IMBRSea Joint School - Adventures at the Swedish Coast

The analysis time has come. How to analyse it? At the beginning, we go slowly, gradually. Like one of many snails we sampled. We take time to work in R studio, we discuss the ideas patiently. In the evening, we go slowly, gradually as well. But it’s more like sliding off the rocky shore towards the steep cliff. Welcome to the ‘panic zone’. We have so much data, we are drowning in it. At the start of the project we wanted only to sample the rocky shores fauna and measure wave exposure levels on three islands. But in the process, we found ourselves collecting 2 different faunal samples per site (from belt transects and from quadrats), collecting algal samples, describing habitats on the islands and recording the weather conditions. We can do so much with it, but we have so little time. 2 days! 2 days to analyse the data, write the report, prepare the 14-minute long presentation, make a documentary movie and finish the blog (he-he). So please, don’t be angry that we did not post too m...

The Rockies hit the field for the last 3 days. We set up the Arduino distance sensors to measure wave heights on 3 islets and left these for 24 hours. Meanwhile, we went out to survey the fauna on the rocky shores of the islets. The Rockies team in the field, starting sampling. Credits: Freija Hauquier. We sampled the most exposed islet and the semi-exposed. Our team turned out to be so efficient during the first survey, that we were given a second boat so that we could save time and transport all the group at once to and from the island. On the first day of sampling, all very content with our field performance, we came to the lab to do some quick sorting and species identification and go for a well-deserved rest. Only then we realised how long it takes to do all the post-field lab work! It took us roughly a whole day to write down the species we found on the first day onto the datasheet. With each day, we became faster in the lab as we divided the work during sorting equally, w...

The past days were tough for the Rockies, since we not only had to adjust our sampling method for the benthic community, but also struggled with constructing the Arduino tool for our wave exposure measurements. But let’s start from the beginning: so, the team was divided into two teams of three persons, the Arduino group consisted of Karolina, João and Svenja and  the field sampling group with Marie, Minju and Jen. Initially, the Arduino team wanted to use an acce… acceleroriafhd....accelerometer (who can actually pronounce this?) to measure the accelerations along three directions. With this information we wanted to back calculate the wave heights. So far our ambitious  original plans. But this didn’t work out. Not only due to our pronunciation problems with the word itself, but rather because of the complex set-up, we decided to use a much more handy tool: an ultrasonic distance meter. Never heard of this before? We are here to explain how this fancy tool works. A distance ...

Rocky shore of one of the islets in Tjarno bay. Credits: Svenja Neumann. We are the Rockies. We are investigating the secrets of rocky shores fauna in the beautiful and faraway land in the North, where you haven’t been, somewhere off the coast Tjarno in Sweden. This is the first blog about our summer school project for IMBRSea masters. Let’s rock&roll! The biodiversity of rocky shores has been studied so many times, right? So probably the research into how the faunal diversity changes with the high wave exposure (i.e. rough coastal conditions) is standard even for a summer school project? But here we have a twist for you! As proper ecologists, we are very pragmatic, and we are interested in how the functional diversity in the faunal communities of rocky shores is influenced by different wave exposures. We want to know how the roughness of the sea changes the faunal community, its groups and inter-group relationships, and the traits of organisms that finally impact ecosystem fu...