Marinna Gaudin

In the context of ongoing global change, there is a need to analyze the nature and magnitude of changes in planktonic communities in response to environmental stressors. To address this issue, the statistical framework of species distribution modeling has emerged to model and predict the biogeography of planktonic species under different climate scenarios. However, this modeling approach does not explicitly take into account biotic interactions between species, even though they constitute the main drivers of planktonic community structure and dynamics and may be more relevant indicators of ecosystem health than individual species. With this in mind, my research involves adapting the distributional modeling framework to model and predict the biogeography of observed planktonic associations from metagenomic and metatranscriptomic datasets, on the basis that they may represent relevant biotic interactions. As such, we aim to identify the potential associations most vulnerable to climate change, and the potential impacts on ecosystem functions.

​

My work is mainly related to Work Package 5 (WP5) «advances in systems ecology», particularly in Task 5.2 «Construct cross-kingdoms interaction networks for microbiome and plastisphere communities» through the workflow of Task 5.1 «Review and improve statistical and computational methods for ecological network reconstruction». In the near future, we plan to collaborate with Work Package 2 (WP2) contributors Fabio Benedetti and Meike Vogt to use the computational pipeline for inferring species ecological networks from heterogeneous data types on the omics data compiled within WP2. It will allow the AtlantECO database to be enriched.