Justin Judge
Icelandic field sites where shoreline communities are sampled and collected
Project description
Justin's PhD is focused on quantifying the relationship between environmental drivers of change and multiple dimensions of stability. His work aims to quantify how multiple measures of stability including variability, resistance, recovery and persistence change as communities and food webs become more stressed. He has been doing this using a community of shoreline microinvertebrates that are found around the coast here in Northern Ireland and which readily colonise artificial habitats that are deployed in the intertidal and shallow subtidal.
He has undertaken a range of laboratory and field based mesocosm studies using this community of small microinvertebrates and quantified their responses to a range of press and pulse perturbations. To generalise the work he has deployed these sampling devices in Iceland, Ireland and Portugal to quantify community responses to perturbations. The communities assemble onto pot scrubbers over a two to three month period and are then collected from the shoreline and returned to our laboratory based mesocosm facility in Belfast where we undertake lab based experiments with the communities drawn from sites spanning 24 degrees of latitude.
Pot scrubbers deployed in Iceland
Lab based mesocosm
Field based mesocosm facility at the Queen's University Marine Laboratory