by CERF Hub scientist Roland Pitcher

CERF hub scientist Roland Pitcher attended the 1st Workshop of the Census of Marine Life (CoML) Synthesis activity on “A meta-analysis of bio-physical relationships between seabed species/assemblages and their environment”. 

The workshop was held at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, from 29 September to 3 October 2008.

This synthesis brought together several CoML Programs that have been investigating species–habitat relationships, with the objectives of summarising the extent to which physical surrogates may explain biological patterns; ranking the importance of physical variables for structuring biological patterns; examining the common biological responses to their gradients; and identifying critical values for each physical variable that correspond to ‘threshold’ changes in biological patterns.

One of the Programs available to the Census is the CoML affiliated Great Barrier Reef (GBR) Seabed Biodiversity Project where biophysical relationships and prediction modelling were central to the approach. Members of the GBR Seabed Biodiversity project team led by CERF Hub scientist Roland Pitcher initiated this synthesis activity with colleagues from the Census Gulf of Maine (GoMA) Program in Canada and USA. Other participating Programs include GoMex, COMARGE and ChEss (being Census programs on the Gulf of Mexico, Continental Margins and deepwater chemo-synthetic ecosystems, respectively). Analytical approaches developed in the GBR SB project and refined in the CERF Marine Biodiversity Hub were selected as the most useful for this meta-analysis.