Professional Practice Presentation

"Functional traits of the fauna associated with offshore wind farms"


Institute information

Behind the famous Museum of Natural Sciences is hidden the research institute named the “Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences”.

This is a big institute with 250 scientists studying different disciplines: biology, geology, oceanography, taxonomy, palaeontology and ecology. The scientists aim to write scientific papers on these different fields in order to advise political decision makers at the national as well at the international level.

Their goal is to conserve biodiversity, monitor the state of the marine ecosystems and to find possibilities to capture and store industrial CO2.


It is involved in important scientific research activities, the 4 main focus are:

  • Biodiversity and mechanisms involved in the evolution of life

  • Land, freshwater and marine ecosystems

  • History of life, the climate and human settlements

  • Geology of Belgium and modelling the North Sea


Concerning the oceans, the team MARECO that my supervisor is working with, have been studying the North Sea for a long time in order to protect it better and to be able to make predictions. Studies about marine mammals, exotic species, seabirds and bats, underwater noise, ecological models, hard substrates or others are carried out by the researchers from this team.

Map of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences

My research focus & my experience in few words

To go more into details ...

FUNCTIONAL TRAITS

Functional traits are morphological, biochemical, physiological, structural or behavioural characteristics of organisms that influence fitness.

During my professional practice my main task was to find some traits selected by the team related to the species collected on the wind farms inside reliable articles or databases.


FUZZY CODING

Fuzzy coding is a method used in marine ecology when studying functional traits of species. It permits to show the intraspecific variation (variation within species).

For each trait, there are several categories. For example, for the feeding method the categories are: active suspension feeder, passive suspension feeder, deposition feeder, grazer, parasite, predator and scavenger.

Suspension feeder (Mytilus edulis)

https://www.marlin.ac.uk/species/detail/1421

Grazer (Nototropis swammerdamei )

https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphipoda

Parasite (Hyperia galba)

http://isnotashrimp.blogspot.com/2013/02/jellyfish-parasites.html

The fuzzy coding consists of assigning numbers (from 0 to 3) to each category of the traits. Within one trait the total must be 3 and the different numbers are distributed according to the importance of the category for the given species. 0 means that the category is not a characteristic of the species at all and 3 is when the species is only characterised by the category. But, when the species show intraspecific variation for one trait, the higher numbers are assigned to the most common categories and the lower for the ones that are more rarely observed.


Fuzzy coding method on the excel sheet I used