Paul Dees

I completed my PhD during 2021, at the University of the Highands and Islands in Scotland. I studied the ecology of harmful algal blooms, and how they are advected towards the Shetland Islands. I am using the experience and knowledge gained during my PhD and prior education in my new position at the University of Bergen as a SEAS Postdoctoral Fellow.

As a SEAS fellow I am working at the Geophysical Institute, where I am trying to find a machine learning method to predict what will happen to plankton in response to rising sea surface temperatures. There are a number of long-term plankton time series around the world, which are invaluable in letting scientists track how changes to the physical ocean influence the plankton community. I hope to feed model and field derived measurements of physical data into a computer, along with zoo and phytoplankton data from these long-term plankton time series. I hope this will help predictions of changes in life in the ocean where long-term plankton datasets are not operational. It will also help to predict future changes to oceanic life in the anthropocene.

SEAS has a blog.