“That's science. You always end up with more questions than you answered.”
Earlier this year Professor Joanne Preston, from the 's Institute of Marine Sciences, was awarded the (PlyMSEF) medal and has delivered this year's medal lecture.
The medal lecture is an annual event at the University of Plymouth, recognising significant contributions to marine science. In the academic world, being selected to deliver a medal lecture is a big honour – reserved for scientists whose research has made substantial contributions to their field and influenced both scientific understanding and practical conservation efforts.
We sent Daisy Taylor, Apprentice Administrative Assistant from the Department of Research and Innovation, to find out more!
What first drew you to the field of coastal restoration ecology?
I have always been interested in how we maintain, restore and protect biodiversity. I started as a biologist, but my passion is the marine environment. It’s the hotspot for biodiversity on earth and the coastal areas are where humans interact with nature in a tangible way. It's a mixture of fundamental interest in biodiversity and the processes that maintain and create that. Also a clear purpose to want to be involved in trying to leave the planet in a better place than I found it. That’s a ridiculous ambition for one person, but it's not when we come together.
Could you tell us a little about the Solent Seascape and what makes it unique?
The Solent Seascape project is really exciting. Rather than just looking at individual spots, the idea of the project is to look at the Solent as a whole, to try to change the trajectory from one of decline onto a pathway to recovery. The Solent isn't in a terrible shape, but it's also had a lot of habitat loss, the conditions of those habitats are mostly unfavourable. As a result of losing these habitats, we're losing biodiversity and we're less resilient to climate change and pollution. What we're trying to do is recover the ecosystem services which these habitats provide, things like filtering water, reducing carbon, all the way to providing habitats capable of supporting trophic webs and fish stocks.
How important interdisciplinary collaboration in your research?
It's vital. When you're trying to restore, be that by working out what is broken in the system and removing the pressure to fix it, or actively, restoring it like we're doing sometimes, or understanding how disease is affecting a species, It's so interdisciplinary. On, you might be working with a microbiologist or someone who does hydrodynamics, oceanography. You also need to work with those who are setting the targets, the policies, and responsible for regulating. You need to be working with partners that are delivering the restoration, and you need to work to get funding. By its nature, it's very collaborative. I do think it makes for better science. It's vital to work across disciplines. It's a growing community across Europe of people working in marine restoration, but it's a really incredibly positive and dynamic and a really great community to work with, so, it's also very enjoyable working with others.
You were recently awarded the Plymouth Marine Science & Education Foundation Medal, How did it feel to receive this?
It was an honour to be given this medal, to be acknowledged alongside a list of such inspirational scientists. Plymouth was where I started my professional journey as a post doctorate researcher at the Marine Biological Association, after finishing my PhD at the National Oceanography Centre, so it feels like coming full circle in some way.
You use molecular tools like eDNA in your work. How has this technology changed the way we study marine ecosystems?
My PhD used molecular tools, it was very different then. I think they're exciting, especially when looking at biodiversity and evolution, but it’s only a tool, we need to make sure we're still asking the right questions. The nice thing about eDNA is that you can get a big bucket of water and, using various molecular tools, see every single little bit of DNA in that sample and assign it to a species. So, it can give you an incredible snapshot of what species have been there. Now that DNA next generation sequencing has come down in price, you can suddenly sample many sites across a big spatial area and find out what species have occurred there- in a way that you just couldn't do if you were diving and transacting. It's really good for high turbidity environments like the Solent, where it's hard to visually observe things. A really exciting tool, because you can then compare that with other projects around the world, you can start doing larger comparable studies. At the end of the day, you do still have to have a look to see and check what's there too.
What are some of the biggest challenges in restoring marine habitats?
There are a lot of challenges. It's still relatively early days in some ways and so we've got to innovate. One of the big challenges is monitoring success or failure. It can be difficult to monitor what's going on underwater, what we really want is for people doing this across Europe to monitor it in the same way, so we can compare. It's important to report failures as well as successes, so we have the knowledge necessary to optimise and improve the efficiency of monitoring. There's a need to develop more automated tools to help assess things like biodiversity. The big issue with oyster restoration is that there's not enough oysters, and so you have to breed the oysters. But where does the money come from? Big nature-based solutions are said to offer much of what we need to reach our targets in relation to climate change. Yet, there's also a massive funding gap to deliver that. Governments aren't going to provide the money. You can't rely on charities. We need to create financial systems that fund nature restoration, we need to create financial processes that are less destructive to nature. If you're going to have responsible high integrity finance markets, you need the data that they're based on, which goes back to the first problem of it's difficult to get the data. We need to be doing these at the same time- innovating to scale up and innovating how we monitor, to get the best data so that we can increase confidence and reduce the sense of risk involved. Ultimately, it is expensive, but it's not expensive compared to building a bridge, a motorway, offshore wind farms- or anything else. It's just society's appetite for it.
How do you involve students or the public in your research and conservation efforts?
The wider Solent Seascape project frequently hosts volunteer sessions. We've got an oyster cleaning day coming up, they're mostly run by the Blue Marine Foundation or the Wildlife Trust. When we need to sort seagrasses or scrub oysters, we get loads of hands on volunteers, which is fantastic. The students always pitch in. I also get my undergraduate project students and master's students involved in research that is connected directly to the Solent Seascape project, and on the Marine Ecology and Conservation module, which is the third year module that I run. One of the first things they do is put these big structures out on the seabed, in three different harbours across the Solent, where we've restored a reef, and where we haven't. In Langston, Hamble, and Chichester Harbour, we leave them out all summer, after which we collect them and bring them into the lab, where the students analyse them. That data goes directly into understanding whether the reef is functioning or not. So, they get to see it before anyone else, they're embedded into doing hands-on, real-world research in their third year module, which is great.
What are you most excited about in the future of marine restoration?
I’m really excited about the momentum. The number of people, number of projects happening, the amount of interest, the amount of restoration regulation introduced, all of these things are pointing in the right direction. It needs to be mainstream, it's still not quite there. I'm really excited about all the eDNA data. What can it tell us about how systems function? How restoration is changing things for the better? Also using other tools such as AI to analyse underwater videos for fish counts, there's some amazing labs developing this in other parts of the world and I'm really excited to develop that for Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean populations. So, we can then start the eDNA analysis, alongside AI assistance video analysis underwater video. I think there's lots to be excited about as well as very concerned and cautious about. There's a political atmosphere around nature and climate at the moment, that's why I'm keen to make as much as a pragmatic argument for it as possible, this is about human survival on our planet.
If funding and resources were unlimited, what research question would you pursue next?
I would probably want to do a pan-European study to see how coastal habitats were connected by using a mixture of eDNA, currents, and stable isotopes. To look at it at a different scale, how does our system work on this grand scale and that would give us information on areas to protect and focus. That'll be a lot of fun.