Engineering nets for zooplankton

NZ$27000 plus tuition fees

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See:- http://water.auckland.ac.nz/2016/03/22/completely supported phd-opportunity-combining building and-science/ Project: This engineering project will include detailed foundation research, before structuring a test set up that will permit examining the flow and forces for different net designs, just as their potential for protecting plankton integrity for additional genetic/imaging protocols. Advanced estimation strategies will be utilized; for example, Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). At last, a field model will be fabricated and used in the vast ocean.

Title: Oceanography 2.0: Building up a high-speed plankton net for global ocean sampling through citizen sailors. Context: In each liter of seawater, there are somewhere between 10 and 100 billion living things — planktons — shaping the largest planetary Life network that produces half of our oxygen and direct climates. However, planktons testing from research vessels is still pricey, and oceanographic models planned for foreseeing global plankton ecological changes critically lack high-resolution biological data. There is a critical requirement for creative methodologies empowering assortment and investigation of plankton biodiversity over a lot bigger Spatio-temporal scales than is presently conceivable. In 2015 we propelled 'Plankton Planet' (www.planktonplanet.org), a universal program that utilizes DNA barcoding to survey the biodiversity of plankton samples gathered by sailing cruisers (the planktonauts!) around the world. A significant challenge is to structure a low-cost, viable plankton assortment gadget (e.g., modified sea net) that can be effectively conveyed from any cruising yachts at different water velocities to gather flawless plankton communities in the vast sea without stopping the boat.

- Living stipend - All tuition fees - Research costs

Unrestricted