ALGAE

As the name 'Professional Practice' implies, one of the goals of my PP was to get a practice experience of the professional working environment in my host organisation. For me, this organisation was CCMAR and more in particular, the Marine Plant Ecology Research Group, or ALGAE.

CCMAR

The Centro de Ciências do Mar, or CCMAR, is a non-profit organisation within the University of the Algarve, Portugal. It is one of the most important marine science research centres in the country. This research centre aims to broaden the understanding and to protect and explore the potential of marine resources through multidisciplinary research, innovation and training.

On their website, you'll find more information: https://ccmar.ualg.pt/en

ALGAE

The Marine Plant Ecology Research Group, or ALGAE as they call it for short, is my main research group. This research group within CCMAR aims to investigate the different processes that regulate marine plant production at the different levels of organisation, more specifically on the level of molecules, individuals, communities and ecosystems.

If you want to know more, have on look on their website: https://ccmar.ualg.pt/en/group/marine-plant-ecology-research-group

To get acquainted with the ALGAE research group, my supervisor set up a couple of meetings and informal interviews with different people from the group so that I could get to know them a little bit more and to get an idea of what they are working on. I learned a lot from this, and feel like I now have a clearer insight in what CCMAR and more specifically, the ALGAE group does. But that was not all...

Through these interviews, I got the opportunity to participate in some of the fieldcampaigns.

FIELDWORK WITH SARAY

The first fieldwork I got to participate in, was with a marine biology student of the local master's program, Saray. She was working on her thesis, where she studies blue carbon in the salt pans compared to saltmarsh habitats, combined with the role of these habitats for migration and nesting of migratory birds.

Side note: a saltmarsh is a coastal ecosystem in the upper coastal intertidal zone between land and open saltwater or brackish water that is regularly flooded by the tides; a salt pan is a shallow artificial pond designed to extract salts from sea water.

Twice every week, Saray drives out to a particular salt pan in the Ria Formosa. Here, she identifies and counts the birds that are present. She does this by going to a set of fixed spots, where she plants her telescope and observes the birds for a period of time. This is also what we did when I joined her. We saw a lot of birds, such as flamingos (Phoenicopterus ruber), pied avocets (recurvirostra avosetta) and black-winged stilts (Himantopus himantopus), and because it was the middle of spring, there were a lot of chicks!

FIELDWORK WITH FILIPE

Filipe is working for the SEAHORSE project, which aims to restore the seahorse population that once thrieved in the Ria Formosa. For this particular part of the project, they are transplanting seagrasses in a newly created seahorse sanctuary, or protected area, to restore their natural habitat. The goal is to reintroduce seahorses, more in particular the species Hippocampus hippocampus and Hippocampus guttulatus that were bred in captivity, in this area; as well as defining the diet of the seahorses by using stable isotopic analysis and quantifying how much of their diet is already being provided in the Ria Formosa.

We went with the boat to an area where the seagrasses Cymodocea nodosa and Zostera marina, native seagrass species in Ria Formosa, were transplanted two days before. Filipe needed to make an assessment of the biodiversity in this early stage of transplantion to have a baseline for his research, and to compare it to the biodiversity present at the site after a period of time has passed, when the seagrasses are integrated in the seafloor. This was done while SCUBA diving, to get a good idea of the biodiversity by visual census and pictures, and by taking samples from the sediment and analysing and identifying biodiversity in the laboratory.

I helped in this fieldwork by carrying the samples from the water to the boat while snorkeling, and cleaning the sediment from the bags for biodiversity assessment. In the meantime, there was time to explore the underwater area a bit. This was, without a doubt, a highlight in my professional practice. The biodiversity in the area was immens, with some species I had only seen in aquaria before. Here are some of them in the pictures below.

Page updated

Report abuse