My Professional practices at VLIZ

Hello!! My name is Eugenio Raymond Alfonso and I'm from the Canary Island, Spain.

Currently, I'm doing my master studies in the IMBRSea program, an international master focused on the marine biological resources from the point of view of several modules. My specialisation is #FutureSeas, which can be deduced from the name, is mostly about climate change.

And as part of the master's program, I did six weeks of professional practice (PP). Which are evaluated in part with a website, where to show the experience.

... So here we are!!

Image from: Ocean Drifters by Plymouth University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziGtmjiUlJQ

Due to their trophic relevance (Castellani and Edwards, 2017) and their limited swimming capacity, the zooplanktonic organisms are outstanding estimators of the water masses and currents conditions (Pinchuk and Eisner, 2017). These facts are quite relevant when studying the impact of climate change in the oceans, which is the objective of my master studies. Therefore, I tried to spend my professional practices (PP) focusing on the zooplankton study, finding a topic that fits this desire in the Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee - Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) in Belgium.

So that, the PP topic was:

Data exploration and preliminary analysis of LifeWatch plankton time series and samples for Mollusc eggs and larvae occurrences.

Being the working plan:

First, a oceanographic campaign to sample zooplanktonic organisms around the Belgian Part of the North Sea (BPNS).
Then, processing the samples in the VLIZ laboratories.
And finally, obtaining results after some office work.

Being the new working plan:

Plankton: ZooSCAN and Video Plankton Recorder (VPR) image validation.
Underwater acoustics: Online sound searching, the target clicks identification and clicks validation.
Plankton: Statistical comparison of sampling methods.

Unfortunately, I couldn't go there physically due to the COVID-19 situation. Thus, the PP had to be rethought owing to its essential field-laboratory aspects, planning the 6 weeks internship in a remote way.