MIRADA LTERS

MIRADA LTERS is a Microbial Biodiversity Survey and Inventory across all the major aquatic (marine and freshwater) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites established by the NSF’s US LTER Program. This inventory takes advantage of the aquatic sampling locations that are part of the established LTER network of sites and builds on existing infrastructure for coordination at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts set in place by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation supported Census of Marine Life (CoML) ocean realm project called the International Census of Marine Microbes (ICoMM). The specific goals of the program are to: 1. Document and describe both microbial (Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya) baseline diversity and relative abundance data for microbial operational taxonomic units (OTUs) as defined by SSU rRNA gene hypervariable tags at aquatic LTER sites. 2. Determine which microbial OTUs are common to both freshwater and marine LTERs. 3. Determine whether diverse aquatic LTER sites possess “signature” assemblages characterized by space, time and environmental parameters. 4. Discover novel tag sequences that likely represent novel microorganisms that LTER researchers and students can further characterize and study.