Assessing the response of the Great South Bay plankton community to Hurricane Sandy.

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This is not an opportunity for submissions; this is an announcement that Stony Brook University has already been awarded this cooperative agreement due to their work in the areas of: Natural Resources and the Environment. In addition to the draft reports and final submission, the Cooperator will: • Provide a detailed description of the changes in GSB and Moriches Bay plankton communities caused by the new inlet and the spatial and temporal extent of those changes. • Employ a new horizontal mapping approach to rapidly assess the condition of GSB and Moriches Bay with regard to multiple key parameters (temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH, multiple phytoplankton pigments). • Employ methods used over the past three decades to monitor phytoplankton, zooplankton, and ichthyoplankton communities in GSB, facilitating comparisons to prior data sets. • Coordinate sampling efforts with Suffolk County’s Department of Health Services to assure comparability of our sampling efforts and access their historical data to determine how the breach may be impacting the water quality parameters they have been routinely measuring since 1976. • If the breach closes (naturally or artificially) during the period of this study, the cooperator will document whether, and at what rate, the plankton community returns to their pre-breach state.

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