Katrin Schertenleib

Biography

PhD project

Katrin’s PhD project aims at quantifying the impact of multiple stressors on the production of marine benthic resources. By developing a Bayesian Belief Network to link local drivers and predicted climate change scenarios to the impacts they will have on coastal and marine biology in Dublin Bay, she contributes to the international and interdisciplinary project Land2Sea. What is more, after building a new mesocosm facility, she conducts lab-based experiments to empirically disentangle and quantify independent and combined effects of ocean warming and acidification, and possibly other environmental factors such increased nutrient concentrations on benthic rocky shore species. She is interested in whether, how and why the effects of multiple stressors interact, and if effects of abiotic stressors are mediated by biological interactions. By quantifying key processes (e.g. primary and secondary production, or macroalgae-grazer relationships) under current and predicted future ocean conditions she hopes to help estimate our future ocean’s species assemblages and the capacity to produce bioenergy, food and biomaterials from marine organisms (e.g. shellfish, seaweed).
Katrin is funded by the Trinity College Dublin Provost’s PhD Project Award, and the research infrastructure she uses was funded by the Marine Institute.