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This week, PhD Candidate Michael Studivan and Lab Manager Patrick Gardner completed a CISME training workshop led by UNCW. Also known as the Coral In Situ MEtabolism platform, the CISME is a system developed by Drs. Alina Szmant and Robert Whitehead of UNCW and funded by NOAA's Cooperative Institute for Ocean Exploration, Research, and Technology (CIOERT). CISME integrates pH, oxygen, and temperature sensors into a custom-built isolation chamber that allows in situ, non-destructive measurements of coral respiration and photosynthesis in a relatively short amount of time.
The workshop served as an opportunity for coral reef ecologists across the country to come together and test five of the CISME units on reef organisms and substrates. The workshop was hosted by RSMAS and involved participants from UNCW, RSMAS, HBOI-FAU, Scripps, FIU, Stanford, and NOAA.
To learn more about the CISME instrument, please check out their latest publication here. To see our photo album from the workshop, see our Flickr album.