Author: Ariel Barkhurst
Source: Sun-Sentinel [1]
September 23, 2012

"DANIA BEACH—In a $50 million five-story brick and glass building in John U. Lloyd Beach State Park, researchers are taking the biomass of crustaceans to help study the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, cultivating asexual staghorn coral and sequencing the genomes of sponges.

The answers they discover will help preserve an ecological resource — coral reefs and the life they support — that brings about $6 billion in tourism annually to five South Florida counties, including Broward and Palm Beach counties, according to a federal study.

That's one of the reasons Nova Southeastern University built the new, 86,000-square-foot facility with 15 laboratories at the park. The Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Ecosystem Research, billed by the university as the country's largest coral reef research facitlity, was built in part with a $15 million federal grant."

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