Ailish Ullmann

Background

About Ailish Ullmann

I'm researching how habitat heterogeneity influences the diversity, abundance, and community composition of fauna living on polymetallic nodules in deep-sea mining exploration license areas and how disturbance may influence this habitat heterogeneity. Polymetallic nodules are increasingly being targeted for mining both on the high seas and in countries’ EEZs, so understanding the communities they support—and how resilient those communities may be to disturbance—will be critical in managing this new extractive industry. My research on habitat heterogeneity will focus on how faunal communities vary across habitat types, spatial scales, time, and environmental gradients. It will be a small piece of a much larger project to conduct baseline studies of deep-sea ecosystems in these exploration license areas. The hope is that, based on this research, we’ll be able to estimate how large-scale disturbances like mining influence habitat heterogeneity and subsequently deep-sea faunal communities, information which can then be used for the management and conservation of deep-sea biodiversity.