Tjärnö tales edition 2017

EMBC+ Spring School 2017 is over and was again an unforgettable experience. During the 10 days 47 students worked on 7 challenging research projects guided by an international team of 10 teachers. The facilities of the Sven Lovén Centre for Marine Sciences in Tjärnö proved again to be an excellent location for this school. Watch the documentary movies made by each team of students at the EMBC+ video channel! Enjoy! https://vimeo.com/album/4535971

Ingredients: 1 Tjärnö Bay 1 Beam Trawl (BT) 1 Towed Video (TV) 1 Baited Underwater Video (BUV) 1 Photo-quadrat (PQ) 5 computers 1 laboratory 7 people Wake up everyday at 7:30 in the morning and go on a boat. You will need to sample, a lot. Don’t forget to complain about being cold! It will show how committed you are, and people will appreciate it. Analyze your data. With love. Here, it is important to stay calm. Coffee might help you achieve the right consistency of your assessment. Build graphs, tables and calculate indices. It’s very likely that they will be wrong. Remember to keep calm. Delete them, breath and do them again. Eventually some nice stuff will come out. Sleep. Go to the sauna. Some fresh air might help, too. Hang out with your friends, ask them about anything, even the weather, but not how they’re project is going. Friends don’t like that kind of stuff. Write a report. State that BUV was the method with the higher functional diversity and ...

We are done with our field sampling! Two days ago we finished the trawling surveys, and since then we have been submerged in assessing the diversity of the Bay of Tjärnö using a video camera method. On one hand, we were using a sledge with an attached camera (with and without a net). Pulled for one minute, the structure stayed on the sea bottom and recorded during this minute the communities living there (called a video transect). Once in the lab, part of our group was in charge of analyzing these videos and estimating the number of species and their abundance. A bottom full of algae and sea grass made it difficult to identify all the benthic species. Whereas, other times video footage showed clearly all the organisms attached and living on the bottom. On the other hand, we were using our well known landing platform, that was comparable to a low-cost ROV. We used this platform for two methods! In one method, we took a picture of the sea floor in different areas of the bay. ...

Busy days at the Sven Lovén Centre! Our sampling days have started! Zips are up, beanies are on! The cold wind in our faces is the perfect wake-up call, stronger than coffee. Doesn’t matter, sun is shining, and we are on a boat! We started testing our methodology to find out which one works best for the assessment of the different marine communities of the Tjärnö Bay. We are using four methods, and our objective is to compare techniques based on a trawling and video on a sledge, and baited underwater video and photo-quadrats using an amazingly high-tech landing platform (see pictures). Every day, our sailors go on the boat hunting for diversity. Meanwhile, our landrats wait on land for the samples to arrive, either in big boxes full of marine life or inside a little underwater camera. Everyone gathers around with excitement waiting to find out what was the catch of the day. It’s amazing to see the amount of little organisms hidden beneath the cold water of the little bay....

Olá, Hola, Kaixo, Hello, Hallo! Welcome to the tales of the biodiversity hunters! We are 7 students working in the beautiful Marine Research Center of Tjärnö, in Sweden, and we come from Belgium, Portugal, England and Spain. Our study problem could easily be how you can have Southern Europeans having dinner at 5pm or how they are still able to think in freezing Swedish temperatures. Or how the Belgian guy can survive without Beer and French (Belgian) fries. Or how the English girl can survive without the BBC. But NO! In fact, our four-nationality team is in charge of finding out what is the best method to sample the biodiversity of the Tjärnö bay! And everyone has something to give for the success of the team! Yaiza, the sailor girl, is responsible for all the knots, and that’s how she also keeps the team together. Emiel, and his soothing voice, are responsible for keeping the team stress free. Beatriz is being inspired by her current reading of Verne’s Captain Nemo adventure...