Hi Samuel,

In the absence of any brilliant minds I'll make some suggestions instead :)

My first questions are: are you seeking to do sampling yourself & if so how long do you have? Less than a year? Longer? If you don't have long or access to an existing time series, you might be better thinking about some experiments than anything field based where you're unlikely to find out anything new about phyto:zoo relationships in a harbour.

Anyway here's a few ideas to think about:

What are the concentrations of copper & zinc pyrithiones (marine anti-fouling compounds, highly toxic to both phyto & zoo) in the harbour and how do these vary through the year (e.g. are they higher when there's more boat traffic in summer? are there 'hotspots' around boats, do winter storms disrupt these?). If you have access to mesocosm facilities, what happens to community composition if you artifically vary these concentrations to e.g. simulate growth in traffic? If you have non-natives, what happens to these?

Can you reconstruct information about past plankton communities by taking a sediment core, look for dormant cysts, eggs & using lead, caesium isotopes to work out a chronology & see if this correlates with anything over that time (e.g. water quality legislation)? Can you put these sediments into organic digestion & determine the microplastic load? Of course if they dredge the sediments none of this can work!

Do combined sewer overflows have an effect on algal blooms? Can you compare bloom progression in areas with a lot of CSOs and those with only a few?

Hope that helps

Malcolm

Dear Malcolm Baptie ,

Thank you for your input. This is for a possible Senior Thesis which I basically have the Fall 2020 semester to study and answer my question. Your thoughts opened up a range of ideas and I thank you for it.

(Stay Safe)

Kind regards,

Samuel

I am not a brilliant mind, so I will answer the question with a question. Do you have the data? On the one hand, these data should describe the factors that affect the object of research. On the other hand, these data should describe the results of the influence of these factors on the object of research. They should all be linked to the same timeline. For example, they can be an Excel file in which the rows correspond to observations at certain points in time. Columns describe the impact results and the factors that determine these results. Then I can process it all, create models, and do whatever you want. But You can do all this yourself by studying my work, giving priority to new works. Don't be confused by the fact that these works are in a different field of science. Methods for identifying cause-and-effect relationships and describing research are similar in different fields of science.

Hello Eugene Veniaminovich Lutsenko ,

I don't have the data yet. As a matter of fact, I will be conducting experiments so to acquire such information.I appreciate the guidance with the Excel spreadsheet. Cannot wait to get started.

Thank you,

Samuel

I'll help you process this data