Long-term change

Friends, I am excited to tell you about another publication from my lab! This one has been a long time coming. Back in 2021, a collaborator from the Alfred Wegener Institute approached me on Polarstern and asked if I would be willing to take on a project. I had analyzed photos of the seafloor from one of the HAUSGARTEN stations when I lived in Germany (2011-2012), and more photos were collected from the same station in the years since. Could I analyze the new images and continue the time-series, my colleague asked. I was already familiar with the station and the best person to track how it had changed over time. 

I accepted my collaborator's calling - and I even used the project as an opportunity to train a student of my own! My 2022 Summer Student Fellow, Kimberly, marked all the animals in seafloor images, and I double-checked her work. We made it through two of the sampling years over that summer, and then Kimberly did two more as part of her undergraduate thesis. She ran statistical analyses and found meaningful patterns in the data. Her thesis turned out brilliantly. 

After Kimberly's graduation, I turned her analysis into a scientific manuscript. We submitted it for publication - and got rejected. It happens. I was convinced that our findings would be interesting to a broad audience, so I shot high and submitted the manuscript to a high-impact journal. They weren't having it. It took some time, but after revising, resubmitting, and going through review at a more suitable journal, the paper was accepted for publication. 

This work shows how the community of invertebrates on the Arctic deep seafloor has changed over 20 years. You can find the published paper here, in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.