About the project
How are habitats and benthic communities in submarine canyons influenced by natural disturbance and what does that tell us about the best way to conserve them? You will investigate how the resident biological communities and their habitats change in time and whether active habitat restoration is effective in conservation effort.
Submarine canyons are considered major biodiversity hotspots. Their complex terrain, oceanography and sediment transport processes result in higher levels of natural disturbance than found in other deep-sea environments. Recent decades have also seen human disturbances, particularly from bottom trawling, much increased. A better understanding of ecosystem resilience and recovery is needed to support UK and international marine conservation and management.
This PhD will focus on the Whittard Canyon system, including “The Canyons” UK Marine Conservation Zone. Data are available from remotely operated vehicle (ROV) video and photography, and autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) bathymetry, including repeat observations at several locations.
Key project aims include:
Assessing community composition change over time
Quantitative analysis of image data from several locations, surveyed in 2015 and 2022, interpreted against new knowledge about sediment transport and internal wave patterns in this canyon system.
Quantifying changes in small-scale habitat and individual species distribution patterns
Habitat maps will be created from repeat high-resolution mapping and photogrammetry data, to quantify change in habitat distribution and extent. Novel point pattern analysis from photogrammetry mosaics will quantify change in small-scale species distributions. Comparisons of individual specimens / colonies will inform on the health status of key ecosystem engineers.
Analysis of colonisation experiments
There is increasing policy debate about the role of habitat restoration in marine conservation. You will assess settlement experiments currently deployed in The Canyons MCZ, and new deployments planned under the European project ‘REDRESS’. You will study colonisation, habitat recovery, and the potential role of restoration in conservation.
You will also be supervised by organisations other than the University of Southampton, including Dr Veerle Huvenne, Dr Andrew Gates and Dr Loïc Van Audenhaege from the National Oceanography Centre.
