PFRDG Funding to Support Student Research

I am thrilled to announce that I have been awarded one of NSU's President's Faculty Research and Development Grants to support a student-led research project over the next 12 months. The funding will support a graduate student employee in my lab, and they will be working on developing length-weight relationships for common fish species in our DEEPEND midwater collections. At the moment, the majority of our DEEPEND analyses are based on species counts and relative abundances, but size structuring and biomass distribution patterns are hugely important metrics in ecological research, as they can be used to describe fauna densities within different regions, allow us to examine changes in demographic patters, and can be translated fairly directly to ecosystems research (e.g., modelling) that uses carbon as its 'unit of currency'. At present, the standard biomass data that we have has relatively low precision because we measure the wet weights while we're sea. By revising these measures using a subset of specimens from the collections allows us to collate more precise lengths, wet weights, and dry weights for our most common species, and use those data to generate length-weight relationships that can then be applied to the rest of the database and create more reliable estimates of biomass for the samples as a whole.

Example LW regression for one of our midwater species.

We anticipate that the outcomes of this work will include a student-led research paper, and provide the basis for a suite of new analyses of our oceanic datasets.