Taxonomy, biodiversity and population connectivity in the world's largest deep-sea mining frontier the Clarion Clipperton Zone, central

The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, central Pacific abyss, is the world's largest frontier for the seabed mining of metals critical to a future green economy transition (e.g nickel and cobalt). There are currently 16 contracted licences for exploration in this 6 million sq km region, at depths of 4000-5000m.

A critical scientific knowledge gap for the successful regulation of this potentially vast new industry is an understanding of the baseline taxonomy, biodiversity and population connectivity of the animals that live there (Glover et al 2018), which are dominated by abyssal invertebrates such as polychaetes, echinoderms, molluscs and crustaceans (Wiklund et al 2019).

The student on this project will contribute to a large 5m GBP funded NERC highlight topic 'SMARTEX', taking part in research expeditions to the Pacific and undertaking detailed scientific work on the macrofauna and megafaunal invertebrates collected.

This will include chapters on the detailed taxonomy and phylogenetics of species new to science, analysis of regional-scale phylogenetic, functional and beta diversity across the CCZ, analysis of population-level connectivity in target taxa and modelling the impacts of potential seabed mining.

The work will be of i broad interest to scientific journals as well as have direct policy impacts through UK Government and with the International Seabed Authority.