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Project properties |
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| Title | Food webs of Arctic marine coastal communities based on eDNA data |
| Group | Marine Animal Ecology |
| Project type | thesis |
| Credits | 24-39 |
| Supervisor(s) | Carmen-Lucia David
Martine van den Heuvel-Greve |
| Examiner(s) | Tinka Murk, Reindert Nijland, Ronald Osinga, Rosa van der Ven, Diede Maas |
| Contact info | carmen-lucia.david@wur.nl
martine.vandenheuvel-greve@wur.nl |
| Begin date | 2024/09/01 |
| End date | 2025/09/01 |
| Description | The Arctic marine environment is rapidly warming, leading to changes in coastal communities and northward migration of southern species. In this MSc project results from eDNA data from water, plankton and sediment samples from several locations around Svalbard will be used to describe generic local marine communities and analyse the Svalbard food web structure and dynamics. This project will study compositional differences in the food web between locations that differ in space and/or human presence (in/out harbour vs reference sites). Analysing food webs can be a useful method to reveal community structure and species interactions, since they depict the complexity of ecosystems as a network through trophic interactions linking consumers to resources. You will learn how to use network models to build food webs and analyse their structure and stability through various network metrics. |
| Used skills | |
| Requirements | Experience with R or Python; Advanced Statistics; Interest in marine ecology |