Yesterday we said “fair-well” to Alessia Finini, an ERASMUS+ student who has been working with our MARE/IDL team since October 2022, in the context of a collaboration between the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL) and the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. The traineeship was embedded in, and benefiting from projects CEECIND CHASE (funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation, ongoing) and H2020 PORTWIMS (Portugal Twinning for Innovation and Excellence in Marine Science and Earth Observation”, concluded), both led by MARE/ARNET.
Alessia Finini (left) and Catarina Guerreiro (right) in front of the Calcareous Nannoplankton Laboratory, at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Photo credits: Carlos Marques da Silva.
The main goal of her traineeship was to learn the taxonomy of extant coccolithophores living along a meridional transect crossing temperate and subtropical waters in the South Atlantic Ocean. All the microscope work was performed at the Calcareous Nannoplankton Laboratory, based at Instituto Dom Luis, and at the Scanning Electron Microscope Laboratory, based at the Dep. of Plant Biology. The obtained results will provide the basis of her MSc thesis in Marine Sciences, which she is undertaking at the University of Milano-Bicocca in collaboration with FCUL. The next step will be to investigate the impact of meridional variations in the upper ocean’s hydrology and mixed layer depth on the ecology and productivity of coccolithophore communities living in the photic zone of this South Atlantic region. The study has an intrinsically holistic nature, exploiting multidisciplinary data collected in situ during the Atlantic Meridional Transect (AMT28).
We wish her all the best for her return back to Italy, and will keep you updated on her Atlantic discoveries!
Picture of Emiliania huxleyi, taken with a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). E. huxleyi was the most abundant coccolithophore species across the studied temperate and subtropical South Atlantic transect. Image credits: Catarina V. Guerreiro and Telmo Nunes.