TJW

The Arctic seafloor stores vast amounts of carbon. As sea ice retreats and temperatures rise, the species living there are shifting — and we don't know what that means for this carbon sink. I'm investigating how changes in biodiversity translate into changes in ecosystem function in some of the ocean's most rapidly transforming environments.

Offshore wind farms are expanding rapidly across UK and European waters. We don't yet know how their electromagnetic fields, underwater noise, and physical structures affect the seafloor communities that underpin broader ocean health. This year-long controlled experiment found that ecological responses depend critically on the prior history of the site — with direct implications for how impact assessments are designed and where mitigation is needed.

Individual animals of the same species can differ enormously in their traits and behaviours. I study what this variation means for how ecosystems function — and whether ignoring it leads us to mispredict how communities will respond to environmental change.

As offshore wind farms multiply across UK waters, the seafloor beneath them — including ancient heritage sites — risks being overlooked. This project mapped the overlap between planned wind farm footprints and both ecological communities and submerged heritage assets, creating the spatial evidence base needed for better-informed marine planning decisions.

The fjords of Greenland are among the most rapidly changing environments on Earth. This project built the first research partnerships and experimental capacity to study how warming and metal contamination are affecting the animals living on the seafloor there — and trained the next generation of researchers to sustain that work.

Climate change is reshaping Arctic marine ecosystems faster than almost anywhere else on the planet. My PhD asked how the invertebrates living on and in the seafloor respond to past, present, and projected future conditions — and what those responses mean for the functioning of the whole ecosystem.

Predicting how ecosystems respond to disturbance requires linking the traits that make species vulnerable to stressors with the traits that determine their ecological impact. This international consortium synthesised the state of trait-based approaches in marine benthic ecology and developed a framework to make those predictions tractable.

Deep-water corals in the Canadian Arctic are living archives of past ocean conditions — their skeletons record centuries of temperature and chemistry change. This expedition used an ROV to collect these corals from otherwise inaccessible habitats, providing material to reconstruct environmental change across one of the least-studied ocean regions on Earth.

Coastal habitats buffer shorelines from storms and erosion — but their ability to do so depends on the living communities in the sediment. This experiment simulated consecutive storm events in a laboratory flume to test how benthic communities maintain sediment integrity and biogeochemical cycling under repeated disturbance.

Sea ice drives the ecology of Arctic seafloor communities — but the ice is retreating. This expedition sampled benthic communities across a sea-ice gradient in the Barents Sea to understand how species assemblages and ecosystem function change as ice disappears, providing baseline data for projecting future Arctic benthic change.