| Academic Year | 2024-2025 |
| ddigirolamo02@qub.ac.uk | |
| Institution | Queen's University, Belfast |
Biography
School: School of Biological Sciences
Pronouns: he/him
Project: Food Web Structure and the Ecosystem Wide Impacts of Eutrophication in the UK’s Largest Freshwater Lake, Lough Neagh
Supervisors: Dr Mark Emmerson, Dr Neil Reid & Dr Leslie Lancaster
Undergraduate Education: BSc Biology, Specialization in Ecology, Concordia University, Canada
Postgraduate Education: MSc Biology, Specialization in Aquatic Ecology, University of Quebec, Montreal (UQAM), Canada
Research: The goal of this research is to understand how eutrophication has affected food web structure, and consequently, whether this has eroded the resilience of the Lough Neagh ecological community and its capacity to absorb, recover, and adapt to perturbate such as climate change or eutrophication. Through a combination of field and laboratory based research, used to describe food web structure and ecosystem functioning along a gradient of eutrophication induced disturbance, the project will explore the following questions:
- How does food web structure vary spatially around Lough Neagh and has it changed over time?
- How have ecosystem processes (e.g. decomposition of energy flow) been affected by the impacts of eutrophication or changes in the food web structure?
- How do changes in biodiversity affect the inter-relationships between different measures of stability (i.e. resistance, recovery, persistence, and variability)?
