Description of the organisation
The University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) was established as a full University in 1992 but was before acting as Polytechnic University by 30 years. It now has 21,000 students and nearly 2,500 staff members, and it is at the forefront of teaching and research in Marine Science, Veterinary and Engineer. The Marine Science study was established as a Faculty in Spain in 1982 in the ULPGC. More than 400 undergraduate students and 30 doctoral students receive teaching class and research at the Faculty every year. The Marine Chemistry group at the University of Las Palmas ULPGC, (QUIMA) was created 24 years ago and became part of the Instituto de Oceanografía y Cambio Global (IOCAG) in 2014, focusing in the study of the carbonate system chemistry and in the trace metal speciation processes in seawater with international collaborations with the University of Miami, the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academic of Sciences, and most of the European Marine research centres.
Expertise particularly relevant for the project
The research group QUIMA-IOCAG at the ULPGC started in 2000 working on the biogeochemical behaviour of iron in seawater through laboratory experiments and in situ studies. Its expertise has benefited from both several long visits to the RSMAS-University of Miami research group and research projects by the Spanish Ministry of Science ECOFEMAR (MEC, BQU2003-04010), EFEMAR (MEC, CTM2006-09857), EFECO2 (MCI, CTM2009-12526), ECOFEMA (MCI, CTM2010-19517, subprograma MAR), EACFe (MINECO,
CTM2014-52432-P). These projects have resulted in numerours research publications of high impact factor related with the study of the iron oxidation kinetics under the effects of pH, temperature, ionic strength and the presence of organic ligands from natural exudates. The first paper on the effect of organic matter on the behaviour of Fe(II) in seawater (Santana-Casiano et al., 2000) is considered a master piece in the research group. The effect H2O2 in the persistence of Fe(II) in seawater and the competition with oxygen (González-Dávila et al., 2005, 2006) has also been studied. Using natural phytoplanckton cultures, the group has extracted and characterized different polyphenols compounds (Rico et al., 2013; López et al., 2015) and studied the effects of those individual compounds in the Fe(II) oxydation kinetics (Santana-Casiano et al., 2014). This type of work has shown how the presence of organic ligands with catecholate groups are able to reduce Fe(III) to the most bioavailable Fe(II) species, explaining also the decrease in the Fe(II) oxidation rate in these media and conditions. These studies have also been done in several oceanic regions at in situ conditions, including the Sub-Artic (Santana-González et al., 2018), and the submarine volcano Tagoro in the Canary Islands (Santana-Casiano et al., 2013, 2016; Santana-González et al., 2017). The kinetics equations developed by the ULPGC group for the inorganic Fe(II) oxidation as a function of temperature, pH and salinity (Santana-Casiano et al., 2005), have been included in the biogeochemical-circulation models (OGCBMs, ocean general circulation and biogeochemistry models) in the ocean (Tagliabue and Völker, 2011).
For more information ULPGC website.