Wadden Sea research on interactions between microorganisms and their environment

After 3 months of lock down, RV Navicula set sail from Texel again on June 10th. On board are NIOZ scientist Julia Engelmann, post-doc Pierre Ramond and PhD student Tim de Groot. By this blog they will try to keep us informed about their experiences: 'We will sail to a spot in the Wadden Sea between Terschelling and the mainland and stay there for 48h, sampling surface water and taking CTD measurements every hour. The location is at the edge of a tidal channel and therefore quite dynamic. We extract microorganisms from the water through filtration and want to see how the microbial communities change with the tides and the physical and chemical parameters associated with that. Therefore we also measure temperature, salinity, nutrients and dissolved organic carbon and dissolved inorganic carbon. DNA of the microorganisms will be sequenced to obtain their relative abundances per sample. Combining the DNA with the physicochemical data, we will use network modelling to learn about the interactions between microorganisms and their environment in this system'.