Location: Martin Ryan Institute Annexe NUI Galway
Website: http://www.ria.ie/Events/Events-Listing/Academy-Discourse--Marine-Biodiversity-and-Ecosyst.aspx
Start Date: 10/05/2010
End Date: 10/05/2010
Time: @ 5.00pm
RIA Disclosure Lecture (Galway): Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning
Guest Speaker: Prof. Carlo Heip, Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research (NIOZ). Chair: Dr Peter Heffernan, Marine Institute.
There are over 200,000 marine plant and animal species and a few thousand marine microbes described worldwide and many more await discovery. Prof Heip will describe the state of the art in research on marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. He will describe how biogeochemical cycles are largely driven bottom up by microbial processes, whereas food web structure is regulated top down. Reconciling these two views is difficult, he will argue, because microbial biodiversity is largely unknown on the one hand and ecological theory has been developed and tested mostly for terrestrial environments on the other hand.
Prof Heip of NIOZ, is an internationally recognised expert on marine biodiversity and project co-ordinator of the flagship EU FP6 Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning Network of Excellence (MARBEF-NoE: www.marbef.org).
For further information and registration see: http://www.ria.ie/Events/Events-Listing/Academy-Discourse--Marine-Biodiversity-and-Ecosyst.aspx