Award Data

During the harmful algal blooms (HAB), marine algal toxins reach concentrations high enough to cause various neurological and gastrointestinal disorders through inhalation of the toxin or consumption of contaminated shellfish. Brevetoxins, produced by dinoflagellate Karenia brevis, are known to disrupt neurological processes to cause an illness called neurotoxic shellfish poisoning. The timely rec ...

A central part of NOAA’s mission is to develop and distribute scientific data, including large-scale climate, weather, marine, and coastal information for regional and national analysis. NOAA has also developed local data gathering tools on an as-needed basis. While these approaches demonstrate the power of local data collection, no existing tool meets the broad needs of environmental community ...

Conversion of biomass into useful fungible chemicals and fuels is a long standing challenge. A key requirement of such processes is high efficiency of conversion for economic viability. Biomass derived sugars are highly oxygenated and need processing to remove to be converted into useful hydrocarbons.We propose an integrated bio-thermochemical platform for production of a hydrocarbon which can be ...

Small to mid-size farms across America now face declining profits and a higher volume of agricultural residuals due to increasingly erratic weather patterns. Farmers are seeking innovative ways to create new revenue streams and adapt to a changing landscape. Bragdon Farm's Phase I SBIR research is committed to creating a hay fuel log and scalable business model that can help ameliorate these i ...

Swine morbidity and mortality caused by porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) virus is a threat to the U.S. pork industry causing losses of $664 million last year that may exceed $700 million in 2014. Vaccines against PRRS virus have failed to stem the occurrence of PRRS in U.S. herds. Here we propose to ascertain the technical feasibility of developing an effective autogenous (kill ...

Wildland fires cost billions of dollars a year in the US, threatening homes, lives, and valuable natural resources. Large amounts of chemical additives, including those in water enhancers, foam fire suppressants, and long-term retardants are used in battling wildland fires to slow the spread of the fire and enable firefighters to work safely on the ground. Millions of gallons of water and hundreds ...

Culturing fish today is organized around two key steps: multiplication of fish in the hatcheries and the increase of fish biomass in grow-out production. This transition is more-or-less linear: immediately after spawning eggs get fertilized, develop and hatch, they are grown to the fry/fingerling/smolt stage, and get transferred to grow-out production. This cycle starts with the spawning event, wh ...

In this Phase I SBIR program, Reactive Innovations, LLC (RIL) will demonstrate an advanced system to recover valuable nutrients from animal manure. Since World War II, the availability of relatively cheap mineral fertilizers has been a major factor spurring specialization of production agriculture, in which crop (cereal) production has been increasingly separated from livestock production. One imp ...

Bacterial wilt is a disease that occurs in many important agricultural crops, including pepper, tobacco, tomato, and potato, and can be caused by the bacterium Ralstonia solancearum. This bacterium is classified into 5 races that are based loosely on host ranges, and into 5 biovars, which are based upon their differential ability to utilize a panel of carbohydrates. While Race 1 is endemic to the ...

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) has been used intensively worldwide to produce high quality products. One important issue associated with CEA is that temperature control of the greenhouse is often difficult to achieve, requiring large amount of fuel and/or electric power. Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI), in collaboration with the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, The Uni ...