Mason professor uses $900K research grant to help increase fish populations

Kim de Mutsert, assistant professor in George Mason University’s Department of Department of Environmental Science and Policy, is working to create a support tool to help managers of coastal resources such as fisheries understand and reduce the impacts of hypoxia, or low oxygen levels in water.

She and her team were recently awarded a nearly million-dollar grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that will let them spend the next four years examining how reducing the flow of nutrients from the Mississippi River into the northern Gulf of Mexico might affect biomass and distribution of fish in the water.

Hypoxia has been a growing issue in the Gulf of Mexico, particularly off the coast of Louisiana.

This “dead zone,” according to de Mutsert, is caused by an inflow of nutrients from the Mississippi River into the Gulf. Algae grow on these nutrients, which later sink to the gulf floor and decompose. This process robs the water of oxygen and can create an adverse effect on the local fish population.

De Mutsert’s interest in hypoxia began in 2010 while she was doing her postdoctorate research in Louisiana, the coast of which is at the base of the dead zone. She worked with a research team to create ecosystem and spatial models that looked at how hypoxia could impact predator-prey interactions, as well as how fish were moving to more suitable habitats.

“What was mostly known was the level of oxygen in the water, and conclusions were based on that, but there were few studies looking at the effects [of oxygen levels] on the organisms in the water,” de Mutsert said.

According to de Mutsert, the Environmental Protection Agency has a plan in place to reduce the hypoxic zone from its current average area of about15,000 kilometers square to 5,000 kilometers square. Her modeling would help simulate the effects of reducing the zone, in terms of its impact on the fish in the water.

The project will use data that has been collected in previous projects, along with data collected by a NOAA survey called SEAMAP, to create a user-friendly software tool. De Mutsert will travel to the Gulf Coast periodically to assist with workshops that will help train fishery managers on the modeling tool.

Once the four years of research are up, de Mutsert hopes to have an easy-to-use, user-friendly tool that helps managers understand the effects of hypoxia and nutrient reductions on fish and fisheries, and generate the best possible outcome for their needs.