During this Professional Practice I did a lot of different things. Firstly, I helped out with finding some good literature in order to start the experiments in a proper manner. After that I helped out with the experimental setup by cutting filter material, making sure the lighting was installed correctly, cleaning and sterilizing the sediment that will be used, preparing different swatches of the substrate materials that will be used in all the experiments and setting up the basins for the first, smaller experiment.

Besides that I was able to join a fieldtrip to Texel, The Netherlands, where we collected the first water, meiofauna, and macrofauna samples. After arriving back in Ghent one of the tasks that needed to be completed was identifying and counting meiofauna in the samples we took, which was a new skill for me.

Halfway through the internship the seagrass plants arrived in Belgium. This meant that we had to set up the acclimation tanks and create a protocol to start off the first experiments. I had never worked with seagrass in such a close proximity so far, which led to me learning a lot of new information. Another skill that I could add to my current knowledge is how to measure and mark seagrass plants in order to measure growth over time.