa Cruz
Marine Sciences Institute,
University of California, Santa Barbara
Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory (SNARL),
UC Natural Reserve System/University of
California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Irvine
University of Hawaii, Manoa
Online Information-
Mono Lake Microbial Observatory
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Funded by the
National Science Foundation
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