Valentina Cometti, MSc

What’s the work that you do?

In my master’s, I studied Antarctic benthic sessile community with a particular focus on phylum Bryozoa. I studied marine biodiversity using a particular tool named ARMS (autonomous reef monitoring structures), which was located in Tethys Bay in the Ross Sea. These structures are very important because they are cheap, replicable and usable in any area of the world. They use meta-barcoding techniques to screen for biodiversity and have revealed cryptic and pseudocryptic species.

My study that has two goals: (1) understand the composition and dynamics of benthic sessile communities and (2) provide a database of all samples to make all collected marine biological information available.

What keeps you going?

Antarctic benthic communities change in response to nature or anthropic impact. Understanding the dynamism and composition of these communities is very important to provide data on climate change. My passion is bryozoans because their structures are perfect and any chemical change alters them. It is an important structured phylum for the benthos, and there is a lot of geological information. Making a baseline of this phylum is crucial to understanding change in a changing world.

What’s your message to the world?

The slow growth of polar benthic organisms helps us compare data about it with other sites around the world. We need to make this information available and share it with other researchers.