North Carolina Center for Coastal Algae, People, and Environment NC-CAPE

The North Carolina Center for Coastal Algae, People, and Environment (NC C-CAPE) is a five-year effort to advance our scientific knowledge on the risks of harmful algal blooms (HABs) in NC coastal waters, including the United States’ largest lagoonal estuary, the Pamlico-Albemarle Sound System. Concerns about emergent HABs in the region have surged and coincide with reports on toxins present in water and seafood. Major knowledge gaps currently exist on environmental drivers that lead to the development of these blooms and the production of toxins, and associated human health risks. With growing threats to ecosystem and human health, with the increasing frequency, intensity, and range of cyanobacterial blooms, attributable to eutrophication and likely exacerbated by climate change, NC-CAPE will provide data to guide efforts to implement effective monitoring approaches, inform guideline values for safe consumption of water and seafood, deliver predictive tools to assess emergent and future toxin exposure risk, and leverage community engagement initiatives to fill data gaps and improve oceans and human health. NC C-CAPE will provide investigators at all career stages valuable opportunities for collaboration, leadership, cross-training, as well as the foundational support to expand their research programs across disciplinary boundaries. The Center’s Community Engagement Core will use principles of data justice, which is central to understanding and addressing HAB exposure and prevention, to empower community members as experts with the capacity to conduct critical and systemic inquiry into their own lived experiences. The Center is committed to recruiting students, postdocs, and staff from diverse backgrounds including underrepresented groups, and will convene an External Advisory Committee that reflects the diversity of stakeholders. Activities will include the establishment of a data justice charter with community groups and the establishment of a Community Advisory Board to ensure stakeholder involvement in problem definition, design, and data dissemination. The Center is jointly supported by NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences and by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).NC C-CAPE combines multidisciplinary expertise in ocean and climate science, toxicology, epidemiology, modeling, and community engagement to understand, predict, and reduce risks to human health from cyanobacterial HABs in coastal waters. The Center comprises three research projects, bound together through the Center Administration and Community Engagement cores. NC C-CAPE will elucidate links among environmental drivers and HAB dynamics, microcystin congener composition, and toxin contamination in oysters and blue crabs (Project 1), define how MC mixtures influence mechanisms of liver toxicity and resulting risk of adverse health outcomes in regulatory-relevant mammalian models as well as at-risk human populations (Project 2), and integrate diverse data sets and coastal circulation modeling within a probabilistic modeling framework to elucidate environmental controls on microcystin distribution in water and seafood and assess exposure risk in a changing climate (Project 3). Finally, the Center’s Community Engagement Core will promote the translation of Center discoveries, use the principles of data justice to elevate community voices in research design, fill gaps in HAB exposure and prevention knowledge relevant to environmental justice, and support critical and systemic inquiry led by community partners.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.