Our Experimental System!

Wor king in the field of Global Climate Change, you have to create an environment that doesn't exist yet. Additionally, environmental parameters such as temperature, salinity and pH don't change one at at time; they change concomitantly. This means the interaction of the variables can have just as much impact as the variables by themselves. At the University of Hartford, I have built an experimental system that allows me to explore the effects of projected environmental variables on aquatic organisms both singly and in concert. In the sumps/mixing reservoirs, seawater is manipulated to the desired level of temperature, salinity, pH or dissolved oxygen for the given experiment. The water is then pumped to four tanks, randomly distributed on a shelving system. The effluent water is gravity-fed to a series of PVC pipes, and a pump returns the effluent water to a filter, and then the sump to be re-treated before it is recirculated back to the exposure tanks.

 

Experimental System built at the University of Hartford