Summer Vacation Scholarship
Examining the species richness and distribution of zooplankton
communities around Australia
Supervisors: Dr Jason Everett (Jason.Everett@unsw.edu.au) and
Prof. Iain Suthers (I.Suthers@unsw.edu.au)
Collaborators: Assoc. Prof. Anthony Richardson (UQ and CSIRO, Brisbane).
Project Details
A Summer Vacation Scholarship is available within the Fisheries and Marine
Environmental Research laboratory within BEES (www.famer.unsw.edu).
Zooplankton species information has been collected from the Continuous Plankton
Recorder (CPR) Program since 1931 throughout the North Atlantic (Richardson et al
2006). The CPR survey is the largest multi-decadal plankton-monitoring program in the
world. The CPR is a simple, robust device towed behind ships of opportunity (SOOPs) on
their normal trading routes at their conventional operating speeds, usually 15–20 knots
allowing it to collect hundreds of samples throughout an ocean basin without human
intervention. In 2008 the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) started deploying
a CPR around Australia and to New Zealand. To date there exists a database of 82
deployments, with 4381 individual zooplankton samples across 327 taxa.
Using this extensive database the Vacation Scholar will examine the distribution and
abundance of zooplankton around Australia. Additionally, the student will examine the
coincident satellite information from these deployments (sea-surface temperature,
chlorophyll a, sea-surface height) in order to assess the drivers of zooplankton
communities. The vacation scholar will also have the opportunity to use this dataset to
examine a range of ecological questions such as species richness, thermal tolerance and
metabolic theory.
The student will have
an interest in
biological
oceanography with a
strong background in
ecology. The student
will preferably have
numerical ecology
and/or programming
skills (MATLAB, R).
References
Richardson, A.J. et al.,
2006. Using
continuous plankton
recorder data. Progress
in Oceanography,
68(1), pp.27–74.