28 maart 2022: Lecture Christoph Brochard

This presentation will show the type of work Christophe Brochard is doing and the direction his further research will take. It will also feature high resolution photos of the beautiful tiny creatures that he studies.

Christophe Brochard is co-director of the company Bureau Biota ecological consultancy. His interest in ecology and taxonomy is very broad, from birdwatching to botany and from microscopy to entomology. For the past 15 years he specialized in studying the planktonic world. He started analyzing seawater phytoplankton. Later he also studied freshwater phyto- and zooplankton. With this planktonic specialisation and the opportunities given by Maarten Loonen for the Arctic Centre of the University of Groningen he started the fieldwork on Svalbard, four years ago. He evaluates if long term research on this topic is possible. Despites very poor literature on planktonic species of Svalbard he realized that both phyto- and zooplankton could be used as model groups to study climate change. Christophe therefore decided to work further on this fascinating world as a PhD candidate in collaboration with the Arctic Centre of the University of Groningen.