scholarly journals Niche Partitioning between Coastal and Offshore Shelf Waters Results in Differential Expression of Alkane and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Catabolic Pathways

mSystems ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawn M. Doyle ◽  
Genmei Lin ◽  
Maya Morales-McDevitt ◽  
Terry L. Wade ◽  
Antonietta Quigg ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Microbial Communities ◽  
Differential Expression ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
Surface Waters ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Niche Partitioning ◽  
Marine Environments ◽  
Microbial Response ◽  
Polycyclic Aromatic ◽  
Marine Oil Spills

ABSTRACT Marine oil spills can impact both coastal and offshore marine environments, but little information is available on how the microbial response to oil and dispersants might differ between these biomes. Here, we describe the compositional and functional response of microbial communities to different concentrations of oil and chemically dispersed oil in coastal and offshore surface waters from the Texas-Louisiana continental shelf. Using a combination of analytical chemistry and 16S rRNA amplicon and metatranscriptomic sequencing, we provide a broad, comparative overview of the ecological response of hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria and their expression of hydrocarbon-degrading genes in marine surface waters over time between two oceanic biomes. We found evidence for the existence of different ecotypes of several commonly described hydrocarbon-degrading bacterial taxa which behaved differentially in coastal and offshore shelf waters despite being exposed to similar concentrations of oil, dispersants, and nutrients. This resulted in the differential expression of catabolic pathways for n-alkanes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)—the two major categories of compounds found in crude oil—with preferential expression of n-alkane degradation genes in coastal waters while offshore microbial communities trended more toward the expression of PAH degradation genes. This was unexpected as it contrasts with the generally held view that n-alkanes, being more labile, are attacked before the more refractory PAHs. Collectively, our results provide new insights into the existence and potential consequences of niche partitioning of hydrocarbon-degrading taxa between neighboring marine environments. IMPORTANCE In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the taxonomic response of marine microbial communities to oil and dispersants has been extensively studied. However, relatively few studies on the functional response of these microbial communities have been reported, especially in a longitudinal fashion. Moreover, despite the fact that marine oil spills typically impact thousands of square kilometers of both coastal and offshore marine environments, little information is available on how the microbial response to oil and dispersants might differ between these biomes. The results of this study help fill this critical knowledge gap and provide valuable insight into how oil spill response efforts, such as chemically dispersing oil, may have differing effects in neighboring coastal and offshore marine environments.

scholarly journals Niche Partitioning Between Coastal and Offshore Shelf Waters Results in Differential Expression of Alkane and PAH Catabolic Pathways

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawn M. Doyle ◽  
Genmei Lin ◽  
Maya Morales-McDevitt ◽  
Terry L. Wade ◽  
Antonietta Quigg ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Microbial Communities ◽  
Differential Expression ◽  
Functional Response ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
Surface Waters ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Niche Partitioning ◽  
Marine Environments ◽  
Microbial Response ◽  
Marine Oil Spills

ABSTRACTMarine oil spills can impact both coastal and offshore marine environments, but little information is available on how the microbial response to oil and dispersants might differ between these biomes. Here we describe the compositional and functional response of microbial communities to different concentrations of oil and chemically dispersed oil in coastal and offshore surface waters from the Texas-Louisiana continental shelf. Using a combination of analytical chemistry, 16S rRNA amplicon, and metatranscriptomic sequencing, we provide a broad, comparative overview of the ecological response of hydrocarbon degrading bacteria and their expression of hydrocarbon degrading genes in marine surface waters over time between two oceanic biomes. We found evidence for the existence of different ecotypes of several commonly described hydrocarbon degrading bacterial taxa which behaved differentially in coastal and offshore shelf waters despite being exposed to similar concentrations of oil, dispersants, and nutrients. This resulted in the differential expression of catabolic pathways for n-alkanes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH)—the two major categories of compounds found in crude oil—with preferential expression of n-alkane degradation genes in coastal waters while offshore microbial communities trended more towards the expression of PAH degradation genes. This was unexpected as it contrasts with the generally held view that n-alkanes, being more labile, are attacked before the more refractory PAHs. Collectively, our results provide new insights into the existence and potential consequences of niche partitioning of hydrocarbon degrading taxa between neighboring marine environments.IMPORTANCEIn the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the taxonomic response of marine microbial communities to oil and dispersants has been extensively studied. However, relatively few studies on the functional response of these microbial communities have been reported, especially in a longitudinal fashion. Moreover, despite the fact that marine oil spills typically impact thousands of square kilometers of both coastal and offshore marine environments, little information is available on how the microbial response to oil and dispersants might differ between these biomes. The results of this study help fill this critical knowledge gap and provide valuable insight into how oil spill response efforts, such as chemically dispersing oil, may have differing effects in neighboring coastal and offshore marine environments.

scholarly journals Characterization of microbial response to petroleum hydrocarbon contamination in a lacustrine ecosystem

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilio D’Ugo ◽  
Milena Bruno ◽  
Arghya Mukherjee ◽  
Dhrubajyoti Chattopadhyay ◽  
Roberto Giuseppetti ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Petroleum Hydrocarbon ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Oil Pollution ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Hydrocarbon Contamination ◽  
Petroleum Hydrocarbon Contamination ◽  
Microbial Response ◽  
Pollution Event ◽  
Hydrocarbonoclastic Potential

AbstractMicrobiomes of freshwater basins intended for human use remain poorly studied, with very little known about the microbial response to in situ oil spills. Lake Pertusillo is an artificial freshwater reservoir in Basilicata, Italy, and serves as the primary source of drinking water for more than one and a half million people in the region. Notably, it is located in close proximity to one of the largest oil extraction plants in Europe. The lake suffered a major oil spill in 2017, where approximately 400 tons of crude oil spilled into the lake; importantly, the pollution event provided a rare opportunity to study how the lacustrine microbiome responds to petroleum hydrocarbon contamination. Water samples were collected from Lake Pertusillo 10 months prior to and 3 months after the accident. The presence of hydrocarbons was verified and the taxonomic and functional aspects of the lake microbiome were assessed. The analysis revealed specialized successional patterns of lake microbial communities that were potentially capable of degrading complex, recalcitrant hydrocarbons, including aromatic, chloroaromatic, nitroaromatic, and sulfur containing aromatic hydrocarbons. Our findings indicated that changes in the freshwater microbial community were associated with the oil pollution event, where microbial patterns identified in the lacustrine microbiome 3 months after the oil spill were representative of its hydrocarbonoclastic potential and may serve as effective proxies for lacustrine oil pollution.

scholarly journals Optimization on Emergency Materials Dispatching Considering the Characteristics of Integrated Emergency Response for Large-Scale Marine Oil Spills

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Song Li ◽  
Manel Grifoll ◽  
Miquel Estrada ◽  
Pengjun Zheng ◽  
Hongxiang Feng
Keyword(s):  
Emergency Response ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Marine Oil ◽  
Emergency Managers ◽  
Distribution Point ◽  
Dispatching Algorithm ◽  
Marine Oil Spills ◽  
The Difference

Many governments have been strengthening the construction of hardware facilities and equipment to prevent and control marine oil spills. However, in order to deal with large-scale marine oil spills more efficiently, emergency materials dispatching algorithm still needs further optimization. The present study presents a methodology for emergency materials dispatching optimization based on four steps, combined with the construction of Chinese oil spill response capacity. First, the present emergency response procedure for large-scale marine oil spills should be analyzed. Second, in accordance with different grade accidents, the demands of all kinds of emergency materials are replaced by an equivalent volume that can unify the units. Third, constraint conditions of the emergency materials dispatching optimization model should be presented, and the objective function of the model should be postulated with the purpose of minimizing the largest sailing time of all oil spill emergency disposal vessels, and the difference in sailing time among vessels that belong to the same emergency materials collection and distribution point. Finally, the present study applies a toolbox and optimization solver to optimize the emergency materials dispatching problem. A calculation example is presented, highlighting the sensibility of the results at different grades of oil spills. The present research would be helpful for emergency managers in tackling an efficient materials dispatching scheme, while considering the integrated emergency response procedure.

JAPANESE GOVERNMENTAL AND INDUSTRIAL MEASURES FOR THE CONTROL OF MARINE OIL SPILLS

1979 ◽  
Vol 1979 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-267
Author(s):  
Chikao Funatani
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Disaster Prevention ◽  
Legal Structure ◽  
Marine Disaster ◽  
Marine Oil Spills ◽  
Marine Disasters ◽  
Prevention Center ◽  
Spill Control

ABSTRACT Development of an effective oil spill control system in Japan was spurred by two marine disasters in 1974 which brought about an organizational and physical reinforcement of the nation's capability to respond to oil spills. This paper describes today's legal structure for oil spill control, the organizational concepts used at various levels to provide joint efforts by government agencies and industry, the role of the Marine Disaster Prevention Center which serves as the nucleus of the necessary control operations, and research and development highlights of ongoing Japanese efforts to prevent, control, and clean up oil spills.

scholarly journals Using Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer to Build Marine Oil Spill Preparedness Capacity and Foster Resilience Among Indigenous Communities

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elise G. DeCola ◽  
Andrew Dumbrille ◽  
Steve Diggon
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Transfer ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Peer To Peer ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Marine Oil ◽  
Marine Oil Spills

ABSTRACT Indigenous communities often bear disproportionate risks from marine oil spills because of their close connections to and reliance on marine ecosystems. The impacts of an oil spill on Indigenous people and communities can be far-reaching, even for incidents that might be considered “small” from the perspective of the response community. Building community capacity for oil spill preparedness and response is a critical component to creating resilience within Indigenous communities. While the fundamental elements of capacity are the same for Indigenous communities as for any other coastal community, the approach requires an understanding and respect for Traditional Knowledge, Indigenous governance structures, and existing stewardship networks. Oil spill preparedness and response traditionally follows a top-down approach within both government and industry, because marine oil spills are low frequency, high consequence, highly complex incidents where multiple organizations and jurisdictions must work together. While this reality applies regardless of whether an oil spill impacts Indigenous communities, a top-down approach can be experienced as a threat to self-governance and compromise the effectiveness of capacity-building efforts. There is a significant body of research in support of the concept that resilience to emergencies and disasters among Indigenous people must build upon existing social, cultural, and familial structures in order to be effective. This requires a fundamentally different approach that builds from the ground up with the goal of ultimately meshing with the existing preparedness and response framework. Peer-to-peer learning and knowledge transfer is an approach that has been used in support of a range of initiatives among Indigenous communities, such as human health initiatives. The same approach may provide a mechanism to empower Indigenous communities to enhance both capacity and resilience. This paper presents a case study from ongoing work to connect Indigenous communities from Canada's High Arctic and Pacific Coast in support of marine oil spill preparedness and response.

scholarly journals Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Detection of Marine Oil Spills Using an Adaptive Long-Term Moment Estimation Optimizer

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Zongchen Jiang ◽  
Jie Zhang ◽  
Yi Ma ◽  
Xingpeng Mao
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Heavy Oils ◽  
Marine Oil ◽  
Oil Spill Detection ◽  
Moment Estimation ◽  
Marine Oil Spills ◽  
Oil Films

Marine oil spills can damage marine ecosystems, economic development, and human health. It is important to accurately identify the type of oil spills and detect the thickness of oil films on the sea surface to obtain the amount of oil spill for on-site emergency responses and scientific decision-making. Optical remote sensing is an important method for marine oil-spill detection and identification. In this study, hyperspectral images of five types of oil spills were obtained using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). To address the poor spectral separability between different types of light oils and weak spectral differences in heavy oils with different thicknesses, we propose the adaptive long-term moment estimation (ALTME) optimizer, which cumulatively learns the spectral characteristics and then builds a marine oil-spill detection model based on a one-dimensional convolutional neural network. The results of the detection experiment show that the ALTME optimizer can store in memory multiple batches of long-term oil-spill spectral information, accurately identify the type of oil spills, and detect different thicknesses of oil films. The overall detection accuracy is larger than 98.09%, and the Kappa coefficient is larger than 0.970. The F1-score for the recognition of light-oil types is larger than 0.971, and the F1-score for detecting films of heavy oils with different film thicknesses is larger than 0.980. The proposed optimizer also performs well on a public hyperspectral dataset. We further carried out a feasibility study on oil-spill detection using UAV thermal infrared remote sensing technology, and the results show its potential for oil-spill detection in strong sunlight.

scholarly journals Feature Merged Network for Oil Spill Detection using SAR Images

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 3174
Author(s):  
Yonglei Fan ◽  
Xiaoping Rui ◽  
Guangyuan Zhang ◽  
Tian Yu ◽  
Xijie Xu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Recognition Accuracy ◽  
Original Model ◽  
High Dimensional ◽  
Sar Image ◽  
Sar Images ◽  
Marine Oil ◽  
Marine Oil Spills ◽  
Overfitting Problem

The frequency of marine oil spills has increased in recent years. The growing exploitation of marine oil and continuous increase in marine crude oil transportation has caused tremendous damage to the marine ecological environment. Using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images to monitor marine oil spills can help control the spread of oil spill pollution over time and reduce the economic losses and environmental pollution caused by such spills. However, it is a significant challenge to distinguish between oil-spilled areas and oil-spill-like in SAR images. Semantic segmentation models based on deep learning have been used in this field to address this issue. In addition, this study is dedicated to improving the accuracy of the U-Shape Network (UNet) model in identifying oil spill areas and oil-spill-like areas and alleviating the overfitting problem of the model; a feature merge network (FMNet) is proposed for image segmentation. The global features of SAR image, which are high-frequency component in the frequency domain and represents the boundary between categories, are obtained by a threshold segmentation method. This can weaken the impact of spot noise in SAR image. Then high-dimensional features are extracted from the threshold segmentation results using convolution operation. These features are superimposed with to the down sampling and combined with the high-dimensional features of original image. The proposed model obtains more features, which allows the model to make more accurate decisions. The overall accuracy of the proposed method increased by 1.82% and reached 61.90% compared with the UNet. The recognition accuracy of oil spill areas and oil-spill-like areas increased by approximately 3% and reached 56.33%. The method proposed in this paper not only improves the recognition accuracy of the original model, but also alleviates the overfitting problem of the original model and provides a more effective monitoring method for marine oil spill monitoring. More importantly, the proposed method provides a design principle that opens up new development ideas for the optimization of other deep learning network models.

scholarly journals A guide to toxicity assessment and monitoring effects at lower levels of biological organization following marine oil spills in European waters

2010 ◽  
Vol 67 (6) ◽  
pp. 1105-1118 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Martínez-Gómez ◽  
A. D. Vethaak ◽  
K. Hylland ◽  
T. Burgeot ◽  
A. Köhler ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Biological Effects ◽  
Toxicity Assessment ◽  
Biological Organization ◽  
Marine Oil ◽  
Assessment And Monitoring ◽  
Marine Oil Spills ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract Martínez-Gómez, C., Vethaak, A. D., Hylland, K., Burgeot, T., Köhler, A., Lyons, B. P., Thain, J., Gubbins, M. J., and Davies, I. M. 2010. A guide to toxicity assessment and monitoring effects at lower levels of biological organization following marine oil spills in European waters. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 67: 1105–1118. The usefulness of applying biological-effects techniques (bioassays and biomarkers) as tools to assist in evaluating damage to the health of marine ecosystems produced by oil spills has been demonstrated clearly during recent decades. Guidelines are provided for the use of biological-effects techniques in oil spill pollution monitoring for the NE Atlantic coasts and the NW Mediterranean Sea. The emphasis is on fish and invertebrates and on methods at lower levels of organization (in vitro, suborganismal, and individual). Guidance is provided to researchers and environmental managers on: hazard identification of the fuel oil released; selection of appropriate bioassays and biomarkers for environmental risk assessment; selection of sentinel species; the design of spatial and temporal surveys; and the control of potential confounding factors in the sampling and interpretation of biological-effects data. It is proposed that after an oil spill incident, a monitoring programme using integrated chemical and biological techniques be initiated as soon as possible for ecological risk assessment, pollution control, and monitoring the efficacy of remediation. This can be done by developing new biomonitoring programmes or by adding appropriate biological-effects methods to the existing monitoring programmes.

scholarly journals Spatio-temporal overlap of oil spills and early life stages of fish

2013 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 970-981 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frode B. Vikebø ◽  
Petter Rønningen ◽  
Vidar S. Lien ◽  
Sonnich Meier ◽  
Mark Reed ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Gadus Morhua ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Individual Offspring ◽  
Polycyclic Aromatic ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Vertical Distribution ◽  
Eggs And Larvae ◽  
Vertical Positioning

Abstract Coupling an oil drift and fates model (Oscar) in an offline environment with an individual-based model (IBM) for Northeast Arctic cod (Gadus morhua) eggs and larvae enables us to quantify the exposure of eggs and larvae to oil from various oil spill scenarios. Oscar describes the spatio-temporal dispersal and fate of hydrocarbons, whereas the egg and larval IBM integrates the exposure of each individual. We can thus evaluate the effects of the time and location of an oil spill on the degree of exposure for individuals from different spawning grounds (SGs). In addition, we quantify how this effect is modified by the dynamic vertical positioning of eggs and the vertical behaviour of larvae. The principal findings of the study indicate that the mean egg and larval exposures for individuals from different SGs are highly dependent on the time and location of the spill and the vertical distribution of the offspring. Approximately 9.9, 4.7, 3.5, and 0.4% of the offspring would experience total polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (TPAH) concentrations above 1 µg l−1 (parts per billion, ppb) for oil spill scenarios situated at Haltenbanken, Lofoten, and Vesterålen near the coast and near the shelf edge, respectively, based on the maximum TPAH concentrations in the water column along the individual offspring trajectories.

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