Nielja Knecht

Master, ETHZ, Switzerland

KEYWORDS

Data analysis and statistical modelling
Global plankton biomass patterns
Carbon cycle

Short BIO

I am a Master’s student of Environmental Sciences at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and currently working in Nicolas Gruber’s Environmental Physics Group as a research assistant.

During my exchange semesters in Sydney and Gothenburg, I first dived into Marine Sciences and was immediately fascinated by it. I am very interested in how much we can learn about the ocean by aggregating and analysing all the data we have collected about it.

Currently, I am working on developing statistical model ensembles to predict the global biomass distributions of pteropoda and foraminifera and assess their contribution to carbonate export fluxes.

Role in AtlantECO

My contribution to AtlantECO is mainly to WP2. Together with Fabio Benedetti and Meike Vogt, I developed a statistical modelling pipeline to analyse the main environmental drivers underlying the geographic biomass patterns of different species and predict their global distributions.

We aim to transform this into a user-friendly, accessible analysis pipeline for WP2 to extrapolate quantitative data for different species groups.