Seabed Mining And Resilience To EXperimental Impact (SMARTEX)

The NERC-funded SMARTEX project aims to provide the critical scientific understanding and evidence-base to reduce risks of deep-sea mining of polymetallic nodules in a 6 million km2 region of the central Pacific ocean. Manganese nodules are highly-enriched in metals important for industry, including the development of new sustainable technologies. However, the nature and importance of the abyssal ecosystem is largely unknown, as is its capacity to cope with and recover from mining impacts.

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My role is the SMARTEX project is to understand how the oceanography influences the dispersal of animals in their larval forms. Larval dispersal modelling (LDM) allows scientists to better understand how connected areas of the region are to one another, and thus predict possible impacts on regional connectivity and diversity if disturbance events were to take place.

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