Towards the food web of the South Sandwich Islands: benthic pelagic diversity, sampling effort and data shortfalls
The focus of the secondment was to present the first compilation and description of the SSI including benthic and pelagic species and their distribution along the islands. Furthermore, also to identify trophic interactions and assembly the food web of the SSI marine ecosystem.
The South Sandwich Islands is one of the most intricated regions of the Southern Ocean. The enormous biodiversity that this ecosystem harbours due to its extensive and complex bathymetry is of great interest for the scientific community, however, it is an understudied region so far.
Studying trophic interactions and their impacts on community dynamics and ecosystem function is a fundamental objective in ecology, especially in ecosystems threatened by climate change such as the SSI. Thus, representing interactions within food webs serves as a method to describe and quantify ecosystems, as they offer visual representations of biodiversity, species interactions, and ecosystem structure and functioning.
The experience was good in general.
