Cassandra L. Ettinger edited Project_Description_Personnel_1_page__.md  over 8 years ago

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Seagrasses are the only group of fully-submerged marine angiosperms, and are globally distributed along coastlines of every continent except Antarctica \cite{Costanza_1997}. They form dense meadows in shallow waters along the coastline, providing critical habitat for many marine species \cite{Harborne_2006}. These meadows harbor tremendous amounts of biodiversity, providing homes to many rare/endemic macroogramisms and are critical in biogeochemical cycling in the ocean system \cite{Orth_2006}. (Is there any evidence that tropical rain forests have more microbial diversity than other locations? if so, could use as justification?? closet find so far is this \cite{Fierer_2012} maybe http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23832301 or http://www.labmanager.com/news/2009/07/amazon-rainforest-microbial-observatory-to-catalog-study-soils#.VqKKS1MrKHo ??) Although they occupy a very small percentage of area on Earth \cite{Costanza_1997} they are one of the most important carbon sinks, sequestering carbon 35X faster than Tropical Rainforests \cite{Mcleod_2011} and storing this carbon for millennia if left undisturbed \cite{Macreadie_2012} \cite{Mateo_1997} \cite{Serrano_2012}.   The levels of biodiversity seagrass beds and their importance in biogeochemical cycling and carbon sequestration make them excellent candidates for investigating unexplored microbial eukaryotic diversity. Microeukaryotes themselves play a variety of important roles in coastal and marine ecosystems; they are primary producers, predators/prey, decomposers, involved in biogeochemical cycling, untapped sources of natural products, potential pathogens and symbionts \cite{Sogin_2006}. \cite{Sogin_2006} **not sure this reference is appropriate - might be better to cite papers that the Sogin paper sites specifically**.  Previous work has identified ........... (cite Enhalus paper, and JE Duffy's paper that mentions algae and other microeuk composition changing seagrass bed composition)