The carbon paper
Friends, while I am busy working away analyzing Arctic larval samples at sea, the fruits of my past research are appearing in print. I'm the second author on a new paper published today in the journal Progress in Oceanography: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2021.102616
This paper grew out of some work I had done in Norway with my advisor there, Andrew Sweetman. Andrew had an image dataset from Svalbard fjords that needed analyzing, and together, we used the data to figure out how environmental factors influence biodiversity in seafloor communities.
But that's not where the analysis ended. Another PhD student from Poland, Mikołaj Mazurkiewicz, was also in contact with Andrew about Arctic fjord communities, specifically about how they utilize carbon. I had actually met Mikołaj and his advisor during a field trip in Svalbard before, so when he wrote to me about re-analyzing the image data, I was pretty excited and more than happy to help.
Mikołaj found that in colder fjords, seafloor invertebrates have higher biomass and account for a higher proportion of total carbon demand. In warmer fjords, the invertebrates are smothered by glacial sedimentation and eaten by predatory fish, so they have much lower biomass and carbon demand. The study quantifies and formalizes what many scientists had been informally observing for years - when the temperature warms up, the ecosystem shifts and the seafloor becomes a lot more boring. I'm obviously condensing a complex story into a ridiculously short, digestible summary, so if you're interested in the full story, I encourage you to read the paper. You can find it here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2021.102616
This paper grew out of some work I had done in Norway with my advisor there, Andrew Sweetman. Andrew had an image dataset from Svalbard fjords that needed analyzing, and together, we used the data to figure out how environmental factors influence biodiversity in seafloor communities.
But that's not where the analysis ended. Another PhD student from Poland, Mikołaj Mazurkiewicz, was also in contact with Andrew about Arctic fjord communities, specifically about how they utilize carbon. I had actually met Mikołaj and his advisor during a field trip in Svalbard before, so when he wrote to me about re-analyzing the image data, I was pretty excited and more than happy to help.
Mikołaj found that in colder fjords, seafloor invertebrates have higher biomass and account for a higher proportion of total carbon demand. In warmer fjords, the invertebrates are smothered by glacial sedimentation and eaten by predatory fish, so they have much lower biomass and carbon demand. The study quantifies and formalizes what many scientists had been informally observing for years - when the temperature warms up, the ecosystem shifts and the seafloor becomes a lot more boring. I'm obviously condensing a complex story into a ridiculously short, digestible summary, so if you're interested in the full story, I encourage you to read the paper. You can find it here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2021.102616
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