Recipe for the the perfect biodiversity assessment


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 that BT, despite presenting a higher cumulative species curve, sucks! Because it has a higher impact on the environment and more people is needed (in terms of species ID and sampling effort) to do it. Yeah, BUV is cool!

Give recommendations for future researches. This will increase your chances of gaining a Michelin star in your assessment. Say that for future research, people should adapt their method to the species they want to assess and the environment they are assessing. Tell them, that they need to consider environmental impact, cost/effort and oceanographical features to have more conclusive results and better sampling methods. This will make you sound smart, and people like smart people. Show your limitations! People like smart people, but not ‘know-it-all’s’.

Make sure you have enough embarrassing photos of your group colleagues and that you sent enough sunset pictures to your mom. You never know when it will be the next time you’ll be back to Tjärnö, or even Sweden. You are allowed to share some photos on your social media profiles, so your friends know how cool you are.

Say thank you! To everyone on the Sven Centre for treating you really well and everyone on the EMBC for being the best!

Pack your stuff and go home, with a smile.




And voilà! You have the perfect biodiversity assessment!

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