Tuesday September 19th, Dr Jose González, responsible of the Oceanography service of the ECIMAT (CIM-UVigo), will present the lecture “Assessing the effect of oil spills on the dynamics of plankton community using a model” at the “Café con Sal” conference cycle.
Modelling in marine ecology has been widely used with predictive purposes, but they can also be used in an alternative way, as an interpretative tool to understand the processes involved in determining the structure and dynamics of the food web. In this sense, models can be used to reproduce the measured variables, giving us important clues to determine which of the not measured parameters need to be tuned to reproduce the observations. Thus, we can use modelling to determine differences among communities or to detect the possible effects of the input of nutrients and toxics on a given community, even in not measured parameters.
Jose González will present in his lecture the use of a simple model, the NPDZ (Nutrients-Phytoplankton-Detritus-Zooplankton) model, to interpret the results of the mesocosms experiments conducted during the IMPRESION project, as an example of this alternative application for modelling. During the conference, he will explain the experiments results, which proved that modelling is a powerful tool to explain differences in community dynamics among 4 different marine microbial communities, and also allow the detection of subtle toxic effects, not always detected from direct interpretation of empirical data.
The conference will take place at the conference room of the ECIMAT at 11:00h (CES) with a coffee and will be live streamed on http://tv.uvigo.es/es/directo/1.html and permanently available on CIM and UVigoTV websites.
Vídeos
- Presentation of Jose González Alba Hernández, CIM-UVigo
- Assessing the dynamics of the microbial plankton community using a model Jose González, ECIMAT, CIM-UVigo
- Questions time Jose González, ECIMAT, CIM-UVigo