For the month of March, our PGR Student Spotlights are being taken over by five women, each representing one of our five faculties, in celebration of International Women's Day. Their mission is to inspire inclusion.
Our Faculty of Technology Student Spotlight is Laura Fantuzzi.
What is your research?
I monitor pollution and biodiversity in British coastal waters with data obtained via an ocean rowing race event.
Tell us a bit more about your research.
My research aims to map pollution and biodiversity in British coastal waters, with data collected at regular intervals along the entire coast of Great Britain. Specifically, I look at how microplastics, underwater noise pollution, temperature and salinity affect biodiversity. Biodiversity is understood as the key metric to resilient and productive ecosystems that supply us with ecosystem services. Meanwhile, a global biodiversity crisis is underway. All components of the environment affect biodiversity, two major ones being temperature and salinity of the water. As climate change progresses, with warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, the types of species that a given location is hospitable to are also changing. Human activity constitutes another disruptor of biodiversity. Plastics are pervasive across ecosystems and sizes, from nanometres to several metres. The impacts of microplastics, as well as their exact distribution, transport and spatiotemporal variability in loads and characteristics, are an active area of research, but negative impacts have been reported, so it is important to understand where, when and how they might interact with biodiversity in the ocean. The underwater soundscape is also an area of active research, with the growing understanding of how marine species rely on sound - either directly, such as cetaceans using echolocation and vocalisations to hunt and communicate, or indirectly, such as crustaceans reacting to the vibrations of sound waves. Therefore, noise from human activities (shipping, underwater construction, military sonar) are expected, and have shown, to have impacts. Both microplastics and underwater sounds have not yet, in the UK, been monitored at this scale. Overall, by considering all of these factors together through synchronous sampling, this study helps understand the contribution of several forms of disturbance to biodiversity change.
I obtain my data from the GB Row Challenge, an annual ocean rowing race around Great Britain, where teams compete on the circumnavigation of the island unassisted: they cannot stop in man-made harbours or accept help from passing boats. The organisers, wanting to maximise the impact and sense of purpose of their event, initiated a partnership with the University of Portsmouth to co-develop an environmental monitoring project. The boats that teams hire out for the challenge would be fitted with scientific equipment. It was important that this kit did not hinder the speed or manoeuvrability of the boats. So, the project’s partner engineers and scientists had to be creative. For example, in studies of the underwater soundscape, it is commonplace to tow a hydrophone. But this would have created drag, so instead, the hydrophone was fully built into the boats’ rudder! Further, it was not possible to fully automate the collection of samples for microplastics and biodiversity analyses, so the teams’ participants were trained to change filters and preserve samples daily, and as such became citizen scientists.
A GB Row Challenge ocean rowing vessel on display at the University of Portsmouth.
As I was researching the field of citizen science, I realised that this concept of implementing environmental data collection in ocean sport events is a growing one, with several sailing races, teams or individuals initiating partnerships with research groups. I have named this movement ‘marine recreation with a purpose’ in a recent publication, due to the emphasis on adding ‘purpose’ in their discourse. I believe that although currently primarily seen in larger events, the advent of autonomous, portable and affordable sensing and sampling technology will enable any interested individuals to study the oceans. I certainly hope to promote this trend of marine sports and science partnerships through my work with GB Row Challenge.
Environmental monitoring equipment on GB Row Challenge vessels. Panel A shows the location of each instrument on board. Panel B shows the microplastics pump system. Panel C shows the environmental DNA pump hose and the hydrophone (built into the rudder) cabling. Panel D shows the temperature and salinity probe fixed on the rudder.
Tell us a bit about you.
Originally from Belgium, I’ve always been fascinated by the world around me and was especially drawn to natural sciences. At 13 years old, for a science project, I chose to dissect an animal heart. At 17 years old I ranked top of my school and 8th nationally in the country’s Biology Olympiads. I was going to go on to be a biologist in Belgium, but my life took a turn when I started scuba-diving at 18 years old in the Mediterranean during a gap year that was meant for me to learn English. Everything about the marine world fascinated me, and this experience led me to a marine biology undergraduate degree in the UK, where I’ve lived since 2018.
Whilst at the University, I was involved in running the student scuba-diving club, and I also started sailing, rowing and cycling as a way to explore the outdoors and take in as much beauty as I can. I got involved in nature restoration and conservation projects, including surveying marine biodiversity while diving and actively restoring seagrass meadows on the south coast.
I embarked on my scientific journey purely based on my endless curiosity and awe for the marine world. I became interested in the wide field of “pollution”, seeing it as a threat to what I love. Microplastics in particular captivated me, due to their sheer widespreadness, so in my undergraduate degree, I carried out experiments to study how microplastics affect feeding in marine organisms. I then joined the GB Row Challenge data collection project as a PhD student, surveying pollution and biodiversity in Great Britain’s coastal waters. This embodied so many of my interests and values, from exploring nature to marine sports, pollution to biodiversity, and through to normalising the study of nature by and for anyone.
Hear more about Laura's research in this University of Portsmouth LifeSolved podcast
If you would like to feature in our student spotlight section please email graduate.school@port.ac.uk to discuss this further.