Nueva doctora: Cristina Claver

El pasado viernes 21 de febrero, Cristina Claver defendió su tesis doctoral, titulada “Monitoring and Evaluation of the Deep Sea through Environmental Genetics”, en la estación marina de Plentzia (PiE-UPV/EHU). La investigación, dirigida por Xabier Irigoien y Naiara Rodríguez-Ezpeleta, se enmarca dentro de los proyectos europeos SUMMER, BIOcean5D y OBAMA-NEXT, con apoyo adicional de EDAMAME y GENGES en sus primeras etapas. La tesis ha sido también financiada gracias a una ayuda predoctoral del Departamento de Educación del Gobierno Vasco.

Resumen de la tesis (en inglés)

Effective management actions are essential to guarantee sustainable use and conservation of marine ecosystems. Developing such actions requires ecosystem-scale monitoring of biological resources, which is difficult to achieve in hardly accessible deepsea habitats. Yet, the recent interest in the exploitation of deep-sea resources urges the need to further assess this realm. Environmental genetics has emerged as a powerful cost-effective and logistically feasible approach for obtaining multi-species information through the analysis of DNA collected from environmental samples, including in difficult
to access ecosystems.
In this dissertation it is hypothesized that required information for efficient monitoring and accurate assessment, such as diversity, distribution, abundance and trophic interactions of oceanic species, can be derived from environmental DNA (eDNA), whose study might result key for effective biodiversity conservation. This thesis presents examples on how the analysis of environmental DNA samples of different nature can be used to address biological questions in the mesopelagic realm, filling knowledge gaps in various aspects of deep-sea marine ecology. Throughout this dissertation, genetic techniques are applied to the study of marine organisms such as traditionally and newly commercial fish, poorly known siphonophores, iconic cetaceans, and little-studied deep-sea cephalopods.