About the project
Long-term environmental monitoring of changes to the seabed is rare but important, particularly as climate change accelerates. Seabed photography makes it possible, but inconsistency in application reduces comparability. This project will assess climate-related ecological change in benthic fauna and develop the consistency in seabed photography key to future marine monitoring.
Responsible environmental monitoring is fundamental to understanding and conserving marine ecosystems in the face of accelerating climate change, and the sustainable development of marine resources. Long-term biodiversity monitoring is essential but rare in the remote deep sea.
Seabed photography provides a feasible, repeatable, cost-efficient solution, and is increasingly used in the assessment and monitoring of change in remote marine environments, particularly by academics, industry and government agencies. Effective ocean observation and monitoring require comparability between data from different time points, so practicable optimization of data collection is critical. However, the conditions for robust monitoring are not commonly met because a lack of guidance stemming from comparisons of the variety of new imaging methodologies.
The aims of this project are to:
- monitor temporal change in the ecology of megabenthic communities experiencing impacts of climate change using seabed imagery; and
- establish best practices for optimizing ecological data extraction from photography for monitoring seabed communities and determining key ecosystem measures (e.g., Essential Ocean and Biodiversity Variables).
The project will compare benthic megafaunal communities from key monitoring sites using existing and new seabed photo datasets, including from the Porcupine Abyssal Plain Sustained observatory, an abyssal long-term time series site where the benthos appear to be impacted by climate change.
The student will assess this important change, while removing bias from the imaging methodology. In so doing, the student will identify best practices for consistent environmental monitoring using photography and generalize them as recommendations for marine monitoring.
Supervisors
You will also be supervised by organisations other than the University of Southampton, including:
- Dr Jennifer Durden from the National Oceanography Centre (lead supervisor)
- Dr Andrew Gates from the National Oceanography Centre
- Dr Brian Bett from the National Oceanography Centre
