Thesis Subject:
Spatial dynamic of the microbial community in the German Bight

Scientific Interests and Goals:
Microbial abundance, diversity and variability in marine systems have been the focus of many studies during the past few decades. Although there is a growing understanding of bacterial community composition and their distribution patterns, the factors that drive changes in their biogeography are still not properly understood.
Microbial community composition has been extensively studied at the sampling site Kabeltonne at Helgoland Roads (see MIMAS. These analyses focused on the seasonal variability (succession) of the bacterial community. But since conditions at Helgoland Roads are influenced by the large-scale hydrographic regime in the German Bight, observed changes in the bacterial community are complex and comprise not only a temporal but also a spatial (dispersion) component.
The aim of my PhD is to deconvolute these temporal and spatial signals in the microbial community at Helgoland Roads. I am aiming at the deconvolution of the temporal and spatial signals by comparing seasonal data collected during weekly sampling at Helgoland Roads with spatial data recorded during monthly transects in the German Bight with the FK Uthörn. To interprete these data multivariate statistical analyses will be combined with the results from hydrodynamic simulations.