Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Increasing pressures to extract ocean resources will demand new strategies to sustain ocean life and the associated functions (processes) and services (e.g. food production) on which our planet depends. My Discovery Grant research will focus on understanding biodiversity and ecosystem function linkages in marine seafloor habitats. This work will advance ideas that form the basis of ongoing student projects, integrating complementary observation and experimental work on the specific functions of nutrient and carbon cycling, habitat provisioning, and food web support. Published theory links biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, but requires field verification of the ideas and essential processes, particularly in oceans.

Seafloor organisms play an essential role in nutrient and carbon (organic matter) cycling. Students in my lab use statistical and predictive approaches to link key functions and biodiversity, and the complicating effects of variable environments. We now add manipulative experimental approaches to confirm patterns and causative mechanisms. Our work will next consider how different groups of organisms contribute to cycling and how those roles link to quality and availability of organic matter. We will also ask how these functions scale up – whether small-scale measurements can inform regional maps of ocean function. We also ask how multiple functions (e.g. nutrient recycling vs food web support) interact. Using manipulative experiments (laboratory and field based) we will build on past work to identify the biodiversity elements most important to different functions. Comparative measurements and experiments across habitats and scales will determine the generality and scability of inferences to advise society on the biodiversity elements most essential to sustaining ocean health and productivity.

These same issues extend to habitat provisioning, particularly for vulnerable early life history stages - which biotic habitat supports which functions? We collaborate with other labs to utilize genetics, otolith geochemistry, behavioural studies, and biophysical modelling to understand connectivity links to habitat provisioning.

Food web support (phytoplankton rain to the seafloor, invertebrate prey in sediments, juvenile fishes fed on by conspecifics and other fishes), provides another critical ecosystem function we are just beginning to understand. My students embrace tools such as lipids and stable isotopes that offer new understanding of food web processes and ocean surface and seafloor links. With these tools, we will ask whether expected changes in phytoplankton in future ocean scenarios will alter functioning of marine seafloor communities, whether timing of food availability alters how organisms process carbon and cycle nutrients, and how habitat patches influences delivery of functions from habitat provisoning to organic matter recycling.