Thursday 10 July 2014

College of Science Postgraduate Seminar Series 15th July 2014

College of Science Postgraduate Seminar Series - Spring 2014 

15th July 2014 - 1pm - Zoology Museum (Wallace)


Scaling Biodiversity - Ecosystem Function Relationships

Talk 1

Tom Fairchild

(PhD student, Swansea University, UK)


Tom is a first year PhD student at Swansea University under the supervision of Dr. John Griffin and Dr. Mike Fowler. He undertook a 4 year masters degree at Bangor University in Oceanography,  with a 1 year research project focusing on how physical seabed features, sediment types and how current profiles can be used as a predictor of epibenthic species communities. 
Tom opted to take an MSc in Marine Environmental Protection at Bangor where he also undertook free-lance work on the eradication of the invasive sea squirt Didemnum vexillum on behalf of the (then) Countryside Council for Wales. After this, Tom was offered a position with the Welsh Government, employed as the scientific officer for South Wales in the Marine and Fisheries department, leaving only to pursue his PhD here at Swansea. 



Biodiversity, in many different forms, is recognised as being the driving force behind ecosystem functions,  however there is a great deal of debate on how different aspects of biodiversity, physical heterogeneity and "scale" affect the biodiversity  - ecosystem function relationship (BEF). There are growing bodies of work on both the differences in the way we consider "biodiversity" and also as to how heterogeneity affects BEF relationships, but whilst scale is expected to be an important manipulator of BEF relationships it is rarely explicitly examined.

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