Miniaturising gross proximate composition analysis techniques to develop accurate ecological models of marine species interactions at the scale of offshore windfarms

Project Description:

This PhD scholarship is supported by industry partner, the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture (CEFAS) and is part of a PhD Research Cluster, Understanding environmental impacts and consequences.

Offshore Windfarms are, and will continue to be, the most significant physical anthropogenic change to the North Sea and will significantly change the seascape and surrounding ecosystems. Currently there is little understanding of these impacts, which is particularly acute for benthic organisms as they have limited habitat mobility and thus likely to be significantly affected by changing sea beds. Benthic organisms are typically small and thus are challenging to study meaning little is known about how their proximate composition changes, this limits our ability to predict how wind farms could affect food chains.

Ecological models are a key route to understanding what the impacts of climate change could be on our marine systems. Cutting-edge fisheries models, like PANDORA, are starting to incorporate both ecological and environmental data in order to understand how whole ecosystems are likely to respond to disturbances. Ecosystem models are very data hungry requiring, ideally, information on who eats who, how much and what nutritional quality is being consumed. However, very few ecological models incorporate nutrient fluxes and the temporal variation in nutritive value of prey items. To understand these complex nutritional relationships between prey and predator at a fine scale detailed proximate composition (PC) analysis is needed.

This project will investigate how PC analysis can be miniaturised to enable more sustainable, efficient sampling at the level of small individual organisms. Successful development of these techniques will enable understanding of changes at this scale and build a much more detailed picture of ecological relationships than analysis of grouped specimens.

If you have any queries about the project, please contact Dr Samantha Richardson, samantha.richardson@hull.ac.uk or Dr Magnus Johnson, M.johnson@hull.ac.uk

You may also address queries about the CDT to auracdt@hull.ac.uk.