|
Project properties |
|
| Title | How to use trophic relations for building marine food webs |
| Group | Marine Animal Ecology |
| Project type | thesis |
| Credits | 12 |
| 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 | Food webs represent a structured way of looking at marine life functioning, by illustrating an entire community assemblage through one graphical representation. Food webs describe which species are present in an environment and how they interact, and what kind of trophic interactions exist between species, such as who eats whom.
In this project, you will learn how to build a food web using an existing species list and online databases for extracting trophic relations among species. The species list for this project was collected at multiple locations around Svalabard and includes marine mammals, fish, invertebrates and algae. You will access online databases, such as WORMS and GBIF, to search and extract further relevant trophic information about these species. Trophic data originates mainly from stomach analysis and from stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen, which can tell us the trophic levels of a species. With the list of species and their trophic relations, you will learn how to build an Arctic marine food web of Svalbard and use it to describe the complexity and functioning of such trophic network. |
| Used skills | |
| Requirements | Basic skills in R or Python; interest in data analysis/numerical ecology; interest in marine ecology |