[Webinar] Microbes on the Storm

Speaker: Angela Ares Pita, Postdoctoral Researcher, OIST Marine Biophysics Unit

Each year, an average of 27 named storms affects the Western North Pacific region, many of them making landfall on Okinawa islands. Under future climate change scenarios, more common and destructive storms are predicted to happen, making it essential to better understand how these events —and the terrestrially derived pollution such as red soil —affect coastal ecosystem integrity at different ecological levels, including the microbiological one. Bacteria assemblages respond extremely quickly to environmental changes and can be used as valuable sentinels of environmental health. However, their study on short-term dynamics under these circumstances is very limited, probably due to forecast unpredictability and dangerous conditions to sample in the field. In this webinar, Dr. Angela Ares Pita will show observations on the nearshore microbial community and physico-chemical parameter dynamics encompassing two major storms as well as discuss their potential consequences on the ecosystem due to terrestrial run-off.