The demonstrator will focus on plankton involving genomics analysis in its methodology. It will showcase a deep assessment of plankton distributions, dynamics and fine-grained diversity to molecular resolution, focusing on two areas:
- Species and functions discovery: discovery of as yet undescribed biodiversity from genetic and morphological signals from the characterisation of their geographical distributions, co-occurrences/exclusions and correlation with environmental contexts.
- Biodiversity and ecology: exploration of genetic and morphological markers of plankton diversity and abundance, in particular the new ones discovered above, to predict their spatiotemporal distribution and serve as high-resolution EOVs for biological processes.
Two Notebooks will be constructed that make available and usable the intersect between biomolecular, microscopy image and environmental data types, leveraging workflows around functional genetic inference and image feature classification, made possible through the Blue Cloud infrastructure.
This demonstrator will enable scientific exploration of plankton, including correlating plankton concentration and diversity with local environmental variables, deriving known and new indices of ecosystem health, and predicting the distribution of these variables in space and time.
