News updates
08 September 2017
Find out the latest news from the Marine Ecosystems Research Programme
06 September 2017
My name is Hayley Bannister and I am a postgraduate student at the University of Sheffield under the supervision of MERP's Dr. Tom Webb, Prof. Paul Blackwell, Dr. Julia Blanchard and Dr. Kieran Hyder.
In my PhD I am interested in how we can use computer models to better understand how our environment is likely to change in the future. However, predicting the future is complicated and...
04 September 2017
One of the development goals for the ecosystem model ERSEM (European Regional Seas Ecosystem Model) was improving the representation of mesozooplankton, the grazers that form the first link of the food web within the marine ecosystem. This group includes a multitude of diverse organisms like copepods, krill and jellyfish. Originally that group was represented by one generic organism type that...
01 September 2017
Miriam Grace started a one-year postdoc at the University of Sheffield with Tom Webb in May 2017, taking over from Rémi Vergnon. Her background combines bioinformatics, theoretical biology and biodiversity policy analysis.
In addition to data coordination, she is contributing to biodiversity analyses using MERP data, focussing on assessing hotspots and the relationship between different metrics...
01 September 2017
The MERP community of researchers and stakeholders encompasses an impressive range of knowledge and understanding of the UK’s marine ecosystems. To address many of the more ecological questions that interest us, we tend to apply this knowledge via a range of scientific and technical routes, typically using some combination of theory and data, statistical and mathematical modelling...
31 August 2017
One of the attributes that makes MERP a unique research programme is that we have the explicit aim of combining data with large scale models. Many times this aim is embedded in the work plan of projects, however, communication between data-generating ecologists, our experimentalists and observational researchers, and numerical modellers is not a trivial task.
Recognising this challenge, a group...